Elon Musk’s Reign of Terror Is Only Just Beginning
The decimation of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, is up there, though. People around the world are starving now because of Musk’s cuts. They are dying of disease because of Musk’s cuts. They are being born with diseases they will carry with them for the rest of their lives because of Musk’s cuts. Brown University professor Brooke Nichols has estimated that Musk’s destruction of USAID has already led to 300,000 deaths, the majority of which are children. As The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper noted in his excellent piece on Musk’s legacy, “Roughly 1,500 babies have been born HIV-positive every day since January 21, because Musk cut off their mothers’ medication.”
On a more local level, Musk’s legacy is of extraconstitutional destruction, an irreversible government brain drain, and a spree of massive corruption the scale of which is still unknown: We do not know, for instance, just how much data Musk’s gang of pimple-faced coders stole while they were ransacking federal departments or how much of that data related to Musk’s businesses. The full scale of his cuts to, say, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service are still not fully clear, but they will register every time there is a tornado, a hurricane, or extreme weather of any kind.
So the idea that Musk’s time in Washington is over is an obvious farce. To promulgate this notion is to be either ignorant or nefarious: That narrative goes a long way toward letting Musk and Trump off the hook for a multitude of casualties—those already in the ledger and those to be counted later. It suggests that his reign of terror was actually ineffectual when, in fact, it was massively successful; Trump and Musk destroyed that which they’d planned to all along. Most crucially, it suggests that reign of terror has ended. It hasn’t. The destruction that Musk set in motion remains running in the background as an ambient menace to our safety and livelihoods. Musk’s legacy is still being written, and his culpability is still accumulating. He will do more damage soon, perhaps tomorrow, even though he’s already done more than enough.