Hey Elon: You Don’t Just ‘Ooopsie’ The Destruction Of Ebola Prevention

Failures

from the global-health-isn't-a-botched-twitter-feature-launch-you-can-roll-back dept

Look, sometimes you make mistakes. Maybe you send an email to the wrong person. Maybe you accidentally buy the wrong kind of pasta sauce at the grocery store. Maybe you accidentally dismantle critical global health infrastructure. These things happen! At least, that’s what Elon Musk wants us to believe.

At yesterday’s first official Musk/Trump administration cabinet meeting, Elon decided to share a cute little anecdote about his DOGE team’s approach to governing. Just a fun little story about how they “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention efforts. What a knee slapper!

Here’s Musk’s exact quote, which deserves to be read in full because, well, you’ll see:

We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make mistakes, we’ll fix it very quickly. So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention. [nervous chuckle] I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored Ebola prevention immediately and there was no interruption.

The only problem is that almost everything here is nonsense… well, except for the part about canceling the program on Ebola prevention. Musk absolutely did that. And some other terrible stuff as well. But the fixing the mistake part? That doesn’t appear to have actually happened. Oopsie!

[Nervous chuckle intensifies]

The Real Impact of “Accidental” Cuts

To be clear, this one scenario actually offers a really good case study in how dangerously short-sighted the Musk/DOGE efforts are, in which they have no clue what they’re doing, are slashing and burning, and figuring they can just “fix it very quickly after” when things go wrong.

Except, that’s often not how this works, and the things they’re doing are creating not just lasting damage, but real-time harms that can never be fixed.

So, first of all, they absolutely cut off Ebola prevention and it had real world consequences the day they did, because there was an Ebola outbreak reported in Uganda that very day. As Ebola expert (and survivor!) Dr. Craig Spencer explained, normally the US would send an Ebola expert to Uganda to help with the prevention, which they were unable to do, because Musk and DOGE basically made that impossible. Spencer’s explanation of what happened is maddening (this is just a snippet):

On January 29, Uganda reported an Ebola outbreak. Normally the U.S. would’ve very quickly sent one of our Ebola experts to help the response. But this time, we didn’t. Because we couldn’t. Because this administration wouldn’t let them go right when this outbreak was declared.

And normally the U.S. would’ve helped set up border screening and other measures on the ground.

But this time, we didn’t.

Normally, we would’ve spoke with the WHO about helping end the outbreak.

But this time, we didn’t.

Because CDC staff weren’t even allowed to talk to them.

I’ve been told by a colleague that Uganda tried calling the White House to notify them of the outbreak for 2 days…but no one answered the phone. Two months ago we had amazing experts working on global health security there. Now there appears to be no one to pick up a phone.

Lies About ‘Fixing’ Those Mistakes

It turns out that Elon and DOGE actually fired 90% of the team working on it. Which raises an interesting question: How exactly do you “turn on” Ebola prevention when you’ve fired all the people who… you know… prevent Ebola?

“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” of Ebola and other diseases, said Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration and oversaw the agency’s response to health-care outbreaks.

[….]

Bouri said her former USAID team of 60 people working on disease-response had been cut to about six staffers as of earlier this week. She called the recent USAID response to Uganda’s Ebola outbreak a “one-off,” far diminished from “the full suite” of activities that the agency historically would mount, such as ramping up efforts to monitor whether the disease had spread to neighboring countries.

“The full spectrum — the investments in disease surveillance, the investments in what we mobilize … moving commodities, supporting lab workers — that capacity is now a tenth of what it was,” Bouri said.

Furthermore, contrary to Elon’s claim, it appears that the funds for Ebola prevention have not resumed at all:

Other current and former USAID officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations, agreed with Bouri’s assessment.

“There was a waiver for Ebola, but USAID funds have never been back online,” said a current official. “USAID has been frozen: staff and money.”

“If there was a need to respond to Ebola, it would be a disaster assistance response team, or DART,” said one former official. “There is no longer a capability to send a DART or support one from Washington. Many of those people are contractors who were let go at the very beginning.”

