Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and the "public man-made death" that they've caused.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/the-human-cost-of-doges-war-on-usaid

No paywall link
https://archive.md/20260712222347/https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/the-human-cost-of-doges-war-on-usaid

In 1988, Richard Rhodes, a historian and a journalist who wrote a definitive study of the creation of the atomic bomb, published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association called “Man-made Death: A Neglected Mortality.” Rhodes argued that demographers and public-health officials ought to take greater care to account for deaths caused by war, neglect, privation, and other effects of policy. His emphasis was on deliberate acts—artificially induced famines, for example, and the willful dismantling of public-health aid and infrastructure.

Atul Gawande, who was a leading administrator at U.S.A.I.D. until the Trump Administration’s doge initiative, led by Elon Musk, set about defunding and destroying the agency, is a surgeon and a longtime New Yorker contributor. In our latest conversation for The New Yorker Radio Hour, Gawande uses Rhodes’s concept to help describe the colossal human cost that Musk and doge have exacted on the world. Gawande, backed up by recent academic studies, says that the decimation of U.S.A.I.D. around the globe has been responsible for some seven hundred thousand deaths, and that number will likely ascend into the seven figures. The policy is not only immeasurably cruel, Gawande argues; it is also stupid, badly undermining what remains of American soft power and prestige, from Africa to Latin America. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Atul, Elon Musk claims there’s no evidence at all that doge cuts to U.S.A.I.D. led to even a single death. He tweeted—and I’m quoting here—that “no validated medical funding was stopped,” and that “legitimate life saving funding continued.” You’ve replied saying that the reduction in life-saving aid has already led to no fewer than seven hundred thousand deaths. How did you come to that number?

The seven-hundred-plus thousand that have been estimated to have died at the end of a year since the U.S.A.I.D. closure comes from a couple of different sources. One is a Boston University estimate. A separate one comes from an international study published in The Lancet, looking at the impact U.S.A.I.D. had over the past twenty years—saving ninety-two million lives—and projecting, based on the cuts that have occurred, how many deaths have occurred, and they came up with a very similar number. This is what pissed off Elon Musk. Representative Ro Khanna cited the estimate that 4.5 million children, just children, could die by the end of 2030. The precision of the numbers is a question, but it’s clear that it’s, at minimum, tens of thousands in 2025, and very likely hundreds of thousands.

This is an enormous number, so I think it would be worth specifying: people where? People dying of what? Maybe if you could put some more specificity on this, then it ceases to be just a gigantic number.

Yeah—this is an example of what Richard Rhodes, the historian, called “public man-made death.” A big part of what U.S.A.I.D. did was humanitarian response: disaster relief for tens of millions of people who are fleeing war or in conflict zones or were driven out by floods, and those kinds of things. W.H.O. estimates that, where eighty million people were reached by emergency-health services in 2024, that number in 2025 dropped by more than fifty million people. That included, for example, fourteen million people who were victims of severe, acute malnutrition. 2.5 million of them were children.

*snip*