Elon Musk sat down with The Economist’s editor-in-chief in July 2026 and said: “Zero point zero. Zero died because of DOGE.”
I almost laughed out loud at him when he said that. But it’s not funny, people are losing their lives, and many have a significantly worse life as the totality of these cuts emerges. Does Musk actually think most people can’t draw a straight line between what his agency did and the utter destruction of science, health, and consumer protection?
HIV case transmission alone has rapidly increased, it had been trending down, until these cuts. Children are among the hardest hit by the rapid dismantling of USAID, with significant drops in treatment and access to care that the United State Government recently called “a success” despite also stating they hadn’t reviewed the data but are sure it was flawed in it’s analysis.
HIV will very soon (if it hasn’t already) begin to show up in the US at significantly higher rates.
According to UNAIDS: “In 2025, 1.2 million people acquired HIV, but progress is uneven. New HIV infections rose in three regions and 21 countries in 2025. Around 9 million of the 41 million people living with HIV were not on treatment and almost half of all children living with HIV did not have access to antiretroviral therapy in 2025. More than half a million people (570 000) died of AIDS-related illnesses in 2025.”
The epic trail of destruction left by some nameless early 20-somethings praying to the Elon cult of personality has already and will continue to cost people their lives.
Simply put, Elon, the evidence tells a very different story. It is published in peer-reviewed journals, documented by journalists on the ground, and tracked in real time by epidemiologists at Boston University. Musk’s brief tenure as a cost-cutting adviser, has already contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, with millions more projected to follow.
A study published in The Lancet in July 2025, co-authored by researchers from UCLA, Barcelona, and Mozambique, analyzed USAID funding across 133 countries over two decades. They found that USAID had averted an estimated 91.8 million deaths. This includes 30 million children under five between 2001 and 2021. Their forecasting models projected that the 83% cut to USAID programs could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under five. That is roughly 700,000 extra child deaths per year.
Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols built a real-time Impact Counter that has modeled approximately 760,000 deaths in the first year alone, with more than 518,000 of those being children. The Center for Global Development independently estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 lives lost in 2025. These are different methods converging on the same order of magnitude: hundreds of thousands already dead, millions more at risk.
The deaths are not abstractions. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times traveled to the villages where USAID programs once operated and named the dead: Yamah Freeman, 23, who died in childbirth in Liberia because the diesel for ambulances was no longer funded. Kebese Kiadu, age one, who died of malaria. Ibrahim Koroma, an infant in Sierra Leone who died of AIDS after HIV supply chains were interrupted. An eight-year-old girl in South Sudan who died when the health worker who provided her HIV medicines lost funding. NPR worked with photojournalists to identify additional children whose deaths had a documented connection to the USAID cutbacks. That must have struck a nerve, Musk’s response was to call Kristof “an utter piece of shit and a liar.” But he has never bothered to present any evidence that refutes Kristof’s findings.
Our own health systems were dismantled, the damage will be difficult to track because almost no one is left to track it. At the FDA, DOGE-associated cuts eliminated 3,500 to ~4,200 jobs, about 20% of the agency. The directors of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research were removed. Volunteers were recruited to complete drug reviews. Food facility inspections were delayed. A reorganization planned for October 2026 will convert specialized field inspectors into generalists. This means that the person who inspects a pharmaceutical plant may also be assigned to a food processing facility, with neither getting the depth of expertise either role demands leaving consumers playing roulette when food and drugs were once considered safe.
At the CDC, roughly a quarter to a third of the entire staff is gone (about 3,000 employees). Eighty percent of senior leadership positions remain without permanent appointees. The agency has been without a permanent director for nearly a year. The laboratory responsible for responding to cyclospora outbreaks was reduced from 11 people to three. We are currently on week 12 of the worst cyclospora outbreak in United States history. Simultaneous outbreaks of hantavirus, screwworm, measles, whooping cough, and bird flu are straining what former CDC officials describe as a skeleton staff.
