Bill Gates is not impressed by Elon Musk’s work with the Department of Government Efficiency. In an interview with the Financial Times, he described Musk’s work as hurting the most vulnerable people on the planet. “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.” He repeated that line a bit more directly in conversation with the New York Times, stating that while Musk could go on to become a great philanthropist, saying, “In the meantime, the world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children.”
Gates zeroed in on Musk’s cuts to the United States Agency for International Development, which he called stunning and worse than he ever imagined. “I thought there’d be, like, a 20 percent cut. Instead, right now, it’s like an 80 percent cut. And yes, I did not expect that,” he told the New York Times. He also didn’t shy away from placing the blame for those cuts directly on Musk, stating, “He’s the one who cut the U.S.A.I.D. budget. He put it in the wood chipper.”
The results of those cuts are going to be devastating, and in no small part, the result of a complete misunderstanding of what it is that USAID does. For instance, Gates said that one of the consequences of Musk’s bizarre claim that the government was spending $50 million on condoms for Hamas was the cancellation of grants that would have gone to a hospital in Gaza Province, Mozambique, that works to prevent the transmission of HIV to children. “I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money,” Gates told the Financial Times.
He didn’t mince words about what the results of Musk’s work will be, either. He told NYT, “Because of these cuts, millions of additional deaths of kids.” And fixing it isn’t going to be as easy as tearing it down was. Gates said he’s currently expecting a four- to six-year interruption in funding. While he’s still optimistic that aid organizations that he’s involved with will be able to reduce childhood mortality in the long term, he said, “The cuts are so dramatic that even if we get some restored, we’re going to have a tough time.”
That’s exacerbated by the fact that humanitarian aid is on the decline globally, so there’s no obvious candidate to step up and fill in the gap left by the Trump administration’s apparent disdain for extending a hand to anyone born outside America’s borders (and frankly, most inside them, as well).
For Musk, it’s possible that he’d view the unfortunate side effects of cutting aid (lots of death) as just part of the necessary pain needed to make the essential cuts that DOGE was put in place to do. Except…it’s not doing that. Musk initially claimed that he’d cut $2 trillion from the government’s spending, his pseudo-agency has claimed just $162 billion thus far, but the experts at Musk Watch could only verify $5.02 billion of that, which accounts for 0.25% of the initial goal.
So yes, there are millions of children and adults likely to die because a billionaire waved his hands and stopped funding essential humanitarian efforts that he never even bothered to understand, but at least he can rest easy knowing that he also failed spectacularly at his stated mission along the way. It does not seem like it is a stretch to say that we are letting people die in order to protect the ego of the world’s richest and most fragile man.
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