Editor’s Note: This analysis was originally published in CNN’s Meanwhile in America newsletter. Read past issues and subscribe here.
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First, they fired the people who look after the nuclear bombs, then had to hurriedly find where they went and hire them back.
They got rid of the government agricultural workers responsible for fighting bird flu — which has sent the cost of America’s breakfast soaring.
Then, amid rising public concern that an Ebola outbreak in Africa could leapfrog to the US, Elon Musk took his chainsaw to the most prominent US experts on the disease.
“We won’t be perfect. But when we make mistake, we will fix it very quickly,” later backtracked Musk, who is running President Donald Trump’s effort to eviscerate the federal government.
“With USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention. So, we restored the Ebola prevention immediately,” he said.
This haphazard nihilism is symptomatic of Musk’s approach with the de-facto Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): destroy first, ask questions later.
Claims that DOGE has already saved tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer cash are dubious — despite evidence trumpeted by conservative media of frivolous spending. Trump’s claim, for instance, that the now expunged US Agency for International Development spent $100 million on condoms for Hamas is absurdly untrue.
The president’s voters will shed few tears for federal workers kicked out of their jobs with little notice and less compensation. Tearful USAID workers had only 15 minutes to clear their desks on Thursday. But then, as with much of the Trump agenda, the cruelty is the point.
There’s nothing wrong with curtailing bloated government. When the public thinks its cash is being wasted, governance loses legitimacy.
But screw-ups by Musk and his DOGE boys are revealing one key truth — they have no clue how government works. Conservatives might view the federal government as the home of liberal elites. But it pays out pensions, administers health care for seniors and the poor, and keeps keeps planes in the sky. Every state capital has a big federal building — and it’s now dawning on some of Trump’s cheerleaders that hundreds of thousand of government jobs exist outside the Beltway.
A backlash is building as GOP lawmakers get upbraided by constituents back home.
“Things are happening so fast and furiously,” Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis said. “We need to take a step back and make sure that we’re doing things in a way that we are rooting out the waste, the fraud and the abuse and the mismanagement, making programs efficient but not resulting in unintended consequences.”
That’s not Musk’s way. He’s treating the government to the kind of creative destruction — with the emphasis on destruction — that rocked his tech businesses, rocket ship company and social network X.
If this carries on, Trump may pay a price for giving the world’s richest man almost limited government power, come the midterm elections next year.
Even when government is working, financed and fully staffed, things can go badly wrong — the botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the comically mismanaged Obamacare website come to mind.
But when the government is being deliberately desecrated, disasters are all but guaranteed.
Thousands of lives at stake
The obliteration of USAID has had a devastating impact on global public health programs like PEPFAR, the global HIV/AIDS program initiated by President George W. Bush that has saved millions of lives and was one of the most successful US foreign policy programs in decades. The Trump administration insists that it has offered waivers for life-saving treatments. But reports on the ground suggest that cash often isn’t getting through to clinics.
This doesn’t just affect HIV/AIDS patients whose US-provided anti-retroviral drugs keep the disease not just from worsening, but from spreading to new victims. It also risks dismantling the early warning health systems that stop outbreaks becoming epidemics.
Meanwhile wanted to find out whether an emergency operation like the one mounted by the Obama administration that successfully put down a 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa would be possible after Musk’s carnage.
Here’s what Dr. Yukari Manabe, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who is also a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told us.
“There have been some restrictions on travel for people that would normally respond (to outbreaks). So, I think that there are going to be difficulties sending the number of people in addition, people who might normally have dealt with viral hemorrhagic fever outbreaks may not be able to do that. They’ve either been fired or they are not around to do that,” Manabe said.
Without the same support, vital health services USAID built could crumble, she said. “Having people from whom you can bounce ideas off, I think, are very important, and having people who have helped build that capacity.
“They’ve trained people on the ground to be able to do this as well,” Manabe said. “So, countries in the West African Ebola outbreak who had had PEPFAR as part of the programming that they had within their countries, in general, did better in terms of the number of cases that they had.”
Trump will take his latest victory lap on Tuesday night with a prime time, televised address to Congress. A man who loves adulation will get plenty from Republican lawmakers who control both chambers. It will be another moment of vindication for a president whose followers smashed their way into the very House of Representatives chamber from where he’ll speak, on January 6, 2021.
Trump’s message will be simple: He’s saving America.
But the GOP euphoria will be tempered by the reality that the president’s agenda hangs on the miniscule Republican majority in the House of Representatives. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik hasn’t yet taken up her post as the new US ambassador to the United Nations because House Speaker Mike Johnson can’t afford to lose her vote.
It’s one thing for Trump to fire off executive orders, to trample US treaties, to call for the annexation of Canada and to threaten to invade Greenland and Panama. True, lasting, political change requires Congress to act. If he wants his huge tax cut and to fund his mass deportation plan, Trump must inspire unity among his political troops.
Keep an eye on which Supreme Court justices show up. Their attendance at such events is always politically charged — even though they’re usually stone faced and sit out standing ovations.
The high court will have the critical final say on the legality of many of Trump’s power grabs and will define the destiny of his presidency and the Constitution. That means even a stray smile from one of the arch conservatives on the bench that implies favor for Trump’s political cause could ignite a political furor.
