{"id":9923,"date":"2025-02-27T11:18:11","date_gmt":"2025-02-27T03:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tingchao.xyz\/?p=9923"},"modified":"2025-02-27T11:18:13","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T03:18:13","slug":"musk-claims-doge-restored-ebola-prevention-effort-officials-disagree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tingchao.xyz\/?p=9923","title":{"rendered":"Musk claims DOGE \u2018restored\u2019 Ebola prevention effort. Officials disagree."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Musk claims DOGE \u2018restored\u2019 Ebola prevention effort. Officials disagree.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Elon Musk on Wednesday acknowledged that the U.S. DOGE Service \u201caccidentally canceled\u201d efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development to prevent the spread of Ebola \u2014 but the billionaire entrepreneur insisted that the initiative was quickly restored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe will make mistakes. We won\u2019t be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we\u2019ll fix it very quickly,\u201d Musk said at a meeting of President Donald Trump\u2019s Cabinet officials, defending his group\u2019s fast-moving approach to canceling federal programs in a bid for cost savings. \u201cSo we restored the Ebola prevention immediately. And there was no interruption.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet current and former USAID officials said that Musk was wrong: USAID\u2019s 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\u2019s own efforts were sharply curtailed compared to past efforts to fight Ebola outbreaks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere have been no efforts to \u2018turn on\u2019 anything in prevention\u201d of Ebola and other diseases, said Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration and oversaw the agency\u2019s response to health-care outbreaks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last month\u2019s Ebola outbreak has now receded, but some former U.S. officials say that\u2019s in part because of past investments in prevention efforts that helped position Uganda to respond \u2014 and that other countries remain far more vulnerable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s Ebola outbreak a \u201cone-off,\u201d far diminished from \u201cthe full suite\u201d of activities that the agency historically would mount, such as ramping up efforts to monitor whether the disease had spread to neighboring countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe full spectrum \u2014 the investments in disease surveillance, the investments in what we mobilize \u2026 moving commodities, supporting lab workers \u2014 that capacity is now a tenth of what it was,\u201d Bouri said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other current and former USAID officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal operations, agreed with Bouri\u2019s assessment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere was a waiver for Ebola, but USAID funds have never been back online,\u201d said a current official. \u201cUSAID has been frozen: \\staff and money.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf there was a need to respond to Ebola, it would be a disaster assistance response team, or DART,\u201d said one former official. \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The White House declined to comment on whether USAID\u2019s Ebola-response efforts had been fully restored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cUganda\u2019s 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,\u201d an administration official said in a statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s \u201cmove fast and break things\u201d approach<\/a>. A federal judge has repeatedly told the Trump administration<\/a> to restore USAID funds,<\/strong> setting a deadline of Wednesday night to get money out the door again. Some Trump political officials have also grown weary<\/a> of DOGE\u2019s approach, saying that the group\u2019s moves have created additional headaches for Cabinet departments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk has defended his team\u2019s approach as a necessary strategy to overcome bureaucratic inertia and cut government spending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe do need to move quickly if we are to achieve a trillion-dollar deficit reduction in financial year 2026,\u201d Musk said Wednesday, as the entrepreneur addressed agency leaders. But he also acknowledged the need to preserve ongoing public health efforts. \u201cI think we all want Ebola prevention,\u201d Musk said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a> to the United States. Symptoms and complications in survivors can also linger for months<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>. They also warned that the Trump administration is broadly weakening<\/a> the nation\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cU.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,\u201d said Paul Friedrichs, who oversaw the Biden administration\u2019s pandemic-preparedness efforts. \u201cThey also benefit people worldwide by reducing the risk of spread of a lethal disease like Ebola.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beth Cameron, a senior adviser to the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, described the Trump administration\u2019s recent actions as \u201ca double whammy\u201d to global efforts to prevent Ebola, saying that USAID\u2019s \u201ccritical\u201d functions to stop outbreaks abroad had been frozen or gutted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe 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,\u201d said Cameron, who worked on biosecurity efforts in the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. \u201cAnd we have a response that is, at best, less efficient, because the implementers are not able to get reliably paid.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw USAID\u2019s Ebola prevention efforts during the Obama administration, said he interpreted Musk\u2019s comments and the administration\u2019s recent Ebola efforts in the context of mounting criticism that DOGE had moved too quickly to cut public health efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ebola response mounted by the Trump administration in Uganda was \u201cmore symbolic than substantive,\u201d Konyndyk said. \u201cThey know there\u2019s a political vulnerability.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elon Musk on Wednesday acknowledged that the U.S. DOGE Service \u201caccidentally canceled\u201d efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development to prevent the spread of Ebola \u2014 but the billionaire entrepreneur insisted that the initiative was quickly restored. \u201cWe will make mistakes. We won\u2019t be perfect. But when we make a mistake, we\u2019ll fix it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":9924,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[2872,2603,3139],"class_list":["post-9923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-usa","tag-doge","tag-musk","tag-restored"],"yoast_head":"\nMusk claims DOGE \u2018restored\u2019 Ebola prevention effort. 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