DOGE boss Elon Musk claimed the White House “restored” Ebola prevention efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development — but experts say otherwise.
Speaking at a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, the world’s richest person and senior adviser to President Donald Trump, admitted that DOGE “accidentally canceled” USAID’s program to prevent the spread of the deadly virus.
"We will make mistakes," Musk said. "We won't be perfect, but when we make mistakes we'll fix it very quickly … I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.”
Experts say the tech billionaire’s reassurance doesn’t paint an accurate picture. USAID has effectively been dismantled, including the Ebola prevention program, experts say.
Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the federal government's response to the 2014-2015 West Africa Ebola outbreak as director of USAID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, didn’t buy Musk’s explanation.
“This is bunk from Elon. They have laid off most of the experts, they're bankrupting most of the partner [organizations], have withdrawn from WHO [the World Health Organization], and muzzled CDC [Centers for Disease Contro],” Konyndyk wrote on X. “What's left is a fig-leaf effort to cover their asses politically.”
“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” of Ebola and other diseases, Nidhi Bouri, a former senior official at USAID, told The Washington Post.
“There was a waiver for Ebola, but USAID funds have never been back online,” a current official told the Post. “USAID has been frozen: staff and money.”
Court documents Wednesday revealed “nearly 5,800 USAID awards were terminated, and more than 500 USAID awards were retained,” despite a federal judge requiring the administration to pay nearly $2 billion in foreign aid by midnight Wednesday. Hours before the deadline, the Supreme Court stepped in, briefly pausing the order.
Despite Musk’s comments, USAID told several organizations working with the U.S. government to stop Ebola’s spread around the world that their contracts had been terminated, sources told the Post. UNICEF was allegedly one of those organizations. The Independent has reached out to UNICEF for comment.
Just last month, an Ebola outbreak arose in Uganda. The spread was curbed, in part due to USAID’s previous prevention efforts, current and former officials told the outlet. But with fewer people and resources working on outbreak response, other countries could be placed at risk.
“The full spectrum — the investments in disease surveillance, the investments in what we mobilize … moving commodities, supporting lab workers — that capacity is now a tenth of what it was,” Bouri told the outlet.
A former official agreed. “If there was a need to respond to Ebola, it would be a disaster assistance response team, or DART,” the official noted. “There is no longer a capability to send a DART or support one from Washington. Many of those people are contractors who were let go at the very beginning.”
