World’s richest man and head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Elon Musk told Donald Trump’s cabinet on Wednesday that his controversial austerity organisation “accidentally” axed a program working to prevent the spread of Ebola.
Musk, wearing a “dark MAGA” hat, addressed Trump’s cabinet on Wednesday and admitted that DOGE had made some mistakes during its short time cutting the federal workforce.
One of those mistakes was reportedly killing a USAID program that was working to stop Ebola.
“We will make mistakes,” Musk said. “We won’t be perfect, but when we make mistakes we’ll fix it very quickly. For example, with USAID one of the things we accidentally cancelled, very briefly, was Ebola prevention.”
Musk, who laughed at the mistake, said once the situation was brought to his attention that his team worked to rectify the issue.
“I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption,” Musk said.
Despite noting that his group temporarily slashed a critical program that could help prevent a deadly outbreak, he insisted that moving fast was paramount to hit his savings goals.
“But we do need to move quickly if we are to achieve a trillion dollar deficit reduction in financial year 2026. It requires saving four billion dollars per day, every day, from now through the end of September,” he said. “But we can do it, and we will do it.”
But according to the Washington Post, current and former USAID officials said that Musk was wrong: USAID’s Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved last month to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments, they said. The teams and contractors that would be deployed to fight an Ebola outbreak have been dismantled, they added.
While the Trump administration issued a waiver to allow USAID to respond to an Ebola outbreak in Uganda last month, partner organizations were not promptly paid for their work, and USAID’s own efforts were sharply curtailed compared to past efforts to fight Ebola outbreaks.
“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention of Ebola and other diseases”, said Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration and oversaw the agency’s response to health-care outbreaks.
Ebola is a severe and often fatal virus that can cause fever, vomiting and internal and external bleeding, alarming global health leaders who have worked to contain several recent outbreaks. More than 11,000 people died in an Ebola epidemic in West Africa that began in 2014 and eventually spread to the United States. Symptoms and complications in survivors can also linger for months.
