Trump, Musk and some others are tearing apart the government

The United States Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.) Has Goes Dark: Vaccine Skeptic and Cosmic Censorship Victims of President Donald Trump

The first casualty that we know of is the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D. Musk seems to hold a vendetta against the agency. He has called it a “radical-left political psy op,” a “criminal organization” and a “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” He bragged that he and his allies had spent the weekend feeding the agency into the wood chipper. Musk hates the agency for a number of reasons, including the fact that the U.S.A.I.D. had supported the Black South Africans during and after apartheid.

Musk has seized control of critical levers of power and authority in the federal government, making it likely he will destroy federal agencies at will.

Even if Musk had not been elected, the current state of the executive branch would be considered by many to be one of the most serious examples of corruption in American history.

It is worse than I thought. Last Friday, at the end of a week in which a vaccine skeptic and sometime conspiracy theorist auditioned to lead the country’s nearly $2 trillion, 80,000-person public health apparatus, much of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website went dark — its weekly mortality reports, its data sets, certain guidance for clinicians and patients, all taken offline. C.D.C. researchers were ordered to retract a huge raft of their own, already-submitted research. The website of U.S.A.I.D. was next to go dark after several staff members resisted the takeover by Musk and were put on leave. (When the agency website later popped back online, it featured an announcement that all overseas personnel would be placed on leave and ordered to return.).

The country’s most successful global-health initiative, the PEPFAR program, has been suspended by the new administration. If the pause holds for more than 90 days, over 135,000 more children would be born with H.I.V. because of the program being rendered inoperative by staff cuts.

Between Jan. 6, 2020 and Nov. 5, 2024, many American liberals came to think that the reflexive mobilization against President Trump might have been pointless or even counter-productive, since it happened just after his first victory. It’s hard to see how it is possible to undermine core functions of the state and to downsize the nature and purpose of government power, all while at the same time being compliant with the law.

Maybe two men. The news about the U.S.A.I.D. was not distributed by the president. The case against the agency was mounted on X by Musk, who said that it is time for it to die, and an email that told staff that the headquarters would be closed. The way the attack was conducted and the target served as a wake-up call to know that soft power is not real power, and that only the hard kind truly counted.