The list of deadly cuts at home continues. At the NIH, DOGE staff pushed for 3,000 positions to be terminated. By April 2026, at least 5,468 grants had been terminated or suspended, with over $450 million in funds lost. A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine documented that 383 clinical trials were disrupted, directly affecting more than 74,000 patients. This includes people who were mid-treatment for cancer, HIV/AIDS, mental health conditions, and chronic diseases.
Dr. Vishal Patel of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who led the study, described the consequences: “When you abruptly halt a trial, you’re not just pausing paperwork. You’re stopping medications, ending monitoring protocols, and severing the relationship between patient and research team.” The National Cancer Institute alone canceled 181 grants totaling more than $317 million, many focused on cancer disparities affecting populations with 18–35% higher cancer mortality.
At NIOSH, the carnage was nearly total. Remember at the height of the pandemic when I told my audience to look for the NIOSH stamp of approval on masks to ensure they met safety standards? Well, that agency has been almost completely destroyed. Approximately 875 of about 1,000 workers were laid off on April 1, 2025. The National Firefighter Registry for Cancer — the largest study of its kind ever attempted, with 23,000 firefighters enrolled — had its enrollment portal shut down. Seven of eight members of the Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program were cut. The program that certifies respirators for all American workers — from firefighters to healthcare workers — was effectively eliminated. Coal miner black lung screening was disrupted. The World Trade Center Health Program, serving 9/11 responders and survivors, lost over 20% of its staff and briefly stopped approving cancer treatment for new cases. Lab animals were left without staff and had to be euthanized. After public outcry, 328 NIOSH employees were reinstated but hundreds of positions remain cut.
Musk’s defense relies on a category error. He demands death certificates that say “DOGE” as the cause of death which is an idiotic game of semantics. Elon’s agency should have been called DODGE as in DODGE responsibility for any an all actions that have destroyed people’s lives. We all know that policy-caused harm doesn’t land on a death certificate. When you cut funding for antiretroviral drugs overnight, people die of AIDS, but the cause was the funding cut. When you eliminate Ebola surveillance programs, an outbreak goes undetected for weeks, and people die of Ebola, but the cause was the dismantling of the early warning system. When you fire the people who certify respirators, workers eventually inhale toxins they would have been protected from, but the death certificate will say lung cancer, not DOGE. Historian Richard Rhodes coined a term for this: “public man-made death” — deaths caused not by individual violence but by policy decisions, neglect, and the dismantling of infrastructure that keeps people alive.
Musk has admitted he “got carried away” with politics. He told The Economist he regretted the political entanglements. But he has not retracted his claim that zero people died. He has not acknowledged the Lancet study, the Boston University tracker, the named victims, or the shuttered clinics. He has not visited the villages where parents are burying children because funding decisions made in Washington eliminated the programs keeping them alive.
The Department of Government Efficiency officially ended on July 4, 2026. Its effects did not. They will ripple through global health for decades, in the HIV clinics that never reopened, in the outbreaks that were detected too late, in the clinical trials that were abandoned mid-patient, in the 9/11 responders who waited months for cancer treatment approvals, and in the millions of children whose deaths are not hypothetical projections but statistical certainties if the funding is not restored.
Zero point zero. That is what Musk said in response to the deaths caused by DOGE. The evidence is clear that he is wrong. Zero point zero is better used to characterize how much DOGE saved the American taxpayer. There is no evidence that they saved any money and federal spending has sharply increased.
