The U.S. government employs over 3 million civilians who work in hundreds of agencies. Around 4,000 of these are political appointees while the rest are nonpartisan people hired to do the tedious and often boring work of the government.
Who did Donald, JD, Elon and the rest think ensure our drinking water is safe from things like chemical pesticides and fertilizers? Who did they think tracks extreme weather? Who did they think calculates the Consumer Price Index? Who did they think cleans our parks or handles our air traffic control systems? Who did they think designs our spaceships and nuclear bombs? Who did they think monitors for – then directs the government’s response to – food-borne parasitic infections like cyclosporiasis, which ravaged the Midwest in the summer of 2026? Who did they think monitors screwworms, the little flesh-eating maggots that reappeared on a calf in Texas in June 2026?
Well, they found out real quick who does these things because most agencies – including the IRS, State Department, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Food and Drug and Social Security Administrations – scrambled from practically Day One to hire back many of the people that Elon fired.
This included the Department of Agriculture, which desperately tried to hire back bird flu response workers after an avian influenza outbreak, and the National Weather Service, which lost meteorologists, hydrologists, physical scientists and electronics technicians in the initial cuts – a mistake that became painfully evident when, shortly after, Americans lived through devastating wildfires in California; deadly flash floods in Texas; and tornados, hurricanes, and hail storms across the entire nation.
The way Donald Trump, JD Vance, Elon Musk, Russel Vought, and many others in the Trump/Vance administration treat these hard-working, dedicated Americans is outrageous. This “Deep State” b.s. is a highly insulting and sinister narrative that has gotten completely out of control.
This hateful rhetoric needs to stop right this second, and we ALL need to start appreciating lifelong federal employees for what they truly are: extraordinary Americans doing nothing more or less than the grinding, behind-the-scenes work of the American people. These hard-working Americans don’t deserve to be ridiculed and disrespected by rich guys trying to consolidate power.
….and don’t think for one second this unprecedented disrespect won’t have long-term effects. One employee who returned to the Food and Drug Administration summed it up to The Washington Post: “Being back feels like a funeral. Morale is terrible. Everyone is stressed and feels the absence of our colleagues. … I’m looking for another job.” Other people just didn’t go back at all. One former Department of Agriculture safety inspector said this when he was asked to return: “I was like, yep, nope, I’m not risking it again. I’m gonna try to take the money and try to find something else.”
It should have surprised no one that an Elon-led DOGE would be unsuccessful because one must look no further than what happened at Twitter, now X, after Elon bought the company in 2022 to see that, while he may be a genius at some things, talented cost-cutter and management guru? Not so much.
Immediately after taking the Twitter reins, he cut 80 percent of the staff, including many of the engineers who literally kept the site operating. He also decided he wouldn’t honor back pay for thousands of the employees he laid off, or the severance packages that he knew top executives were contractually entitled to – vacuous choices that resulted in multiple lawsuits.
But by far the most perplexing thing Musk did after buying Twitter was sabotage the company’s relationships with its advertisers – an insane thing to do when advertising is your primary source of revenue. Elon & Co. has even sued some of them and, at one point, told them, from the stage of The New York Times’ annual DealBook Summit no less, to “Go f^*k yourself.”
Unsurprisingly, this ridiculousness decimated X’s revenue. According to the investment firm Fidelity, X’s valuation dropped 79 percent from October 2022 to October 2024. It eventually dropped to a $9.4 billion overall valuation, a devastating nosedive from the $44 billion that Musk paid for the company. Tesla’s stock also went on a rollercoaster ride. From the day Elon bought Twitter in October 2022 to the end of that year, Tesla’s stock fell by half.
It probably didn’t help matters that Elon – who at a 2024 Trump campaign rally said, “I’m not just MAGA, I’m Dark Gothic MAGA” – was extremely aggressive in his support of Donald Trump in the 2024 election, while consistently trashing Democrats. Or that he threw what looked eerily like a Nazi salute at President Trump’s inauguration, twice. Elon denied that’s what he did, posting on X, “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is soo tired,” and some Americans – way too many, in our opinion – bought his b.s. denials. But Germans sure didn’t, with Tesla car sales in Germany nosediving 76 percent in February alone.
