Oh, and also, apparently you can take a chainsaw to the US government and just as quickly fix it again... y'know, like by desperately searching for people you just fired from critical positions because you don't have their contact information:
Quote:
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/26/elon-musk-ebola-prevention-usaid-doge/)
Elon Musk on Wednesday acknowledged that the U.S. DOGE Service “accidentally canceled” efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development to prevent the spread of Ebola — but the billionaire entrepreneur insisted that the initiative was quickly restored.
“We will make mistakes. We won't be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we'll fix it very quickly,” Musk said at a meeting of President Donald Trump's Cabinet officials, defending his group's fast-moving approach to canceling federal programs in a bid for cost savings. “So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately. And there was no interruption.”
Yet current and former USAID officials said that Musk was wrong: USAID's Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved last month to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments, they said. The teams and contractors that would be deployed to fight an Ebola outbreak have been dismantled, they added. While the Trump administration issued a waiver to allow USAID to respond to an Ebola outbreak in Uganda last month, partner organizations were not promptly paid for their work, and USAID's own efforts were sharply curtailed compared to past efforts to fight Ebola outbreaks.
“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on' anything in prevention” of Ebola and other diseases, said Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration and oversaw the agency's response to health-care outbreaks.
Hours after Musk asserted that USAID had restored its Ebola prevention efforts, the agency informed several organizations working with the U.S. government to prevent the spread of the virus overseas that their contracts had been terminated, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. The organizations — which included UNICEF, which had been working with USAID on Ebola prevention in Uganda and other countries — were among thousands of organizations affected by the Trump administration's move to cancel foreign-assistance contracts on Wednesday.
UNICEF did not respond to a request for comment.
Last month's Ebola outbreak has now receded, but some former U.S. officials say that's in part because of past investments in prevention efforts that helped position Uganda to respond — and that other countries remain far more vulnerable.
Bouri said her former USAID team of 60 people working on disease-response had been cut to about six staffers as of earlier this week. She called the recent USAID response to Uganda's Ebola outbreak a “one-off,” far diminished from “the full suite” of activities that the agency historically would mount, such as ramping up efforts to monitor whether the disease had spread to neighboring countries.
“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 said.
Other current and former USAID officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations, agreed with Bouri's assessment.
“There was a waiver for Ebola, but USAID funds have never been back online,” said a current official. “USAID has been frozen: staff and money.”
“If there was a need to respond to Ebola, it would be a disaster assistance response team, or DART,” said one former official. “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.”
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