Elon Musk and the death count from USAID cuts

When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was at the height of its powers, around February 2025, the world’s richest man shared on social media that he had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which provides humanitarian and economic assistance around the world, was a prime target of Musk’s ostensible cost-cutting exercise.

The cuts driven by DOGE saw U.S. humanitarian funding fall from around $14 billion to $3.7 billion, pulling money from programs for AIDS prevention, malaria programs, crisis relief, water supply, and maternal health in some of the poorest countries in the world.

But over the past week, Musk has repeatedly denied that the costs cost even a single life. On X, he has claimed that deaths in Africa decreased after USAID cuts, and said his detractors “cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!”

Since then, journalists and aid groups have documented many deaths linked to those cuts. A study published in the Lancet medical journal estimated that the cuts would lead to the deaths of 9.4 million people by 2030, while a mathematical modeler at Boston University estimates that the cuts have already cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide.

Flowers and a sign are placed outside the former headquarters of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, in Washington, D.C., Feb. 7, 2025. JOSE LUIS MAGANA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Many people did just that. Nicholas Kristof, who did some of the earliest reporting on deaths caused by USAID cuts, responded with a list of names of victims. The list included Gbessey Kiadu, a one-year-old who died of malaria because of cuts to his medication in Liberia. Samantha Power, the former USAID administrator, also responded. Kristof subsequently invited Musk to join him on a reporting trip to affected countries.

Musk has responded to the allegations with threats to sue and accused Kristof of “lying through his teeth,” without addressing specifics.

Jeremy Konyndyk, the former head of disaster relief at USAID and now CEO of Refugees International, described Musk’s claims that no one died as a result of the cuts as “revisionist lunacy.”

"I think you'd say conservatively this will have killed, I think at least tens to hundreds of thousands by now, it could well be higher,” he tells TIME. Konyndyk said the Lancet study projecting 9 million deaths in five years was “plausible."

He adds that is difficult to get an accurate count of deaths due to the cuts. “When you pull out the program delivery infrastructure, you also lose the visibility to count the fallout of that—but it's certainly there."

“Take one example: there was a cholera outbreak in Sudan last year that killed several thousand people, which would have been at least significantly curtailed if not stopped if the clinics that operated in that area were still open.”

Konyndyk says it’s not a question of whether the USAID cuts spearheaded by Musk killed people, but of how many.

"The world's richest man chose to cut off aid that kept alive many of the world's poorest people, and I think that is about as morally repugnant as it's possible to be," he says.