While all these are perfectly legal things to do in the United States of America, it may not be the smartest business move for an executive chairman of a social media company and a public company during the most divided election in modern U.S. history. Tesla storefronts, charging stations, and vehicles became targets for violence, including AR-style semiautomatic weapons being fired at Tesla storefronts, and Molotov cocktails thrown through store windows and at Tesla vehicles.
So, it was totally predictable that the destructive experiment that was DOGE not only saved no money for the American people but also, ironically, created more cumbersome red tape. This included hours spent justifying the cost of mundane but extremely important tasks like having the windows washed in air traffic control towers or demanding vendors swear a blood oath to never engage in evil DEI activities – all of which created massive gridlock and delays.
In another ironic twist – given that Elon spent so much time bad mouthing and denigrating our federal workforce – the original “agents” at DOGE were mostly engineers from Elon’s companies who had little to no work experience, much less government experience, and ranged from 19 to 24-years-old. One of the most notorious was a 20-year-old named Edward Coristine, codename “Big Balls.” Big Balls and the other kids essentially took over the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration, and they had access to the Treasury Department’s payment system – meaning they had access to the sensitive information of most Americans, including Social Security numbers and bank account information.
In January 2026, the Trump/Vance administration admitted that members of the DOGE team accessed and shared sensitive Social Security data. Agency officials admitted that one employee signed a secret agreement with a political advocacy group that called for sharing Social Security data with the aim of overturning election results in certain states. Who are the villains now, Mr. Vought?
All these harsh realities obviously started to dawn on Elon because, naturally, he started to lie about what DOGE was achieving. Within weeks, Elon announced that DOGE had already saved $55 billion through actions like layoffs, canceled contracts, and the renegotiation of leases. Problem was, most of the “canceled” contracts were ones that were already completed and most of the leases were set to expire anyway. Analysis by the Associated Press found that almost 40 percent of these contracts weren’t expected to save the government any money in the first place. The New York Times reported that, in DOGE’s published list of canceled contracts and grants, the thirteen largest were presented incorrectly.
Elon also included blanket purchase agreements (BPAs) in the contract number. This was illogical because BPAs are agreements that can be used if the government needs to buy anything in the future. In other words, no money had been spent yet and may never have been spent in the future. But, assigning each of these agreements a random dollar amount gave Elon and Big Balls a chance to give the false impression of more government spending.
Realizing people were getting wise to their shady tactics, DOGE finally stopped posting any information on its website to support its claims – even though Elon had promised to post thorough details to be “maximally transparent.” The New York Times was initially able to get around this because identifying information had been embedded in the group’s source code, but the guys at DOGE changed that as well.
In the end, a Politico analysis of DOGE data showed that Elon’s contract termination scheme saved America less than 5 percent of what he said it did. Plus, the little money that was saved was simply returned to the agencies originally authorized by Congress to spend it. Meaning, not a dime of it went to lowering the deficit – even though Elon and Donald Trump said otherwise (many, many times).
All this is quite loathsome, but nothing could be worse than the destruction and literal death that Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Elon Musk have caused across the world.
< As you read this please keep in mind that, before these guys came to power, the United States spent less than 1 percent of the federal budget on foreign aid. We spent almost $65 billion in 2023, and in terms of dollars, that was more than any other country in the world. But before we break our arms patting ourselves on the back, as a percentage of our economy, the U.S. spent less than Japan, Britain, France, Norway, Sweden, Germany, and the Netherlands. Not to mention that billions of those dollars came right back into the American economy. USAID funded many American researchers, and American farms supplied around 41 percent of the food aid that the agency sent around the world every year. >
Since 1961, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) managed global projects that dealt with food aid, disaster relief, and health and education programs in over 100 countries.
For over six decades, support from the American people vastly increased access to education and healthcare for millions; helped achieve significant reductions in child and maternal mortality; was instrumental in eradicating smallpox and reducing malaria deaths; helped secure democracy for vulnerable nations; and was responsible for sparking economic development in various regions throughout the world. We provided critical assistance during natural disasters, famines, and other emergencies; prevented millions of new infections of HIV/AIDS; and provided access to clean drinking water for millions.
