Elon Musk has revealed he ‘accidentally’ axed a programme working to stop the spread of ebola during his gutting of the US government.
Addressing Donald Trump’s cabinet on Wednesday – even though he is not part of the cabinet – the billionaire admitted his government efficiency department, DOGE, had made some mistakes when cutting the federal workforce.
One of these was apparently scrapping a USAID programme that was fighting against the deadly disease ebola.
Wearing a ‘dark MAGA’ hat, Musk then said his department quickly noticed their error and restored the programme, in a seeming attempt to spin the fiasco as a positive.
He told the cabinet: “We will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect, but when we make mistakes we’ll fix it very quickly. For example, with USAID one of the things we accidentally cancelled, very briefly, was Ebola prevention.”
Laughing about the mistake, the Tesla CEO continued: “I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.”
Musk went on to claims that the government would need to save “four billion dollars” every day until the end of September if “we are to achieve a trillion dollar deficit reduction in financial year 2026.”
Musk has been named a “special government employee” with the mission of increasing government efficiency and reducing unnecessary spending.
This has included effectively shutting down USAID, the government agency tasked with humanitarian relief overseas.
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