Did you know that Truthout is a nonprofit and independently funded by readers like you? If you value what we do, please support our work with a donation.

Elon Musk has shared that he got “carried away” during his time heading the supposed “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, in the early months of the second Donald Trump term — with the billionaire seeming to express only mild regret for the sweeping, illegal government cuts that are slated to kill millions of people across the world over the coming years.

“I think I got a little too involved in politics, got carried away, frankly,” Musk said in an interview with The Economist last week, when asked about DOGE.

He said that the goal of DOGE was to address the federal deficit, “where the interest payments exceed the amount of money spent on the Department of War.” But, despite saying that he went too far, he still suggested that further cuts are needed.

The sweeping cuts enacted by DOGE cost over 260,000 federal workers their jobs, reports have found, and countless more due to slashes to scientific research funded by the government. The cruelest cuts, however, came in the form of the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The agency — though it’s been criticized as an arm of U.S. imperialism — funded humanitarian efforts to provide food, shelter, and education to tens of millions of people abroad. Estimates by experts have found that these cuts are leading to the early deaths of thousands of people a day; some have estimated that they’ve killed over 700,000 people so far.

Oil and Gas Experts in State Department Fired in DOGE Efforts Prior to Iran War

Research last year published in The Lancet found that, by 2030, the DOGE cuts could cause over 14 million preventable deaths, including 4.5 million children and babies under 5. People in affected........

© Truthout