Elon Musk departs DOGE with a horrific legacy

Musk’s time in Washington was characterized by a toxic combination of ignorance, arrogance and malevolence. He didn’t know how things worked, wasn’t interested in learning and didn’t care how many people he would hurt. All of it stemmed from his belief that not only is government incapable of doing anything right, almost everything it tries to do isn’t worth doing anyway. So if he had an impression that an agency was bad — say, the U.S. Agency for International Development — what would be the point of learning its goals and methods? Just shut the whole thing down. The demise of USAID is one of the most horrific legacies of Musk’s time in Washington. The abrupt cutoff of food aid to vulnerable people around the world “has destabilized some of the most fragile locations in the world and thrown refugee camps further into unrest,” according to internal State Department documents obtained by ProPublica. The withdrawal of medical assistance — especially through PEPFAR, the spectacularly successful U.S. program that fights the spread of HIV in Africa — is already leading directly to people’s deaths, almost certainly by the thousands. Some studies have concluded that hundreds of thousands of people either have died or will die because the U.S. government, at Musk’s urging, has all but shut down its foreign humanitarian efforts. The experience of USAID was repeated in agency after agency, often at Musk’s whims or to serve Musk’s interest. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which used to protect Americans from financial scams, could cause problems for Musk’s plans to add payment services to his social media platform X. But now CFPB staff have been sent home, and the agency has essentially ceased to function. We saw a pattern repeated over and over: Musk’s DOGE staffers would descend on a government office, demand access to critical systems and start destroying programs they didn’t bother to understand. Officials who stood up to them were fired. Contracts were canceled, offices were closed, and people who relied on services were abandoned. Elon Musk departs DOGE with a horrific legacy and you enabled all of this chaos, cruelty, and death.