Fortune, “Experts Blame DOGE Cuts for Intensifying the Ebola Outbreak” (July 6, 2026): https://fortune.com/2026/07/06/doge-cuts-usaid-humanitarian-aid-ebola-outbreak-congo/
Cavalcanti et al., “Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030,” The Lancet, 406:283-294 (July 2025): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01186-9/fulltext
NPR, “Trump’s Team: ‘No Children’ Died from USAID Cuts” (July 17, 2026): https://www.npr.org/2026/07/17/g-s1-133651/usaid-elon-musk-rubio-deaths
Forbes, “A Testy Musk Attacks Claims DOGE’s Cuts Killed Children” (June 29, 2026): https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2026/06/29/a-testy-musk-attacks-claims-doges-cuts-killed-children-but-studies-paint-grim-picture/
The Guardian, “What Will Define Elon Musk’s Legacy? DOGE Cuts to USAID Ebola Programs” (July 7, 2026): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/07/elon-musk-doge-cuts-usaid-ebola
IFLScience, “Musk Suggests the Impact of USAID Cuts Was Overstated” (July 24, 2026): https://www.iflscience.com/musk-suggests-the-impact-of-usaid-cuts-was-overstated-but-new-research-tells-a-very-different-story-84201
KFF, “HHS Public Health Policy Actions Under the Trump Administration 2025–2026” (June 30, 2026): https://www.kff.org/other-health/tracking-key-hhs-public-health-policy-actions-under-the-trump-administration/
DOGE Track, “Health and Human Services” (July 4, 2026): https://dogetrack.info/agencies/health/
The Guardian, “CDC Cuts Leave US Less Prepared for Disease Outbreaks” (July 22, 2026): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/22/cdc-cuts-disease-outbreaks-cyclospora-hantavirus-measles
Bloomberg, “New CDC Leaders Vow to Boost Skeleton Staff Left After DOGE Cuts” (June 29, 2026): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-29/new-cdc-leaders-vow-to-boost-skeleton-staff-left-after-doge-cuts
Reuters, “Biotech Experts Want FDA Drug Reviews Based on Science, Not Politics” (July 22, 2026): https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/biotech-experts-want-fda-drug-reviews-based-science-not-politics-2026-07-22/
NOTUS, “The FDA Is Officially Codifying DOGE-Era Changes” (July 28, 2026): https://www.notus.org/agencies/fda-officially-codifying-doge-era-reorgnization-inspectors
U.S. House Oversight Committee, Written Testimony of Dr. Elizabeth Ginexi (June 2026): https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Ginexi-Written-Testimony.pdf
NPR, “Cancer Disparities Researchers Say Federal Funding Changes Have Disrupted Their Work” (July 15, 2026): https://www.npr.org/2026/07/15/nx-s1-5893653/cancer-disparities-gaps-research-funding-grant-disruptions
Medscape, “Science Interrupted: The Lasting Impact of Terminated Grants” (June 29, 2026): https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/science-interrupted-lasting-impact-terminated-grants-2026a1000m1l
Becker’s Hospital Review, “HHS to Stop Funding ‘Dangerous’ Life Sciences Research” (July 28, 2026): https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/legal-regulatory-issues/hhs-to-stop-funding-dangerous-life-sciences-research/
ProPublica (original investigation on NIOSH layoffs, reported via multiple outlets including The Guardian and NPR, July 2026): https://www.propublica.org/
Citizens for the Extension of the James Zadroga Act / Renew 911 Health, “Attempted Cuts to the World Trade Center Health Program” (July 11, 2026): https://www.renew911health.org/attempted-cuts-to-the-staff-of-the-world-trade-center-health-program-and-cuts-to-9-11-cancer-research/
The Bulwark, “Yes, the Cuts to USAID Have Killed” (June 29, 2026): https://www.thebulwark.com/p/yes-the-cuts-to-usaid-have-killed
WNYC / The New Yorker, “How an Estimated 700,000 People Have Died from DOGE’s USAID Cuts” (July 28, 2026): https://wnyc.org/browse/shows/episode/simplecast/47f8ef30-21b4-4b9b-ac25-34194217e1c0
Crosscheck, “Did the USAID Cuts ‘Do Nothing’? Checking Musk’s Claim” (June 30, 2026): https://thecrosscheck.org/factcheck/2026-06-30-usaid-cuts-death-toll-fact-check/
PBS NewsHour / Thirteen, “Former USAID Head Says ‘People Are Dying’ After Dismantling” (July 1, 2026): https://www.thirteen.org/programs/pbs-newshour/cuts-consequences-1782934985/
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