This should be terrifying. Even if you’re so myopic that you think “America First” means not doing any foreign aid work (and boy, is that a discussion for another day), surely you can recognize that preventing foreign outbreaks of deadly diseases helps protect Americans at home as well. Right? Right???

A Pattern of Destruction

And the Ebola example is just one example.

There have been multiple reports of how the DOGE team halted funding for PEPFAR, which is the “President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief,” started by George W. Bush that has been credited with saving over 26 million lives and limiting the spread of AIDS globally. But DOGE stopped the program.

In Africa, thousands of U.S.-funded health workers have been laid off and clinics have closed, restricting access to HIV testing and treatment. African health officials and experts have pleaded for PEPFAR to resume, fearing services that have become a key part of the health care system will be stripped in a way that sets countries back decades.

And even though Marco Rubio has promoted PEPFAR and claimed that he signed a limited waiver to keep some (not all) of it funded… reports are that the DOGE team has still blocked any PEPFAR funding from going through. As the AP reports:

“…aid groups say they know of no payments getting through for that or any program.”

And even though a court ordered USAID to continue its congressionally mandated funding efforts two weeks ago, the Musk/Trump administration has refused to do so. Yesterday, after the judge made it clear that they were walking into a contempt of court situation, the DOJ ran to the Supreme Court, which put a temporary pause on the order, giving the Court a couple more days to evaluate.

Meanwhile, people are dying. Right now. Today. While Elon and his DOGE crew chuckle about their “accidental” mistakes (all easily preventable if they hadn’t fired actual experts or just… asked people to explain what was happening), and then claimed they “immediately” fixed things they didn’t actually fix.

And we could easily go on. I mean, last week they “accidentally” fired all the experts working to prevent avian flu and then were scrambling to try to find them to rehire them. Because nothing says “competent governance” and “efficiency” quite like firing your bird flu experts in the middle of a bird flu outbreak, and then struggling to find the fired experts in order to beg them to come back.

It seems like everywhere you look, these kinds of “accidental” mistakes are being made, and they’re not being rectified.

But Elon and the DOGE crew think it’s all just a laugh.

It’s Not Just The Incompetence, It’s The Indifference

Here’s the thing about all of this: None of it had to happen. None of these “accidents” were inevitable. Even if you wanted to cut actual waste, fraud, and abuse (and who doesn’t?), there are ways to do that without, you know, accidentally dismantling global disease prevention infrastructure.

But there’s no interest from Musk or DOGE in figuring any of that out. Zero. Zilch. Nada. There’s not even a pretense of concern about the irreversible damage being done.

Not only do they have a total lack of intellectual curiosity to learn about the institutions and systems they’re destroying, there’s not even one bit of concern about the very real damage that has been done and can’t be fixed, even if they actually were turning back on the funding (which, again, it appears they’re not).

There are a million stories to be covering these days about all this, but this is a tragedy of epic proportions. And the only acknowledgment of it is a little giggle from Elon, in which he admits to just one part of the error, but falsely states they corrected it. Because apparently that’s where we are now: treating global health infrastructure like it’s a Twitter feature that can be rolled back with a quick deployment.

The real tragedy isn’t just the destruction of vital programs — it’s that lives are being treated as acceptable collateral damage in an ideological experiment, based off of a myth. Musk, DOGE, and the Project 2025 crew are completely bought into the false belief that federal government employees do nothing useful, that they don’t work, and almost all foreign aid is wasted.

When global health infrastructure built over decades is dismantled overnight, it can’t simply be restored with a presidential waiver or a tweet. What’s being lost here isn’t just money or bureaucracy, but institutional knowledge, relationships, and capacity that took years to build. And Musk shows no signs of learning this lesson at all. To him, it remains a joke and a meme to tweet. As people die.

Filed Under: aids, bird flu, donald trump, ebola, elon musk, global health, mistakes, pepfar, uganda