"This is a matter of life or death."

Unelected official Elon Musk continues to make waves throughout the federal government and beyond, siccing his menagerie of Gen Z minions on the Census Bureau and US Treasury.

He's also set his sights on the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the $72 billion federal agency responsible for distributing American-funded aid to international communities reeling from the devastation of poverty, malnourishment, disease, and war.

"This is a matter of life or death," Beatriz Grinsztejn, president of the International AIDS Society, told The Guardian after Trump's initial pause of international aid via his January 20 executive order. That pause had already halted supplies to aid groups like Grinsztejn's, which distributes HIV medication and testing supplies to over 20 million people worldwide.

That "pause" is now spinning out into something much more permanent. On Sunday, at least 1,000 USAID employees reported being locked out of the agency's software en masse. Following a day of mass confusion, it emerged that Musk and Trump are working to axe USAID entirely — exacerbating a crisis in aid funding for an already shocked and overwhelmed international relief effort, and creating the ghoulish possibility of mass international deaths as those relying on the aid are forced to do without.

"It’s the richest person in the world taking away from the poorest people in the world," an anonymous USAID official told Politico. "People will die from this — like thousands, if not hundreds of thousands."

In concrete terms, programs in danger include the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), a widely used USAID-funded initiative which tracks food security in dozens of countries throughout the world. The critical tool has already gone offline following Trump's funding freeze, and is unlikely to rebound given the current trajectory of the agency.

USAID is also the functionary that disburses funds to war-torn regions like eastern Ukraine, which received over $16 billion in federal aid in 2023, or other countries where the Pentagon seeks to assert its footprint, such as Afghanistan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and occupied Palestine (though Israel is currently slated to continue receiving military aid from the Trump admin.)

News of Musk's plan to kibosh USAID was shortly followed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio's announcement that the State Department has seized control of the agency — a de facto takeover not unlike those seen in the Treasury Department, Commerce Department, Office of Personnel Management, or Office of Management and Budget.

Together, the moves harken back to Musk's austerity playbook in his business ventures like Twitter: swoop in, clean house, tell the remaining workers to "buckle down," and profit before the previously functional institution crumbles. Only in this case, USAID isn't a social media company or tech startup with deep-pocketed investors, but a humanitarian relief agency with human lives hanging in the balance.

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