Now that Elon Musk is leaving Washington, what did he accomplish? What is his legacy?
Well, for starters, with his “chainsaw approach,” he wrecked several government agencies. Experts predict that it will take years and billions of dollars to repair the damage.
But perhaps more critically, according to one New York Times opinion columnist, his legacy is disease, starvation, and death. Let’s consider that set of effects.
After all, fellow superrich person Bill Gates is reputed to have said about Elon Musk, “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”
I will focus here on the gutting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), examining the resultant issues of life and death.
For decades, USAID has been the largest source of international assistance to over 120 countries, providing tangible benefits such as hunger relief, food programs, and responses to infectious disease outbreaks.
On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO). Then, four days later, on January 24, Trump froze foreign assistance for 90 days, halting most United States Agency for International Development (USAID) programs.
“Because of these two decisions and the long-lasting consequences, lives will be lost. Livelihoods will be destroyed in the US and abroad. Critical expertise, infrastructure, and data needed to combat food insecurity and malnutrition will be lost. Long-standing US foreign aid policies that are being abruptly halted will leave a diplomatic and humanitarian void,” said one nutrition researcher.
Nevertheless, Musk and his people went on to destroy USAID. A US district court judge recently wrote that the dismantling of USAID likely violated the Constitution in multiple ways.
USAID and WHO have been pillars in the fight against malnutrition and hunger. Several prominent global nutrition researchers argued early on in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that the abrupt withdrawal from WHO and dismantling of USAID would have immediate dire consequences.
The Trump administration cited cost savings as the rationale for stopping foreign aid. However, foreign assistance is only approximately one percent of the federal budget.
Due to the cuts in USAID, food aid at refugee camps in South Sudan has been severely reduced, resulting in people receiving less than 30 percent of the calories they need. “It is not enough to survive on, and that has caused skyrocketing levels of severe malnutrition and deaths associated with it,” said an administrator at USAID.
With a background in calculating the impacts of infectious diseases around the world, a Boston University professor, Brooke Nichols, with assistance from colleagues and peers, developed a statistical model to determine the immediate effects of one of the many programs on Trump’s chopping block: the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). This HIV prevention program has operated through USAID since 2003. It provided critical drugs to adults and children with HIV and is estimated to have saved 26 million lives.
With the disruption of PEPFAR, the PEPFAR Impact Counter developed by Nichols and her colleagues predicts one additional adult death from HIV every 3.3 minutes. That is 159,272 additional adult deaths per year. It predicts one additional infant death from HIV every 31 minutes, which totals 16,054 deaths per year. They developed other impact counters, including tuberculosis, which would increase to 81,260 additional cases per year.
This is quite a toll.
A colleague once told me that two of the worst combinations of attitudes are ignorance and apathy. Musk and his people suffered from both. They are uninformed about how the government and diplomacy operate, and they appear to be unconcerned.
For example, Samantha Power, head of USAID under Biden, said she tried to speak with members of the new administration, hoping to convince them there were elements of USAID’s work that they could leverage for their agenda. But aside from one meeting with transition officials, they ignored her outreach.
“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”
National security experts strongly support the soft diplomacy of USAID. Their bottom line is that addressing critical, bipartisan national security priorities requires a robust 3D approach to US foreign policy – defense, diplomacy, and development. Anything less is shortsighted and puts the country at risk.
But ignorance and apathy are prevailing.
