By Matt Novak
Elon Musk appeared at President Donald Trump’s first cabinet meeting of his second term Wednesday to talk about what the billionaire was doing with DOGE, the group that’s currently dismantling the federal government in an illegal powerplay that circumvents Congress. And while Musk repeated a line he’s said previously about how he would inevitably make mistakes while cutting trillions from the budget, there was another moment where he accidentally revealed he’s unilaterally choosing what gets funded or not.
“I should say we will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make mistakes, we’ll fix it very quickly,” Musk said.
The billionaire oligarch then gave his example of a “mistake” that was corrected, which was extremely revealing.
“So for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention,” Musk said. “I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately. And there was no interruption. But we do need to move quickly if we’re to achieve a $1 trillion deficit reduction in financial year 2026.”
Whether he knows it or not, Musk was admitting that he was making the decisions about what should get funding in a completely arbitrary way. While it may seem obvious that Ebola prevention should be funded, he hasn’t been elected or confirmed to make that decision. His mandate from President Trump as a “special government employee” is ostensibly to root out waste, fraud, and abuse. But everything DOGE has presented publicly to cut is just something Musk didn’t like, not something that was an example of waste, fraud, or abuse.
Congress very famously has the power of the purse and created agencies like USAID to distribute foreign aid around the world. And if an unelected billionaire can just come in and decide what gets funded, that’s simply not the legal way of doing it.
What makes Musk’s claims all the more galling is that at least one expert in the field of Ebola says the billionaire isn’t even accurately representing what happened. Craig Spencer, a doctor who works at Brown University School of Public Health and is an Ebola survivor, wrote on X about how Musk wasn’t really telling the truth about what happened now that funds have been drastically cut for public health.
“On January 29, Uganda reported an Ebola outbreak. Normally the U.S. would’ve very quickly sent one of our Ebola experts to help the response. But this time, we didn’t. Because we couldn’t. Because this administration wouldn’t let them go right when this outbreak was declared,” Spencer wrote.
“And normally the U.S. would’ve helped set up border screening and other measures on the ground,” Spencer continued. “But this time, we didn’t. Normally, we would’ve spoke with the WHO about helping end the outbreak. But this time, we didn’t. Because CDC staff weren’t even allowed to talk to them.”
Spencer even says that a colleague in Uganda tried to call the White House about the outbreak and wasn’t able to reach anyone.
“You know who does ‘Ebola prevention’ here in the U.S.? The CDC,” Spencer wrote. “Hundreds of these frontline experts lost their jobs last week as part of indiscriminate ‘cost saving’ firings. More cuts are expected. USAID has long supported Ebola response efforts overseas. Not no more.”
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