Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, doesn’t mince words when he writes about Elon Musk. The headline of his article says Musk is “an evil piece of human garbage” and a fraud as well. He hates what Musk is doing to our government, and he hates Musk’s indifference to the human damage he is causing.
Does he care that he short-circuited American science and technology with his ignorant layoffs? Does he care that millions of people will die because of his success in shuttering USAID, thereby closing down the distribution of food and medicine to people in need?
He writes:
When I was growing up in Morgantown, West Virginia, I remember very well when that new building went up at the end of Willowdale Road, near the West Virginia University Medical Center and not too far from my friend Doug’s house.
These days, Morgantown—driven by the university in general and by what they now call the Robert C. Byrd Health Sciences Center, in particular—is a sprawling small city, with townhouses and shopping centers and office buildings having swallowed the acres of woods where my friends and I used to play. But in 1970, it was kind of a big deal when a spanking new building like that was conjured into being; this one was of particular interest because it was something different: a federal government building, bringing a little slice of Washington to town.
If you’ve been following the news, you may know that I’m referring to the NIOSH building—the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, which for 55 years employed dedicated researchers in Morgantown studying the effects of black lung on coal miners. Black lung, or pneumoconiosis, occurs when coal dust is inhaled and has killed many men before their time; it killed one of my grandfathers in his fifties. Pap, whom I never knew, died way before the federal government managed to overcome the coal operators’ fierce resistance to even acknowledging that coal mining could expose one to harm and established NIOSH through an act of Congress. But once that happened, laboratories were established in Morgantown and six other cities to research occupational safety, in the mines and other dangerous workplaces. Some 200 people worked at the lab in my hometown and from the mobile van they used to travel across coal country to perform checks on miners, sometimes literally right outside the mine gate.
Until Elon Musk.
Those 200 people were fired in early April by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Controversy ensued, and many of them have been temporarily rehired, but they’re slated to be fired again in June. Labs in Pittsburgh and in Spokane, Washington, were also eliminated.
As Musk steps back from DOGE, we’re getting a number of assessments of his “accomplishments.” They’re generally harsh. He vowed to slash $2 trillion in “wasteful” federal spending (the federal government spends just under $7 trillion a year). He recently acknowledged it’ll be more like $150 billion. However, his “cuts” will also cost American taxpayers $135 billion, according to one estimate, because it turns out that some of these bloodsucking deep staters save taxpayers money. But even $150 billion is a grotesque lie. Jessica Reidl of the Manhattan Institute—yes, the staunchly conservative and generally pro-Trump think tank—recently told The New York Times’ David French: “So right now I would say DOGE has saved $2 billion, which, to put it in context, is one-thirty-fifth of 1 percent of the federal budget, otherwise known as budget dust.”
That’s harsh, all right. But it’s not only or even mainly on fiscal grounds that he deserves our contempt. The cuts are leaving thousands of good people unemployed. And they will literally kill people. Coal miners will die prematurely. Children all over the world will die from malaria and other diseases because of the demise of USAID, which Musk called a “criminal organization.” In fact, this is already happening: Children with AIDS in Africa have died because of the elimination of a President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, outreach program. That’s just the beginning of the enormous pain these cuts will inflict across the world. And the richest man on the planet, who grew up amid vast wealth from his father’s emerald-mining operations and has never known hardship or had to rely on a government service in his life (unless you count $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits for his companies), is responsible for every drop of it.
Musk has paid for his political activism. The Tesla brand is stigmatized is many parts of Europe. Sales have dropped precipitously. His fortune, which was estimated at about $400 billion, is now down to “only” $250 billion. Protestors regularly gather at Tesla showrooms to demonstrate against him and his DOGE. Teslas have been vandalized.
But no matter how much his fortune and his reputation declines, it can never compensate for the damage he has wreaked on our government and its services. We will all suffer in some manner because of this arrogant man.
In the Trump budget for next year, the only government agenda that did not get slashed was the military. Science, health research, education, public television and radio, even the CIA and the FBI, were chopped or closed. Most agencies were stripped of their leaders and experienced personnel. We are in for dangerous times in the years ahead.