Elon Musk Called Out for Glaring Lie in His Weak DOGE Defense

During the first meeting of White House Cabinet officials, Elon Musk admitted that the Department of Government Efficiency cut to Ebola prevention programs was a mistake that would be reversed—but federal officials say the money still isn’t flowing in yet.

“We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly,” Musk, a Trump-appointed special government employee, said Wednesday in defense of his group’s haphazard cuts while looming over the Cabinet table. “So for example with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled—very briefly—was Ebola prevention.

“So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately. And there was no interruption,” the world’s richest man added.

But federal officials have said there was nothing brief about the cut, which involved hacking away at several arms of the federal government’s disease response, and which has apparently still not been reversed.

“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” when it comes to Ebola or other diseases, former U.S. Agency for International Development official Nidhi Bouri told The Washington Post Thursday.

Earlier this month, news of an Ebola outbreak in Kampala, Uganda, was reported via a USAID mission, just prior to the seismic cuts. Public health experts have argued that choosing to nix the agency would force the U.S. into an information dark age that could see the country caught off guard in future health crises.

Other public health officials were more blunt, arguing that Musk was flat-out lying in telling Americans that the nation’s disease prevention programs had been restored.

“This is bunk from Elon,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former USAID official who led the agency’s Ebola response during a 2014–2015 outbreak in West Africa. “They have laid off most of the experts, they’re bankrupting most of the partner orgs, have withdrawn from WHO, and muzzled CDC.

“What’s left is a fig-leaf effort to cover their asses politically,” Konyndyk continued.

Konyndyk noted that before the Trump administration’s cuts, there would have been a robust interagency and international response to an Ebola outbreak that would have included resources pushed to the host government, a coalition of teams deployed to the region by USAID, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Defense Department, as well as real-time cooperation and data sharing with the World Health Organization.

“But not this time,” Konyndyk wrote. “Most experts and operations staff at USAID have been pushed out … USAID’s capacity to deploy response teams is totally broken.

“Bottom line: Elon’s vendetta against USAID and the federal workforce is shredding all of the systems that the USG has built up to protect the US homeland against global outbreak risks,” Konyndyk added. “Scrambling to recall a few staff and issue some belated funding is just window dressing.”

Chief Justice John Roberts stepped in at the last minute to save Donald Trump from being forced to unfreeze $2 billion in foreign aid payments that he paused upon entering office.

Roberts issued an administrative stay on the order after lawyers for the president rushed to the Supreme Court Wednesday, desperate to subvert the decision from U.S. District Judge Amir Ali. Ali had ordered Tuesday that money for lifesaving humanitarian assistance should continue to flow to the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development while he considered the legality of Trump’s funding freeze. 

When Trump failed to respond, Ali imposed a deadline for Trump to pay up, which would have been at 11:59 p.m. Wednesday. The Trump administration claimed it would take “multiple weeks” to satisfy the judge’s request.

The newest order from Roberts supplies the highest court in the land with more time to review the arguments in the case, and aid organizations challenging Trump’s disastrous freeze have until Friday to file their responses. It’s likely that the order will stay in effect into next week. 

Trump’s efforts to gut USAID have threatened the delivery of therapeutic food assistance to nearly 400,000 severely malnourished children abroad.

Roberts’s order is the first time the Supreme Court has responded to Trump’s flurry of legislative activity and the torrent of legal challenges it has produced. There is currently another pending Trump-related case in the Supreme Court, concerning his ousting of leadership at the Office of Special Counsel.

Earlier this year, Roberts found himself behind the steering wheel of the most conservative court in a century for the decision in Trump’s presidential immunity case. The Supreme Court’s ruling in that case single-handedly opened the door for Trump’s return to the White House and cemented this court’s conservative lean for decades to come.  

In his year-end report, Roberts echoed Trump, warning that criticism of the court constituted “illegitimate activity” that undermines independent judges—meanwhile making way for Trump and Elon Musk to challenge and in some cases openly defy the rulings of federal courts.

Trump continues to break one of his biggest promises—one that deeply impacts many of his own supporters.

The second round of aggressive Department of Government Efficiency cuts includes a massive downsizing of the Social Security Administration, which has been ordered to cut its staff in half, according to The Washington Post.

Earlier this month, President Trump promised that “Social Security won’t be touched, other than if there’s fraud or something. It’s going to be strengthened. Medicare, Medicaid—none of that stuff is going to be touched.” But last week, he endorsed House Republicans’ budget plan, which is expected to make an $880 billion cut to Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.

Now, DOGE is cutting the Social Security Administration in half with glee, which will certainly have an impact on benefits for millions of Americans.

This is the newest wave of DOGE’s purge.

Multiple vaccine projects have been paused by the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

Kennedy paused a multimillion-dollar project to create a new Covid-19 vaccine in pill form on Tuesday, and the Food and Drug Administration canceled an advisory committee meeting on updating next season’s flu vaccine, an advisory committee said Wednesday. 

The Covid project was a $460 million contract with Vaxart to develop a new Covid vaccine in pill form, with 10,000 people scheduled to begin clinical trials on Monday. Of that, $240 million was reportedly already authorized for the preliminary study.

“While it is crucial that the Department [of] Health and Human Services support pandemic preparedness, four years of the Biden administration’s failed oversight have made it necessary to review agreements for vaccine production, including Vaxart’s,” Kennedy said, according to Fox News.

“I look forward to working with Vaxart and medical experts to ensure this work produces safe, effective, and fiscal-minded vaccine technology,” Kennedy added. 

Meanwhile, the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, or VRBPAC, was scheduled to meet in March to discuss the strains that would be included in next season’s flu shot, but federal officials told the committee in an email Wednesday that the meeting was canceled, said committee member Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Offit told NBC News that no explanation was given for the cancellation of the yearly spring meeting, which comes in the middle of a flu season in which 86 children and 19,000 adults have died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In an email to NBC, Norman Baylor, a former director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccine Research and Review, said, “I’m quite shocked. As you know, the VRBPAC is critical for making the decision on strain selection for the next influenza vaccine season.” Last week, an upcoming CDC vaccine advisory committee meeting was also postponed.  

These moves send a disturbing message that Kennedy’s anti-vaccine views are starting to influence health policy. On Wednesday, the secretary already had an alarming, nonchalant response to the first American measles death in a decade. Now it seems American public health efforts could experience a serious setback as long as President Trump and Kennedy are in government.

Manoshpere bigot Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan—who still face rape and human trafficking charges in Romania, among others—are on their way to the United States after the Trump administration strong-armed Romania into lifting travel restrictions.

The Tate brothers have been ardent Trump supporters for years, and it seems to have paid off. A Trump official mentioned the Tates in a call with Romania earlier this month, according to the Financial Times. Trump’s special envoy Ric Grenell brought up the brothers again to Romania’s foreign minister on his trip to Munich.

Now, the brothers—who are both dual British-American citizens—are on a plane to Florida, according to their lawyer Ioan Gliga.

The Tates will likely then have a bunch of photo ops with some of the worst people Washington, D.C., has to offer.

“I have never heard of a foreign government asking Romania to lift preventive measures to allow some suspects to leave the country,” foreign Romanian Judge Cristi Danilet told the Associated Press. “If I had been a judge, this would not have happened. If it is true, it means that there is no more rule of law and sovereign countries.”

Tate, a self-professed anti-feminist, has maintained his innocence.