At the start of the second Trump administration, Trump unilaterally created a fake “Department of Government Efficiency,” led by Elon Musk. Only Congress can create or eliminate Departments. According to the Constitution, the House of Representatives is responsible for funding and defunding the federal government.

Trump ignored the Constitution and Congress and let Musk and his team ransack the Federal Government, fire thousands of civil servants, and close agencies at will. DOGE decisions were made not by experts but by Musk and his team, most of whom were young men in their 20s, even a teenagers. From their point of view, their greatest accomplishment was to copy massive amounts of personally identifiable data from the Treasury Department and the Social Security Administration.

While DOGE slashed and burned agencies and Departments with abandon, the cruelest cut of all was the near-total elimination of foreign aid. Millions of people in impoverished countries relied on U.S. AID for food, medicine, and medical care. The aid is gone. Hundreds of thousands of people died. If you say it in the active tense, Trump and Musk murdered “hundreds of thousands of people” whose lives depended on US AID. The food aid was more than a humanitarian impulse: American farmers lost at least $2 billion that was used to pay them to supply food for US AID.

Matt Johnson wrote for MS NOW:

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Elon Musk boasted in February, shortly after President Donald Trump gave him permission to hack his way through the federal government. As a “special government employee” with no oversight running the “temporary organization,” the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Musk destroyed the 64-year-old humanitarian agency in a matter of days, abruptly halting deliveries of lifesaving medicine, emergency food aid and many other forms of support to the poorest people on the planet. This was done in the name of DOGE’s mission to “maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.”

Musk claimed that DOGE would slash government spending by “at least $2 trillion,” but it ended up saving a microscopic fraction of that figure. Now that DOGE has been disbanded, Musk claims “We were a little bit successful” — but admits that he wouldn’t do it again. 

Musk tried his hand at government, shrugged and moved on. The same can’t be said for the people who are dead and dying thanks to the DOGE-led onslaught on the U.S. Agency for International Development. “No one has died as [a] result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Musk declared in March. According to models created by Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, hundreds of thousands of people have in fact died as a result of eliminated and disrupted aid. 

It’s impossible to calculate the ultimate human toll of shuttering USAID. The U.S. was responsible for 40% of the total foreign aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024, and much of the infrastructure that delivered this aid has now been destroyed. Beyond the frozen payments for active aid projects, partner organizations have closed, supply chains for medicine and food deliveries have been severed and staff who administered and monitored programs have been fired. Early warning systems for starvation and infectious diseases have shut down. 

The individual stories are harrowing. A South Sudanese child with HIV died from pneumonia because he didn’t receive the medication necessary to sustain his immune system. People participating in studies were abandonedwith experimental drugs in their systems and medical devices in their bodies. Cases of acute malnutrition at refugee camps have surged. 

In the MAGAverse, none of this is true because USAID was never an aid organization to begin with. Mike Benz, a right-wing influencer who has accused the agency of being a terror organization and subverting governments around the world, was a big influence on Musk’s assault on USAID, which Benz called the “Terror Titanic.” Like Musk before him, Benz has now been appointed as a special government employee to investigate his allegations that USAID was a massive covert influence operation and front for the CIA. 

Benz’s campaign is just the latest example of MAGA propaganda using USAID as a convenient political scapegoat. DOGE viewed the takeover of USAID as an opportunity to find instances of “viral waste,” which could be broadcast to the American people as a justification for its other cost-cutting efforts. One example cited by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was the “50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Trump later declared that the money had been “sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.” 

There was just one problem: The money was actually for family planning in a province of Mozambique called Gaza….

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