Elon Musk’s DOGE Cuts May Become One Of The Trump Administration’s Deadliest Legacies

Elon Musk is the richest man in the world, yet his great contribution to public life was not generosity. It was helping unleash a wrecking ball on public systems that real people depended on. The DOGE project was sold as efficiency. In practice, according to former USAID global health official Nicholas Enrich, it looked more like ideological vandalism: experienced federal workers pushed out, lifesaving programmes gutted, payment systems broken, health contracts cancelled, and vulnerable communities left to absorb the damage.

Current Affairs interviewed Enrich, who spent more than 12 years at USAID and later wrote Into the Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID. The title comes from Musk himself. Enrich says Musk tweeted that he had spent a weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” Enrich was inside the agency when it happened.

Here is part of what he told Current Affairs:

Enrich said USAID had saved more than 92 million lives over the past 20 years while using less than one percent of the federal budget. He said DOGE broke the systems used to audit payments, froze lifesaving programmes, and terminated contracts needed for HIV, Ebola, tuberculosis, malaria and emergency health work.

He also said conservative estimates suggest 750,000 people have already died, most of them children, with the full effects expected to unfold over several more years.

Elon Musk’s DOGE Cuts Were Never Just About Waste

This is almost impossible to process. The richest man in the world helped dismantle an agency that provided food, medicine, HIV prevention, immunisations, emergency childbirth services, Ebola response and infectious disease monitoring. These are not abstract budget lines, they are clinics, medicines and ambulances. They are children who either receive care or do not.

And yet Musk gets to shrug, post memes and move on, and that is the obscene part. Musk sits on government contracts, political influence and a social media platform that can shape public opinion in real time. Then he presents himself as a rebel outsider while benefiting from the very state he claims to be dismantling. Welcome to the oligarchy, everybody.

There also needs to be serious scrutiny of what DOGE actually did, who benefited, and whether companies linked to Musk gained from the destruction of federal agencies and oversight. You cannot have a billionaire with major government contracts helping gut the government and then pretend there is no conflict of interest.