On Feb. 7, federal courts stalled Elon Musk’s plans to drastically slash staffing levels at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). This order was allegedly the result of an “audit” by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the new government body that Musk leads with President Trump’s blessing. In fact, it was part of a premeditated murder of a critical agency, or as Musk himself put it on his social media platform X, “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

I worked for eight years in humanitarian and development organizations funded by USAID in eastern Ukraine. I came away deeply impressed with how much USAID funding can accomplish, and also with how much better it could work.

As a contractor, I encountered sharp and demanding USAID professionals who expertly guided our work, and also unmotivated desk jockeys. (I’m sure they would have said the same of our organizations). Sometimes the process to use taxpayer money was so tangled in rules it seemed like a dead end, but if you learned to navigate these rules  you could create real change in people’s lives.

So I was not initially hostile to the idea of a sharp-penciled and fair audit of USAID’s efficiency. But it immediately became clear that Musk had something else in mind. He did not conceal his snarling hostility to the agency, calling it a “criminal organization” whose “time had come to die.” He utterly disregarded USAID’s central role in global public health and humanitarian relief, ordering a funding freeze that forced African clinics to send their staff home and left patients across the developing world stranded in the middle of medical trials that require careful monitoring for side effects.

He then began scouring the agency’s vast budget with his DOGE team. They insisted they were looking for waste, fraud and even corruption, but they only provide the public with hostile fragments of information that are impossible to vet or place in context. Musk placed a gag order on USAID employees, preventing them from responding to his loaded accusations.

Some of the expenditures DOGE has uncovered are indeed eyebrow-raising, though Musk provides no context to understand their importance in the agency’s $40 billion budget. But some of his “discoveries” are either misinterpreted or outright fakes.

President Trump claimed that Musk’s audit revealed “$50 million for condoms to Gaza.” Numerous media outlets vetted this claim and found no evidence. It is possible Musk and Trump confused the Gaza Strip in Palestine with Gaza Province in Mozambique, where USAID supports a successful AIDS prevention program.

The president and many conservative commentators seized on a DOGE allegation that USAID gave the political journal Politico $8 million in 2023 and 2024, claiming it was proof that the agency laundered funds to buy off media. But in fact the agency provided just $44,000 to the journal for subscriptions, while most of the remaining sum was spent elsewhere in the government to purchase Politico’s legislative analysis services. We can debate whether this expenditure was fully justified, but the accusation of USAID buying media is flatly untrue.

Furthermore, Musk himself shared on Twitter a fake video (potentially produced by Russia) alleging that USAID paid Hollywood stars millions of dollars to visit President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. As someone whose professional and personal life has been so entangled with Ukraine’s existential struggle with Russia, I find this disinformation particularly vile.

Using this information barrage, Musk has built a case for his blitz closure of USAID and massive reduction of its workforce. Clearly it did not convince the federal judge who put a freeze on his plans. But the case is making the rounds of social media, including X, where Musk has control of the algorithm for spreading information.

Musk could have gathered his dossier of alleged fraud and misuse of funds and presented it to Congress, where hearings could have been organized with USAID and its contractors to get to the bottom of the allegations. The fact that he moved to basically abolish the agency before any such hearings raises the question: why not practice true transparency? Why avoid genuine vetting and fact checking?

I remain in contact with former colleagues in the humanitarian sector. They describe mass layoffs and resignations that will be difficult to quickly reverse. While Secretary of State Marco Rubio thankfully approved shipment of nearly half a billion dollars of food aid that was already planned for donation, numerous humanitarian and public health programs remain stalled.

If President Trump and Musk do not soon change their minds about “SHUTTING IT DOWN” (to quote Trump’s latest post) or if legal challenges don’t force them to, the impact will be measured in thousands of lives.

This is not efficiency. It is nihilism.