Where this was said
Nicholas Kristof Interview: Elon Musk's USAID Lies
At 1:12:30 · chapter starts 1:11:30
Tommy frames the interview with Musk's own words: his demand that critics 'name one person' who died, his claim that USAID is responsible for COVID and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and his dismissal of humanitarian aid as fraud. Kristof responds with names and specifics from his reporting in South Sudan, Liberia, and Uganda. Peter Dande and Evan Anzu — HIV-positive children kept alive by PEPFAR who died after health workers connecting them to the system were fired. Yama Freeman, a mother who hemorrhaged to death in a hammock carried by village men because DOGE cut the diesel for ambulances the US had already provided. Jabea, a fourth-grade girl ranked third in her class who died of malaria after DOGE eliminated bed nets, fired community health workers, stripped anti-malaria medicine from clinics, and cut ambulance fuel — a sequential cascade of failures each individually preventable for trivial sums. Kristof also describes how the DRC Ebola outbreak — 1,200+ cases, 300+ deaths — grew unchecked because USAID's early-warning networks were defunded. He is precise about limitations: mortality data collection was itself decimated by the cuts, making exact numbers impossible. But he argues the order of magnitude — hundreds of thousands of deaths per year — is fundamentally right.
Approximately 83% of USAID programs were canceled and 94% of staff were laid off as a result of Elon Musk and DOGE's destruction of the agency.
Elon Musk demanded that critics name a single person who died because of DOGE's USAID cuts. Nicholas Kristof names them: Peter Dande, Evan Anzu, HIV-positive children who died after health workers were fired. Yama Freeman, who bled to death because DOGE cut ambulance diesel. Jabea, a 4th-grade girl ranked third in her class who died of malaria after cuts eliminated bed nets, health workers, medicine, and fuel in a cascade of failure.
The PEPFAR program started by President Bush in 2003 has saved 26 million lives, and disruption to it by DOGE funding freezes has caused preventable deaths in children.
The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has produced over 1,200 cases and more than 300 deaths, worsened by the dismantling of USAID's early-warning networks.
