Pool via AP
Elon Musk speaks during a cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, February 26, 2025.
In the days after 9/11, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, Ward Churchill, compared the victims of the attacks to the infamous Nazi Adolf Eichmann, a major organizer of the Holocaust. Accusing the office workers at the World Trade Center as somehow implicated in American imperialism in Iraq and elsewhere, Churchill called them “little Eichmanns.” It was an egregious example of the habit some “radical” academics have of drawing attention to themselves with outrageous hyperbole, but his phrase has lived on.
Eichmann, of course, was famously described in Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil as a dim-witted lackey who didn’t particularly hate Jews himself, but readily set up the logistics of their extermination because that’s what he was told to do. His name has become a stand-in for how easily ordinary people can participate in terrible crimes.
But there is a better comparison for the sundry criminals and neo-Nazis who are carrying out Elon Musk’s illegal orders to shut down USAID and gut America’s foreign aid budget through mass cancellation of contracts. Reinhard Heydrich, Eichmann’s boss, was not following orders but giving them. He was a viciously sadistic antisemite who gloried in cruelty and violence for its own sake. He was notorious even among the Nazi leadership for his brutality; Hitler called him “the man with the iron heart.”
What Musk and his little Heydrichs at DOGE, the State Department, and elsewhere are doing to millions of people around the world is not the banal evil of “just following orders.” It is gleeful, intentional evil of the worst kind: the mass murder of helpless innocents.
One target of DOGE’s little Heydrichs is PEPFAR, the brainchild of George W. Bush, which distributes medication to people infected with HIV, mostly in southern Africa. It has saved an estimated 25 million lives, and until recently provided drugs to about 20 million people. Funding has been frozen since January 24. Experts estimate that this has already killed about 15,300 adults and 1,600 children, and that if it remains frozen for a year, the death toll will surpass 500,000.
But that won’t be the end. HIV is almost universally fatal without treatment. Unless PEPFAR is restored (or replaced), the death toll could easily eclipse that of the Holocaust.
Another target of the little Heydrichs is America’s funding for tuberculosis treatment. As John Green writes in his recent book Everything Is Tuberculosis, TB is the deadliest disease in human history. To this day, it kills about 1.3 million people per year. Even during the height of the recent pandemic, COVID-19 only briefly surpassed it.
It’s particularly awful given that TB can be cured with proper treatment. That’s why the U.S. not only funded a lot of TB treatment previously, but also operated the infrastructure by which treatment funded by other nations is distributed. But thanks to DOGE, virtually the entire global system of TB treatment for poorer nations has been frozen up.
Efforts to control malaria, polio, and many other programs have also been canceled.
The crimes of sadistic madmen commonly blow up in their faces.
State Department officials have claimed that disease control efforts are not being defunded, and Musk recently claimed that he canceled Ebola control efforts by accident and they have since been restored, but as The Washington Post and CBS have reported, it is not true. Groups on the ground are not getting their contracted funding.
The murderous insanity of all this is scarcely possible to describe. Both TB and especially HIV are prone to mutation, and have developed resistance to some early treatments. Treating drug-resistant strains of the diseases requires strict adherence to a schedule of several different drugs, sometimes for years. The longer treatment is halted, the more likely that the diseases will evolve resistance. Even a pause of a few months could easily result in new strains of totally drug-resistant TB and HIV, rendering all the grueling effort to develop these treatments—much of it funded by millions in U.S. taxpayer dollars—wasted, along with causing millions of deaths.
Lest there be any doubt about the motivation here, another target of DOGE is food aid. For decades, America has distributed food of various kinds across nations struck by famine, poverty, or conflict through USAID, in containers reading, “from the American people.” That is also mostly frozen. Musk and his little Heydrichs are literally snatching nutrient paste out of the mouths of starving babies. That is the kind of people we are dealing with.
It’s worth pointing out that nonwhite countries in the Global South are the main beneficiaries of these programs. Would DOGE be so eager to cut programs aimed at, say, Eastern Europe? I doubt it.
While Trump bears responsibility for allowing Musk to seize control of the government, as does Secretary of State Marco Rubio for wielding the headsman’s axe on foreign aid contracts, all these actions are clearly coming straight from Musk. Even Project 2025 did not propose abolishing USAID, because its authors understood it is part of America’s system of projecting power and influence, and because it helps the U.S. itself. Much food aid is grown by American farmers, and letting diseases like HIV and TB fester abroad is dangerous. It is not at all impossible, for instance, that a totally drug-resistant TB might get loose in the United States—particularly with the anti-vaccine crackpot Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has the tacitly eugenicist belief that illness is caused by poor life choices, running the public-health bureaucracy. There are measles and now possibly rubella outbreaks festering in Texas right now, but Kennedy is downplaying the problem.
It’s no surprise that DOGE prioritizes gleeful cruelty over American security and power. The crimes of sadistic madmen commonly blow up in their faces. Heydrich was assassinated by Czech and Slovak commandos in 1942; the Nazi program ended with millions of Germans dead, Germany itself utterly destroyed, and big chunks of their cherished Reich permanently ceded to Poland and Russia. That’s one reason why the Hitler salute became so taboo after 1945. But we may have to learn that lesson again the hard way.
