World’s richest man and unofficial head of the Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk told Donald Trump’s cabinet on Wednesday that his government gutting group “accidentally” axed a program working to prevent the spread of Ebola.
Musk, wearing a “dark MAGA” hat, addressed Trump’s cabinet on Wednesday and admitted that DOGE had made some mistakes during its short time cutting the federal workforce.
One of those mistakes was reportedly killing a USAID program that was working to stop Ebola.
“We will make mistakes,” Musk said. “We won’t be perfect, but when we make mistakes we’ll fix it very quickly. For example, with USAID one of the things we accidentally cancelled, very briefly, was Ebola prevention.”
Musk, who laughed at the mistake, said once the situation was brought to his attention that his team worked to rectify the issue.
“I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption,” Musk said.
Despite noting that his group temporarily slashed a critical program that could help prevent a deadly outbreak, he insisted that moving fast was paramount to hit his savings goals.
“But we do need to move quickly if we are to achieve a trillion dollar deficit reduction in financial year 2026. It requires saving four billion dollars per day, every day, from now through the end of September,” he said. “But we can do it, and we will do it.”
The Independent has requested comment from the White House.
Musk is neither appointed to Trump’s cabinet and has not been confirmed by the Senate, but has nonetheless been named a “special government employee” with the task of streamlining the government, which has taken the form of massive cuts to the federal workforce.
USAID has effectively been shuttered. Thousands of USAID employees have been placed on leave, with only 600 employees left to manage the agency’s various projects.
Despite Musk’s insistence that the accidental cancellation suffered no interruptions, a voice from USAID says otherwise.
Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the federal government’s response to the 2014-2015 West Africa Ebola outbreak during his time working as the director of USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, said Musk’s fix was a bandaid to save face after DOGE’s blunder.
“So – I’ve actually led Ebola outbreak response @USAID. This is bunk from Elon. They have laid off most of the experts, they’re bankrupting most of the partner orgs, have withdrawn from WHO, and muzzled CDC,” he wrote on X. “What’s left is a fig-lead effort to cover their a**** politically.”
He said that the government’s capacity to respond to global outbreaks and disasters “has now been wrecked” by Musk’s cuts.
“Most experts and operations staff at USAID have been pushed out. USAID’s ops centers have been shut down (the main ops centers were in USAID’s Reagan Building HQ, which Elon has now leased to DHS),” he wrote. “USAID’s capacity to deploy response teams is totally broken.”
He also alleged that DOGE had banned leadership at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from talking with healthcare professionals from the World Health Organization.
“Bottom line: Elon’s vendetta against USAID and the federal workforce is shredding all of the systems that the USG has built up to protect the US homeland against global outbreak risks,” he wrote. “Scrambling to recall a few staff and issue some belated funding is just window dressing.”