The Center for Global Development estimates that, before 2025, aid distributed by USAID saved up to 5.6 million lives a year by providing interventions for HIV/AIDS, vaccine-preventable illnesses, and emergency/ humanitarian relief alone (this number doesn’t include interventions for water and sanitation, family planning, and nutrition, which are significant in and of themselves). By itself, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) – the largest ever global H.I.V. program that was started by President George W. Bush in 2003 – is credited with saving the lives of over 26 million people living in over 50 countries.
On his first day back in the Oval Office, Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14169, freezing all new foreign development assistance obligations and disbursements. Four days later, a stop-work order was issued for all existing foreign assistance awards; on February 2nd the USAID website was taken down; and five days later, signs identifying the headquarters of USAID were removed.
Okay, so even if you are going to do something despicable like this, surely you have enough compassion and awareness to understand that it’s critical to give organizations around the world time to adjust to this massive change in humanitarian aid, right?
Nope. Elon/DOGE immediately started to systematically dismantle the rest of USAID, shutting down most all its programming and laying off almost all its staff. This included people working in war zones, who found themselves abruptly cut off from their work emails and the app they relied on to help them in case of an emergency.
Immediately after Elon, in his words, “fed USAID into the wood chipper,” at least 11,500 Americans and 54,575 foreigners lost their jobs; around $1 billion in payments for work that had already been completed was frozen; $500 million in food was just sitting in ports, ships and warehouses, rotting; health workers who provided preventive care were forced to leave devastated villages; and immunizations, Vitamin A distributions, and deworming were abruptly stopped.
Wait? Deworming? Like, as in people? What the heck is that? … many Americans are probably asking, since we don’t have a clue of the horrors people in other countries face.
… but it’s high time we learn more about these horrors, so here it is: Children in many countries are besieged by worms. Apologies if you’re eating breakfast, but a female worm can lay 200,000 eggs a day – which vastly worsens children’s malnutrition since the very little nutrients they receive go to the parasites, not to them. The great news is that aid agencies can deworm a child for less than $1 a year. The bad news is the $1 has now been cut.
Just in case you’re not sufficiently outraged yet, a seven-page memo obtained by Bloomberg – dated June 3, 2025, prepared for Marco Rubio and signed by nine U.S. State Department aides – revealed that, instead of $6 billion going to dying children, the Trump/ Vance administration was going to use that money – six billion dollars – to dismantle USAID, including hundreds of millions used to fight the legal challenges that were surely coming thanks to the administration closing the agency.
In a pathetic effort to clear his conscience, in testimony before Congress on May 21, 2025, Marco Rubio said that the gutting of USAID by the Trump/Vance administration had not caused any unnecessary deaths: “No children are dying on my watch… no one has died because of USAID.”
That is a preposterous thing for him to say. Without question, directly because of heartless decisions made by Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Elon Musk, babies have needlessly died of malnutrition, cholera, malaria and AIDS, and more women and young girls have fallen victim to violence, both physical and sexual. That’s just a fact.
Humanitarian aid in 2025 alone reached 25 million fewer people than the year before; over 2,000 health clinics have closed in crisis zones around the world; global food aid funding has dropped 58 percent; and millions of people have lost access to critical H.I.V. treatment and testing.
In fact, more than 1,700 H.I.V. treatment sites have closed since Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Elon Musk’s cruel cuts to PEPFAR. PEPFAR treated 77,000 fewer children in 2025 than the year before, and now roughly half of the children living with H.I.V. around the world don’t have access to the treatments they must have to stay alive. South Africa is being kicked out of the program altogether, even though the country has the highest H.I.V. rate in the world, with around eight million people living with the virus.
This all is heart wrenching, but it’s also incredibly frustrating because, between 2000 and 2020, the number of children who died before their 5th birthday dropped by half. This is considered to be perhaps the greatest achievement ever in global health and shows a remarkable level of investment, dedication and collaboration between donors, governments, health professionals, families and communities.
Sadly – in direct contradiction to Marco Rubio’s absurd assertion that no children have died on his watch – for the first time in decades, child deaths rose in 2025.
