Elon Musk and Dzaleka Refugee Camp in Dowa, central MalawiMother Jones illustration; Michel Euler/AP; Amos Gumulira/AFP/Getty

Elon Musk is trying to rewrite the history of his four-month tenure in Washington. As the billionaire founder of Tesla and Space X returns to the private sector after four months as a “special government employee,” he has put aside the celebratory chainsaw and cast himself as a misunderstood outsider whose dreams of efficiency were stymied by a terminally broken bureaucracy. 

Nowhere is this attempted whitewashing more jarring than his effort to sweep away the consequences of the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, which has supported food assistance programs around the world and helped administer the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. Musk once bragged about feeding USAID into a “woodchipper.” But, on May 20, when Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain asked about the disruption of PEPFAR funding in an interview in Qatar, the tech executive dismissed the claim out of hand. 

“First of all, the program, the AIDS medication program is continuing,” he said. “So your fundamental premise is wrong. Do you have another example, since the one you cited is false?”

As Husain pressed on, explaining that the State Department—which is absorbing what’s left of USAID—had granted a waiver only to certain PEPFAR programs, Musk repeated his denial. 

“It’s false, it’s false,” he said. Before Husain moved on, Musk made a promise: “Okay well which ones aren’t being funded? I’ll fix it right now.”

But it was not false. And Musk did not fix it.

Despite his assurances on stage—and his subsequent assertion in response to the rocker Bono that “zero people have died” as a result of funding cuts—the destruction he spearheaded is continuing to have devastating effects in places that relied on USAID for lifesaving aid. But don’t take my word for it; take the Trump administration’s. State Department cables obtained by Mother Jones warn that cuts to foreign assistance programs are driving hunger and human trafficking in Malawi, and threatening to undo years of progress battling the AIDS epidemic in Lesotho, by terminating a program that worked to prevent HIV transmission from mothers to their children. 

These are just two examples, based on internal records. But the consequences of slashed or interrupted services have been severe and wide-ranging. The US has cut programs for malaria. At a hearing on Capitol Hill last month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio celebrated cutting “$10 million for male circumcision in Mozambique”—a PEPFAR-supported program that reduced HIV transmission in 2.5 million men by 60 percent. The assertion that people will you die if you........

© Mother Jones