Elon Musk on Wednesday acknowledged that the U.S. DOGE Service “accidentally canceled” efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development to prevent the spread of Ebola — but the billionaire entrepreneur insisted that the initiative was quickly restored.
“We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly,” Musk said at a meeting of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet officials, defending his group’s fast-moving approach to canceling federal programs in a bid for cost savings. “So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately. And there was no interruption.”
Yet current and former USAID officials said that Musk was wrong: USAID’s Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved last month to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments, they said. The teams and contractors that would be deployed to fight an Ebola outbreak have been dismantled, they added. While the Trump administration issued a waiver to allow USAID to respond to an Ebola outbreak in Uganda last month, partner organizations were not promptly paid for their work, and USAID’s own efforts were sharply curtailed compared to past efforts to fight Ebola outbreaks.
“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” of Ebola and other diseases, said Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration and oversaw the agency’s response to health-care outbreaks.
Last month’s Ebola outbreak has now receded, but some former U.S. officials say that’s in part because of past investments in prevention efforts that helped position Uganda to respond — and that other countries remain far more vulnerable.
Bouri said her former USAID team of 60 people working on disease-response had been cut to about six staffers as of earlier this week. She called the recent USAID response to Uganda’s Ebola outbreak a “one-off,” far diminished from “the full suite” of activities that the agency historically would mount, such as ramping up efforts to monitor whether the disease had spread to neighboring countries.
“The full spectrum — the investments in disease surveillance, the investments in what we mobilize … moving commodities, supporting lab workers — that capacity is now a tenth of what it was,” Bouri said.
Other current and former USAID officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations, agreed with Bouri’s assessment.
“There was a waiver for Ebola, but USAID funds have never been back online,” said a current official. “USAID has been frozen: \staff and money.”
“If there was a need to respond to Ebola, it would be a disaster assistance response team, or DART,” said one former official. “There is no longer a capability to send a DART or support one from Washington. Many of those people are contractors who were let go at the very beginning.”
The White House declined to comment on whether USAID’s Ebola-response efforts had been fully restored.
“Uganda’s Ebola outbreak occurred on the same day as the foreign aid freeze. Despite that, the waiver for assistance in addressing the outbreak was quickly reinstated,” an administration official said in a statement.
The dustup over Ebola prevention represents the latest flash point as Democrats, current and former federal officials and others warn of the harms of DOGE’s “move fast and break things” approach. A federal judge has repeatedly told the Trump administration to restore USAID funds, setting a deadline of Wednesday night to get money out the door again. Some Trump political officials have also grown weary of DOGE’s approach, saying that the group’s moves have created additional headaches for Cabinet departments.
Musk has defended his team’s approach as a necessary strategy to overcome bureaucratic inertia and cut government spending.
“We do need to move quickly if we are to achieve a trillion-dollar deficit reduction in financial year 2026,” Musk said Wednesday, as the entrepreneur addressed agency leaders. But he also acknowledged the need to preserve ongoing public health efforts. “I think we all want Ebola prevention,” Musk said.
Ebola is a severe and often fatal virus that can cause fever, vomiting and internal and external bleeding, alarming global health leaders who have worked to contain several recent outbreaks. More than 11,000 people died in an Ebola epidemic in West Africa that began in 2014 and eventually spread to the United States. Symptoms and complications in survivors can also linger for months.
Public health experts said that there are risks in moving too quickly to dismantle the federal teams and programs fighting disease around the world, citing a mystery illness that has killed more than 50 people and is currently spreading in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They also warned that the Trump administration is broadly weakening the nation’s public health infrastructure domestically as well, citing initiatives that target funds and programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and other health agencies.
“U.S. investments in foreign aid, CDC surveillance and global health programs and in NIH-funded research are the front-line defense for the American public,” said Paul Friedrichs, who oversaw the Biden administration’s pandemic-preparedness efforts. “They also benefit people worldwide by reducing the risk of spread of a lethal disease like Ebola.”
Beth Cameron, a senior adviser to the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, described the Trump administration’s recent actions as “a double whammy” to global efforts to prevent Ebola, saying that USAID’s “critical” functions to stop outbreaks abroad had been frozen or gutted.
“We have the programs and the people who were working on Ebola and other deadly-disease prevention capacity in other countries not able to do their jobs because their work is frozen, and many of the people have been put on administrative leave,” said Cameron, who worked on biosecurity efforts in the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. “And we have a response that is, at best, less efficient, because the implementers are not able to get reliably paid.”
Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw USAID’s Ebola prevention efforts during the Obama administration, said he interpreted Musk’s comments and the administration’s recent Ebola efforts in the context of mounting criticism that DOGE had moved too quickly to cut public health efforts.
The Ebola response mounted by the Trump administration in Uganda was “more symbolic than substantive,” Konyndyk said. “They know there’s a political vulnerability.”
