This week, the Trump administration let it be known that the Department of Government Efficiency is moribund. The quasi-official agency that allowed Elon Musk to deconstruct and destroy much of the federal government may be gone, but the detrimental and deadly effects continue to reverberate.
Perhaps the cruelest of the cuts was the elimination of America’s foreign assistance program, the United States Agency for International Development. The sudden loss of feeding programs and medical services to poverty-wracked regions all over the planet is now estimated by a former USAID official to have caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children, in less than a year.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has been on the ground in Africa observing the calamity. In a TV interview, he noted that Musk could pay to feed all of that continent’s starving children with just the interest he earns from his vast wealth, but, of course, that is not going to happen.
As billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has said, Musk’s elimination of USAID was a case of “the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children.”