Earlier this year, Elon Musk's cost-cutting operation — called DOGE — dismantled USAID's Ebola surveillance and response programs. Musk later said this happened by accident. But a serious Ebola outbreak was already spreading in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda when the programs shut down.

Here's the timeline: By May, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a global health emergency. The CDC reported 246 suspected cases and 80 deaths in the DRC. Within days, the number had grown to more than 600 cases and 139 deaths. By mid-June, at least 30 people had died in a single camp, a sign the virus was moving fast.

Jeremy Konyndyk ran USAID's disaster response office from 2013 to 2017. He managed the response to the 2014-2015 West Africa Ebola epidemic with a budget of $1.4 billion per year. Today, he heads Refugees International and is one of the strongest critics of the cuts. He told the media that people are "dying in significant numbers" because of Musk's actions. He also said that the current outbreak would have been caught much earlier if the surveillance systems — the ones his team had built and used — still existed.

Workers in the DRC dealing with Ebola patients faced a lack of basic supplies. Boots, masks, protective gear — all were in short supply. One medic said, "We are dying like flies." Earlier in the response, field workers had reported shortages of medicine and motorcycles they needed to reach remote areas. They directly tied these shortages to the funding cuts.

How did this unfold? On February 3, Musk posted on the social media site X that his team had "fed USAID into the wood chipper" over a weekend. On February 26, President Trump signed an order giving Musk even more power to cut government spending. Contracts, staff, and programs were terminated very quickly.

Then something odd happened. In April, Musk visited the White House to announce that Ebola programs would be restarted. On that same day, his DOGE team had canceled the contracts that would have funded those programs.

A team of health researchers published a study saying that completely eliminating USAID could lead to 14 million deaths worldwide, including 4.5 million children. When a Democratic congressman cited this figure publicly, Musk threatened to sue.

The administration has defended the cuts differently. Officials said they were shifting to "hyper-prioritized" emergency help instead of broader development spending. But then, just days later, the White House asked Congress for $1.4 billion in new emergency funding for Ebola response.

This is the core complaint from Konyndyk and others: the government took apart the system built to prevent crises, then asked for billions in emergency money once the crisis happened. Congress will have to decide what to make of this.