An Impact Counter designed by Dr. Brooke Nichols, an infectious disease mathematical modeller and health economist, put the number of child deaths caused by USAID cuts at 488,550 in 2025, or 88 deaths every hour. She estimates that, by mid-2026, the ruthless cuts had cost over 750,000 lives worldwide. < Dr. Nichols’ work has reached over 150,000 people in over 175 countries, and her methodology has been peer-reviewed by multiple academic cohorts across disciplines to certify accuracy and transparency >.
This tracks with numbers provided by Atul Gawande, who told The New Yorker magazine that he estimates seven hundred thousand people have already died because of the cuts. <Mr. Gawande was the assistant administrator for global health at USAID until he resigned after the Trump/Vance administration ended U.S. foreign assistance. >
A study published in May 2026 in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet estimates that development assistance funding cuts will cost 9.4 million lives across 93 low- and middle-income countries by 2030 – including 2.5 million deaths among children under the age of five – if we stay on the current trajectory. If more severe cuts are made – and with these heartless men in charge, why wouldn’t they be? – the numbers skyrocket to 22.6 million deaths overall, including 5.4 million among children under five.
Oxfam International – a global confederation of independent non-governmental organizations that operate in almost 80 countries worldwide – estimates that a child under five could die every forty seconds by 2030 because of the Trump/Vance/Rubio/Musk cuts to humanitarian and development aid.
To add insult to injury, many of the deaths in 2025 could have been prevented with existing resources. BUT, thanks to the haphazard and incompetent way the Trump/Vance administration dissolved USAID, over 60,000 metric tons of food – along with other commodities and nutritional supplements already paid for by the U.S. taxpayer – sat in warehouses in America and around the world rotting and expiring instead of being transported to crisis zones and famine-stricken countries. It’s estimated these supplies could have helped over 60 million people.
More than $12 million worth of contraceptives and HIV-prevention medications purchased by the U.S. taxpayer – originally headed for 18 different countries – just sat in distribution centers in Belgium and the United Arab Emirates, going to waste. A Washington Post investigation from the first half of 2025 found that supplies valued at over $190 million were scheduled to arrive at distribution warehouses by the end of June; however, shipments worth almost $76 million never made it. An additional $63 million worth of supplies – including life-saving medications for diseases like malaria that must be treated quickly – were delivered to the warehouses but delayed, on average, 41 days… in far too many cases, 41 days too late.
Hundreds of thousands of doses of a lifesaving supplement called Plumpy’Nut sat in a warehouse in Rhode Island, its shipment to Sudan canceled after Washington issued the stop-work order. Meanwhile, at the Almanar food distribution center in Khartoum, the capital city of Sudan, mothers sat in line – waiting – with their starving children.
By September 2025, The New York Times was reporting that the 260,000 innocent civilians trapped in El Fasher, a city taking the full brunt of Sudan’s vicious civil war, were eating animal feed, trying to make the decision whether to risk being killed if they stayed OR raped before they were killed if they left. You know, much like the daily decisions we make over here, like if we’re going to get our coffee at Starbucks or Dunkin’.
Doctors Without Borders reports that, in Somalia, the number of children they see with severe malnutrition has risen by 73 percent since 2024. At Baidoa Bay Regional Hospital, deaths among severely mal-nourished children increased by 44 percent in the first half of 2025 alone, compared to the same period the year before – with 47 percent of deaths occurring within two days of a child’s arrival. By April 2026, the number of patients admitted was more than triple the number in April just one year before.
Elsewhere in Africa – where 46 million people are forcibly displaced, including nine million refugees – millions of refugees in Chad and Malawi lost aid practically overnight as the U.N. Refugee Agency closed American aid programs. People trapped in South Sudan were living through the most dire humanitarian crisis ever recorded, with 34 million of them – two-thirds of the population – relying on U.S. humanitarian help for their very survival. Nevertheless, the Trump/ Vance/Rubio/Musk cuts forced the immediate closure of close to 80 percent of the emergency food kitchens that were often their only source of food.
