Elon Musk smirked and laughed as he confessed during Trump’s first cabinet meeting that DOGE accidentally cut Ebola prevention while gutting the United States Agency for International Development.
The first to speak to the cabinet after Trump’s opening remarks, Musk admitted that the Department of Government Efficiency has made mistakes as it cut jobs and programs in recent weeks.
“But when we make mistakes we’ll fix it very quickly,” the Tesla CEO said. “So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention.” He grinned, smirked and laughed as he put his fingers up in air quotes around the word “accidentally.”
Musk is not a cabinet member or an elected official and sported a t-shirt stating “Tech Support” at Wednesday’s meeting. He claimed that Ebola prevention was immediately restored without interruption.
But to many observers, his comments highlighted the dangerous consequences of DOGE’s overhaul of government agencies.
“That is kind of a BIG accident...” one user commented on X.
Only a few hundred USAID workers are expected to keep their jobs, according to plans by the Trump administration, which fired 2,000 U.S.-based staff positions and left thousands of workers on leave worldwide.
It has left some wondering if USAID, which has played an active role in preventing the global spread of disease by improving health care and hygiene in foreign countries, will be able to adequately respond to outbreaks.
Musk’s wrecking of the federal workforce has also affected key public-health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which joined USAID’s Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) that responded to an Ebola outbreak in the the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2018.
In total, more than 1,100 employees have been fired at the CDC, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in recent weeks.
The timing couldn’t be worse. The country is currently in the throes of the worst flu season in 15 years and Texas recorded the U.S.‘s first measles death since 2015 on Wednesday amid an outbreak in the state.
