Elon Musk has spent recent days insisting that nobody has died from the destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the foreign aid agency that was unlawfully abolished with Musk’s help at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term.
“If cutting USAID killed a child… A single child. It would be covered by the Media like the biggest story in history,” one Musk fan wrote Monday on X.
“Exactly,” Musk wrote in a quote tweet Tuesday, endorsing the message.
The trillionaire oligarch even insisted that USAID is the one that’s killed people, retweeting a conspiracy theory from Rand Paul that Anthony Fauci was to blame for the covid-19 pandemic because federal funds were being used to conduct gain of function research.
“USAID money killed millions,” Musk wrote Tuesday.. Admittedly, U.S. intelligence agencies now endorse the idea that covid-19 escaped from a lab, but that only happened after President Trump took office for a second time. Before Trump took control, intel agencies were largely skeptical of the idea.
Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency took a chainsaw to the federal government last year, with the Tesla CEO bragging on Feb. 3, 2025 that, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” And researchers have been tallying the death toll ever since.
It’s particularly interesting that Musk keeps saying that his role in dismantling USAID would be huge news if someone actually died. Because we have so many news stories about those deaths.
- Children die after USAID funding cuts end lifeline for displaced communities fleeing violence – PBS Newshour (May 16, 2025)
- Doge cuts to USAid blamed for 300,000 deaths — most of them children – The Times (May 30, 2025)
- Trump’s Most Lethal Policy – New York Times (Sept. 20, 2025)
- Trump’s USAID pause stranded lifesaving drugs. Children died waiting. – Washington Post (Sept. 30, 2025)
- U.S. aid cuts are being felt across Africa. Here’s where. – Washington Post (Oct. 9, 2025)
- In Afghanistan, a Trail of Hunger and Death Behind U.S. Aid Cuts – New York Times (Feb. 4, 2026)
And that’s just a small sample of the journalism that’s documented the devastation. These stories typically explain how people have already died, but the big takeaway from all of them is that these cuts will be felt for generations.
There’s also the online tracker started by researcher at Boston University, which estimated more than 750,000 people have died from the cuts. And many studies that explain how the death toll will be in the millions by the end of this decade.
Children are starving and people around the world are going without medical care that was being provided by USAID. People are dying as result of Musk’s action. And to deny this fact is to deny reality.
USAID didn’t just provide aid, it was monitoring issues on the ground like child health and mortality, maternal issues, and reproductive health statistics, as the New York Times explained in Feb. 2025, at the start of USAID’s destruction. Now that USAID has been fed “into the wood chipper,” it’s become harder to even get an accurate picture of how many people are dying.
The entire situation has echoes of what President Trump said during the early days of covid-19. If you don’t test for the disease, you can pretend like it’s not there. And Musk will likely rely on that strategy in the years ahead to deny his role in the deaths of millions of people.
his excuse is they wouldn’t put the starving children on the phone with him.
— Razzball (@razzball.bsky.social) June 23, 2026 at 10:59 AM
Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, recently cited a 2025 study published in the Lancet that said cuts to USAID will contribute to the deaths of about 4.5 million children by 2030. During a recent podcast, Khanna said that Musk “needs to answer” for the “4.5 million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling USAID.” Musk responded to Khanna by tweeting that it’s “Time to sue this liar.”
No lawsuit has been file thus far, but Musk is a fan of filing nuisance lawsuits, as OpenAI will attest. And since he’s now a trillionaire, he can afford the best lawyers in the world to annoy his critics and drain them of resources.
