Elon Musk’s claim that his Department of Government Efficiency initiative “very quickly” corrected an accidental cancellation of Ebola prevention funding to the U.S. Agency for International Development got a dose of reality Wednesday evening.
The tech billionaire and DOGE head admitted to the snafu during the first cabinet meeting of President Donald Trump’s new administration, where he conceded that his team would make mistakes – and promised to quickly correct them.
“So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention,” Musk said Wednesday. “I think we all want Ebola prevention, so we restored the Ebola prevention immediately.”
But that claim is being roundly disputed by current and former officials inside the agency. Initiatives to combat Ebola and other diseases “have been gutted,” they told The Washington Post.
“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” of Ebola and other diseases, according to Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration.
“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, who oversaw the agency’s response to health care outbreaks, told the Post.
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Other current and former officials also called into question Musk’s assertion Wednesday.
“There was a waiver for Ebola, but USAID funds have never been back online,” one current agency official told the Post. “USAID has been frozen: staff and money.”
A former agency official worried about the lack of readiness if a response happened to be necessary.
“If there was a need to respond to Ebola, it would be a disaster assistance response team, or DART,” the former official is quoted as saying. “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.”
The Trump administration’s recent actions were described as “a double whammy” to global efforts to prevent Ebola, according to Beth Cameron, a senior adviser to the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. She told the publication that the agency’s “critical” purposes to stop outbreaks abroad had been frozen or gutted.