Tech billionaire Elon Musk is facing criticism over foreign aid cuts that, according to a journalist, have already led to fatalities. The cuts, part of an initiative spearheaded by President Donald Trump, have triggered global concern about their impact on vulnerable populations.
When Trump took office, he established the “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)” through an executive order, appointing Musk to oversee the effort. The department has been responsible for eliminating government programs, freezing grants, shutting down websites, and laying off employees, all under the promise of saving taxpayers trillions.
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Musk, however, has dismissed concerns that the abrupt cuts have had deadly consequences. Responding to criticism on his social media platform, X, wrote, “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding. No one.”
New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof, who recently visited South Sudan and Nairobi, Kenya, offered a starkly different perspective. Appearing on MSNBC, Kristof discussed his report detailing the dire consequences of the funding reductions. According to him, people have already lost their lives due to the policy shift.
“It’s great that a judge has restored email access to USAID employees who were put on administrative leave, but that isn’t enough,” Kristof said. He emphasized that reinstating email access does not undo the cancellations of crucial programs that were actively saving lives.
“At the end of the day, kids in places like South Sudan are still dying, still not getting their nutritional support,” he warned. Kristof recounted a visit to a maternity clinic in Sudan, where healthcare services for expectant mothers had been a rare resource. As he spoke with patients, they mistakenly assumed he was responsible for the clinic’s existence.
“Everybody is thanking me. They’re thanking America for its generosity. They’re saying that women are safe here now. A woman who was then in labor wants to name her baby after me,” he said. However, the clinic was on the brink of closure due to the Trump administration’s cuts.
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“Those women, again, are going to be bleeding to death in the dust there,” he told MSNBC. “When you see in front of you these pregnant women who were now going to be left to die in childbirth, it just breaks your heart.”
Kristof highlighted how Americans celebrate the heroism of a firefighter rescuing a child but often overlook the larger-scale impact of U.S. humanitarian aid. “American taxpayers have been doing that on a huge scale with USAID,” he noted. “And this was a kind of heroic thing that the U.S. had done. But that just ended in January.”
As the debate over the foreign aid cuts continues, Musk and the Trump-aligned DOGE initiative remain at the center of controversy over the future of U.S. humanitarian assistance.
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