Elon Musk Labeled 'Evil' After Exposé Claims His USAID 'Wood Chipper' Killed Hundreds of Thousands

Elon Musk is facing intense criticism in the US after a former senior USAID official alleged in an interview published on Saturday 1 June that the tech billionaire's role in dismantling the aid agency under Donald Trump's administration contributed to the suffering and deaths of 'hundreds of thousands' of people across more than 100 countries. The accusations, centred on what one critic called Elon Musk's USAID 'wood chipper', were laid out by ex staffer Nicholas Enrich in a lengthy interview with Current Affairs.

USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, has for decades overseen American foreign aid and development programmes, from vaccination drives to HIV and Ebola prevention. During Trump's presidency, Musk was appointed head of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a cost cutting office within the administration. According to Enrich, it was from that position that Musk drove a rapid and destructive restructuring of USAID that he believes had lethal consequences across the developing world.

Inside The USAID Claim

Enrich told Current Affairs he was serving as USAID's top global health official when Musk publicly boasted about shredding the agency's work.

'Musk tweeted that he just spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper, and I was the top global health official at USAID at the time,' Enrich recalled. 'So, I unfortunately had a front row seat to the destruction that was happening to the agency at that point.'

He then set out what he says was being dismantled. USAID, he explained, was the federal government's arm for delivering foreign aid and development help 'around the world to over 100 countries.' It was more than charity. 'It was an implement of national security,' he said. 'It kept Americans safe from infectious diseases.'

None of the internal documents or the tweet Enrich refers to are reproduced in the interview, so his account cannot be independently verified. There is also no response from Musk or the former DOGE office. On that basis, his description of events remains an allegation, albeit from someone who says he was in the room as decisions were made.

What is not in doubt is the force of his accusation. Enrich contends that 'hundreds of thousands' of people, many of them children in the poorest countries, either suffered or died because lifeline programmes were choked off. He attributes this not to strategic reform but to hostility towards foreign aid and ignorance about what USAID actually did.

Critics Turn On Musk

The interview does not rely on Enrich alone. Writer Nathan Robinson, who conducted the conversation, says he feels forced into unusually harsh language when describing Musk's conduct.

He says he has to 'resort to extreme adjectives like 'evil' and 'depraved'' for someone who, in his view, could use personal wealth to save millions of lives and 'chooses not to.'' Robinson then goes further, accusing Musk of actively sabotaging the one government agency capable of doing that work cheaply and at scale.

'Not only chooses not to, but personally goes into the government agency that, for a very small amount of money, saves those lives and decides that no, those people are going to die,' he said. 'I really, kind of run out of words.'

That is moral judgement rather than a forensic audit, and no independent death toll is provided. There are no figures from the World Health Organization, no leaked spreadsheets and no internal memos in the interview that would allow an outside reader to calculate the impact. The phrase 'hundreds of thousands' rests on Enrich's assertion and should be treated with caution.

Still, his anger is specific. He accuses 'the DOGE folks and the political appointees that came into the agency' of relying on 'right wing conspiracy theories' about foreign aid rather than briefing papers and scientific evidence. In his telling, they were not simply cutting budgets, but doing so without understanding that USAID's modest spending supported vaccination campaigns, maternal health services and epidemic preparedness.

Aid Cuts And Public Claims

The sharpest criticism of Musk's USAID approach centres on what Enrich describes as a gap between public rhetoric and private action.

He recalls watching Musk 'celebrating cutting off aid for the world's poorest children,' then appearing at the White House to claim he had 'restored access to HIV and Ebola prevention activities' even as, Enrich says, DOGE aligned officials were in USAID offices terminating the contracts needed to run those programmes.

'It's one thing if he's going to commit to celebrating cutting off aid for the world's poorest children,' Enrich said. 'It's another to then stand in the White House and speak publicly about how he's actually restored access to HIV and Ebola prevention activities, on the same day that his tech bros are sitting in our office at USAID and terminating the contracts that would be needed to provide those services.'

Again, there is no parallel comment from Musk or his allies in the interview, and no White House transcript quoted to confirm the exact wording of his public statements. Enrich's account is vivid, but it remains one sided.

He also gives a more detailed picture of how he believes the Trump administration quietly neutered USAID after announcing a freeze on foreign aid. Officials, he says, promised at the time that all 'life saving activities' would continue. Behind the scenes, he claims, the definition of what counted as life saving was repeatedly narrowed.

'They stopped us at every step of the way,' Enrich said. 'They kept scaling back what they considered to be life saving. They kept slashing the staff and the experts that we needed to provide those life saving services.'

For Enrich, the ultimate insult is the claim that all this was done in the name of efficiency. 'What's really upsetting is that it wasn't done to make the agency more efficient, it wasn't done to realign foreign aid with the president's agenda, as they're now claiming,' he argued. 'The reality was it was done by uninformed and unqualified sycophants who knew nothing about the agency, and the reason was specifically to satisfy the ego of the world's richest man.'