Elon Musk’s war on USAID is a war on reality

 On January 29, President Donald Trump celebrated the latest victory in unelected billionaire Elon Musk’s crusade against “inefficiency” in the government: stopping $50 million from, according to Trump, “being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.” Fact-checkers diplomatically pointed out that no evidence exists for this claim, which, if it were true, would work out to 1.5 billion condoms for some 2.1 million Gazans. They also noted that for several years, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides food, medical care, and humanitarian aid abroad, had not sent any condoms anywhere in the Middle East.

In a press conference on Tuesday, Musk appeared to concede that this might have been a mistake. (One theory: He got confused by the fact that the U.S. government funds disease prevention in Gaza Province, Mozambique.) But the “condoms for Hamas” story took on a life of its own on X, the social media platform Musk bought in 2022, where the outraged blue-check accounts that dominate feeds and replies treated it as incontrovertible proof of the righteousness of Muck’s mission. “Tip of the iceberg,” Musk wrote on January 28, quoting an account called Autism Capital, which had shared a clip of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt making the condoms claim. As of this writing, the Autism Capital tweet has been viewed 54 million times; Musk’s retweet is not far behind, at 47 million.

In the weeks since, Musk has been working diligently to dismantle USAID, which he has described as a “criminal organization” that needs to “die.” Under his direction, the agency was gutted by a rapid-fire series of furloughs, firings, and spending freezes intended to reduce staffing by roughly 95%. Some smaller organizations that received USAID funding were forced to fold immediately; other luckier ones are scrambling to figure out what they will do if they exhaust their cash reserves sometime in the next few months. 

A federal judge temporarily blocked parts of these orders from taking effect, but on Monday morning, staffers still found themselves locked out of their offices and were instructed to telework until further notice. In the meantime, USAID-funded soup kitchens in famine-stricken areas have already closed, and refugee hospitals are turning patients away; in Uganda, workers said that dozens of newborns were contracting HIV daily after funding for antiretroviral drugs disappeared. Even if some federal judge eventually rescues USAID from Musk’s clammy grasp, people will suffer and die because Trump turned the government over to a Big Tech reactionary who believes that money spent on poor people is money wasted.

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk tweeted on the evening of Sunday, February 2. “Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

Musk’s war on USAID is the fullest realization yet of his efforts to turn X into a Musk-inflected agitprop factory. By replacing the legacy Twitter verification system with one that makes algorithmic boosts freely available for purchase, Musk created an environment in which anyone with a paid account can turn their favorite conspiracy theory into a trending topic. When Musk, as he so often does, weighs in on a post that catches his attention, his cosign amplifies it to his more than 200 million followers, who read, digest, and repeat it to the point where it might work its way to the top of the trending-topics page again. It is an unprecedented level of being Too Online: Musk is both driven by news cycles on X and driving news cycles on X all by himself.

Before the election, the byproduct of this dynamic was typically just an unfunny tweet with the cry-laughing emoji appended. Now, with Trump in the White House and apparently happy to serve out his term getting puppeteered by the world’s richest man, the stakes are considerably higher: If a stupid viral tweet about condoms sufficiently piques his interest, Musk has the power to ruin lives overnight. 

As the Washington Post reports, Musk’s obsession with USAID appears to originate from Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official who, prior to his stints in government, seems to have moonlit as a pseudonymous alt-right streamer warning of the looming dangers of “white genocide.” Benz’s thesis, as outlined in a blizzard of color-coded tweets and hours-long videos that make the Pepe Silvia guy look like the paragon of rational thinking, is that USAID is a front group for American intelligence involved in mass censorship, leftist indoctrination, and/or clandestine anti-Trump machinations executed by shadowy figures at the highest levels of government. 

Most of Musk’s anti-USAID tweets in recent weeks, according to NBC News, are interactions with Benz and other blue-check X accounts pushing the same narrative. (Among them: a clip from Benz’s December appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.) Musk’s triumphant “wood chipper” tweet, for example, quoted a tweet from Benz that called USAID “the Terror Titanic,” which in turn quoted a tweet from Milo Yiannopoulos that described USAID as “the most gigantic global terror organization in history.”

There is a simple moral argument for one of the world’s wealthiest countries spending a fraction of its annual budget to fight starvation and epidemic and poverty abroad, especially when its annual military spending—the same military that drops bombs on other countries whenever U.S. politicians deem that particular form of intervention more useful—is more than $800 billion, or roughly 20 times the $40 billion budget of USAID. But you do not have to buy this argument to understand how USAID’s work benefits the economy, or national security, or whatever else you might include in a term as nebulous as “American interests.” The reason Congress created and continues to fund USAID is to strategically build soft power and goodwill; that this often takes the form of providing badly needed (and relatively inexpensive) humanitarian aid is mostly a happy coincidence. When a country is still struggling to address, say, chronic food shortages or an antibiotic-resistant strain of tuberculosis, planning ambitious new ventures with U.S. businesses probably won’t be at the tippy-top of its priority list.

Musk’s purported interest in government “efficiency” has always been about accumulating power, and his decision to single out USAID is unsubtle even by his standards. He is implementing a farcically literal version of “America First,” eager to cut off people whose lives, in his opinion, are not worth the trouble of improving, let alone saving from preventable death.

In some ways, the Musk-USAID odyssey follows a familiar pattern: conspiracy theories bubbling up from the murkiest depths of the right-wing media ecosystem, which tweaks, launders, and repackages stories to the point where they’re coherent enough for the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal, the front page of Drudge, and/or the A-block on Fox & Friends. During the first Trump administration, there was no better way to track the president’s official position on pretty much any issue of substance by reviewing whatever Steve Doocy and Ainsley Earhardt had spent the morning gabbing about. 

Eight years later, however, stories no longer need to appear in a Murdoch-owned media property to rocket to the top of the White House agenda. If you are a conservative activist who wants to influence the trajectory of American politics—or, for that matter, if you are a member of a foreign intelligence agency looking to do the same—the single smartest investment you can make is a monthly subscription for an X account that earns a coveted “Wow!” reply from Musk. Or, even better, “Looking into this.”

The proliferation of fringe views on X aligns nicely with Musk’s policy preferences. But it is also good for the long-term viability of the X platform, which Musk frames as a tool for “citizen” journalists to report on stories that the traditional news media fails to cover accurately, thoroughly, or both. Musk often exhorts X users to remember they “are the media now”—and of the four X accounts NBC News identifies as peddling anti-USAID content boosted by Musk, one promises “unfiltered breaking news,” and another claims to be a “citizen journalist.” Omitted from Musk’s rhetoric is the simple fact that X does not subject content to a meaningful vetting process; in practice, “citizenship journalism” is a euphemism for empowering anyone to label anything as “news” and trust the algorithm to make it so, no matter how disconnected from reality it may be.

When Musk calls X the “future” of journalism, he isn’t saying he wants people on X to report on the shuttering of USAID or the deaths of the people it serves. He wants people on X to drown out the journalists who report these things. For people steeped in the closed, pay-to-play universe he’s built, whatever is happening on X is the story. If it isn’t happening on X, is it even happening in the first place?

“Nobody’s going to bat a thousand,” Musk said in his White House press conference after a reporter asked about the condom falsehood. “We will make mistakes, but we’ll act quickly to correct any mistakes.” Shortly thereafter, he tweeted a clip of himself speaking at the press conference, along with the caption, “$50M of condoms is a LOT of condoms.” It has 59 million views and counting.

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