What will define Elon Musk’s legacy? Doge cuts to USAID Ebola programs

Staff carry a coffin for a victim of Ebola at the hospital in Mongbwalu, Ituri, Democratic Republic of the Congo, on 26 June 2026. Photograph: Dieudonne Dirole/EPA View image in fullscreen Staff carry a coffin for a victim of Ebola at the hospital in Mongbwalu, Ituri, Democratic Republic of the Congo, on 26 June 2026. Photograph: Dieudonne Dirole/EPA Analysis What will define Elon Musk’s legacy? Doge cuts to USAID Ebola programs Melody Schreiber Experts say cuts have hindered the response to DRC’s Ebola outbreak and resulted in ‘significant numbers’ of deaths Elon Musk has an Ebola problem. SpaceX stock dropped precipitously after its initial public offering, and Tesla faces a wave of lawsuits. But instead of focusing on his companies, Musk has posted frequently on X about the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which he helped dismantle – or, in his words, feed into the woodchipper – last year. “Elon’s USAID crash-out over the past week has been a thing to behold,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former top USAID official who oversaw the agency’s Ebola response in 2014-2015 and the president of Refugees International. “In a way, it’s helpful that Elon is doing this, because it’s putting attention back on the issue of what he did last year.” Musk has said his critics “cannot cite a single name of someone who died” and “If there were, it would be worldwide headline news!” When confronted with the names – including those of children who died because of the cuts – Musk called a journalist “an utter piece of shit and a liar” and “ utterly evil ”. Musk has claimed , without evidence, that US tax dollars went to arming militants and “ corrupt politicians ”. Musk’s cuts, through the short-lived US “department of government efficiency” (Doge), have come under renewed scrutiny during the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Last year, Musk admitted to “accidentally” cutting Ebola detection and response programs. “This is one of the reasons why there was not enough surveillance and preparedness for the outbreak of Ebola ,” said Davide Rasella, a research professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and head of the Global Health Impact Assessment and Evaluation Group at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) in Spain. If global health programs hadn’t been slashed in the DRC and elsewhere, the Ebola outbreak would have been detected much earlier, Konyndyk said. “I’m very confident about that,” he added. The cuts have affected global health, nutrition and education around the world. One Lancet study estimated there would be 14 million deaths, including 4.5 million child deaths, if USAID were abolished entirely. When Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman from California, cited the study, Musk threatened to sue, and he doubled down on his claims that Doge did nothing wrong. Rasella, one of the authors of the Lancet study, was unfamiliar with the Khanna-Musk conflict, but he stood by the estimat