The U.N. World Food Program was unexpectedly forced to end food distribution to one million refugees in Uganda’s Kiryandongo refugee settlement, a place that cares for people forced to flee unthinkable violence in Sudan. This led to pandemonium, with hundreds of people physically fighting one another over the little food that remained. Duaa Tariq, one of the food kitchen organizers, described it this way: “People are screaming from hunger in the streets.”
The 4.5 million people, including 2.9 million children, who are sick and starving in Burkina Faso – where the government’s war against Islamist insurgents has intensified, leading to more deaths and mass displacement, widespread hunger and unthinkable human rights violations – now have virtually no support.
In a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh – the world’s largest – a million people, including 500,000 children, forced to flee Myanmar have nothing to eat. Even if they live, they are now more susceptible to outbreaks of diseases like tuberculosis and H.I.V. because clinics and programs have closed their doors.
Because USAID was one of the largest providers of health care to Indonesia, H.I.V., tuberculosis and malaria cases have exploded. Women who are being mistreated and/or trafficked in Cambodia and Guatemala are now unguarded and Colombia is on its way to becoming destabilized again. The six million Haitians who need humanitarian aid are facing, at best, malnutrition and, at worst, starvation.
The hundreds of thousands of displaced people in Syria who live in camps increasingly have no food, fuel or water, and the millions of Ukrainian children at risk of death, forced deportation, psychological trauma, indoctrination, and militarization under Russian occupation are now largely unprotected.
Dangerous pathogens were immediately left unsecured at labs across Africa, and airport and checkpoint inspections for mpox, Ebola, and other infectious diseases were reduced or stopped altogether – meaning millions of unscreened animals and people began freely crossing borders. This obviously put Americans directly at risk because diseases – like the Marburg virus in Tanzania, the mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Lassa in Nigeria – can travel quickly.
…a consequence that, unsurprisingly, didn’t take long to materialize. In June 2026, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned that the Ebola outbreak spreading through the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda could rapidly become the largest Ebola epidemic in history unless efforts to contain it improve.
This is highly problematic because Ebola is a severe, astonishingly deadly viral disease, with an average fatality rate of 50 percent. In past outbreaks, as many as 90 percent of those infected have died. Unfortunately, containing this one will be much more difficult now that the Trump/Vance administration withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Trump/Vance/ Rubio/Musk cuts have diminished or eliminated altogether many of the people, systems and agencies that once coordinated the U.S. Ebola and other outbreak responses. In fact, the United States didn’t even know about the outbreak until nine days after the WHO did.
The once extensive disease surveillance networks and emergency teams located in East Africa are largely gone, and the CDC has lost hundreds of epidemiologists and other experts – including many stationed in Africa – who would be instrumental in containing the epidemic. In all, the CDC’s emerging disease center – which handles hantavirus and Ebola – has lost about 700 employees and contractors, and its Global Health Center has lost hundreds more employees.
There is also no coordinator for global health security – a position created by Congress – and no one staffing the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, also created by Congress.
In yet another blow to America’s readiness to address emerging infectious diseases and biological threats, just months before the Ebola outbreak, the Trump/Vance administration indefinitely paused research at National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick, one of the few global institutes with the facilities capable of researching Ebola. Plus, the administration cut funding for GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance – an incredibly reckless move since GAVI is working to develop a vaccine for this specific strain of Ebola (this outbreak involves the Bundibugyo virus, a strain that has no approved vaccine).
Beyond obvious causes and effects – like the fact that cutting off food leads to people starving – it can be hard to visualize how cuts like the ones made by Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Elon Musk link directly to disasters, but here are two examples. For one, the outbreak got a head start because samples were taken to the national lab in Kinshasa, Congo at the wrong temperature – something that would likely never have happened when that task was managed by USAID.
Here’s a second one: Because USAID provided crucial supplies that health workers no longer have access to, these workers have been treating Ebola patients wearing only gloves and surgical masks instead of using respirators, face shields, airtight clothing, and/or surgical hoods that prevent exposure to bodily fluids. This obviously puts their lives in danger and exasperates the spread.
Heather Kerr, the International Rescue Committee’s country director for Congo, put it this way: “The health system is on its knees here.”