On December 26, 2004, the geological plates beneath Sumatra unleashed the third-most-powerful earthquake ever recorded. A gargantuan column of water raced toward Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, and Indonesia. None of these countries had advance-warning systems in place, so no one had time to prepare before the surge hit. Some 228,000 people died—the highest toll of any natural disaster so far this century.

Setting up prevention systems would have been inexpensive, especially compared with the countless billions the tsunami ultimately cost. But governments typically spend money on preventing disasters only after disasters strike, and the affected countries hadn’t experienced a major tsunami in years. After the events of 2004, USAID spent a tiny fraction of its budget to help fund an advance-detection system for the Pacific, which might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had it been in place sooner. But some people would have seen such an investment as a “waste”—inefficient spending that could have gone toward some more immediate or tangible end.

DOGE has turned this dangerously flawed view into a philosophy of government. Last week, Elon Musk’s makeshift agency fired one of the main scientists responsible for providing advance warning when the next tsunami hits Alaska, Hawaii, or the Pacific Coast. The USAID document that describes America’s efforts to protect coastlines from tsunamis, titled “Pounds of Prevention”—riffing on the adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure—now redirects to an error message: “The resource you are trying to access is temporarily unavailable.”

More than 800 workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have lost their job in recent weeks, including many who helped mitigate climate disasters, track hurricanes, predict ever-stronger storms, and notify potential victims. Meanwhile, cuts to volcano monitoring are crippling the government’s ability to measure eruption risk. DOGE is also reportedly preparing to cancel the lease on the government’s “nerve center” for national weather forecasts.

Musk has categorized as superfluous a good deal of spending that actually makes the country more resilient, at a time when catastrophic risk is on the rise. We never see the crises that the government averts, only the ones it fails to prevent. Preparing for them may seem wasteful—until suddenly, tragically, it doesn’t.

[Read: The diseases are coming]

The modern, globalized world is the most complex and interconnected environment that humans have ever navigated. That’s why the potential for catastrophic risk—that is, the risk of low-probability but highly destructive events—has never been greater. A single person getting sick can derail the lives of billions. A crisis in one country’s banking sector can crash economies thousands of miles away. Now is precisely the time when governments must invest more heavily in making themselves resilient to these kinds of events. But the United States is doing the opposite.

Donald Trump made the same mistake in his first term. In September 2019, his administration quietly eliminated an initiative that it saw as government waste: a $200 million program that tracked novel coronaviruses around the world. Three months later, COVID-19 infected its first victim in Wuhan. The U.S. government spent an estimated $4.6 trillion in response to the pandemic that emerged from that virus—roughly 23,000 times the budget for the preparedness program that could have helped mitigate its effects.

Complex systems—say, health care, or government, or industrial supply chains—without any built-in slack or redundancy are efficient but fragile. The effects of any disruption quickly cascade, and the potential for catastrophic risk grows. In 2021, a gust of wind turned a boat sideways in the Suez Canal—and upended the global economy, inflicting tens of billions of dollars in economic damage. Last year’s CrowdStrike outage is another example of an avalanche created by a minor problem within a system that was not resilient.

DOGE is courting these kinds of risks by automatically assuming that programs with no immediately obvious function—or at least none that Musk and his minions can discern—are wasteful. Some of its cost cutting may be eliminating genuine waste; no government spends its money perfectly. But DOGE’s campaign is riddled with errors, at the level of both understanding and execution. The agency’s strategy is akin to a climber replacing sturdy rope with low-cost string: We may not realize the full danger until it snaps.

Musk developed DOGE’s playbook when he took over Twitter, where resilience matters much less than it does in government. Gutting the social-media platform may have resulted in more harmful content and some outages, including one this week, but the stakes were low compared with the crucial government services that Musk is currently cutting. When X fails, memes go unposted. When the government fails, people can die.

The risks are not only to Americans but also to humanity, as technology and climate change have linked the destinies of far-flung people more closely and increased the likelihood of extinction-level calamities. It is not reassuring in this regard that Trump controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and that DOGE accidentally fired key people who manage it, that Trump doesn’t believe in climate change and is having Musk slash seemingly every agency designed to mitigate it, and that Musk summarized his view of AI risk by telling Joe Rogan that it presents “only a 20 percent chance of annihilation.” The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction—an organization that DOGE would certainly eliminate if it could—came up with a more sophisticated figure in 2023: By its estimate, there is a 2 to 14 percent chance of an extinction-level event in the 21st century. This is not a world in which the government should be running itself on a just-in-time basis.

Musk may flippantly acknowledge the risk in interviews, but DOGE’s fundamental ethos—Silicon Valley will fix what the government cannot—almost entirely ignores it.

[Read: The dictatorship of the engineer]

Americans can’t rely on Meta, Google, and Apple to build tsunami-early-warning systems, mitigate climate change, or responsibly regulate artificial intelligence. Preventing catastrophic risk doesn’t increase shareholder value. The market will not save us.

As DOGE hollows out the Federal Aviation Administration, fires extreme-weather forecasters, and implodes the National Institutes of Health, Americans are left to wonder: What happens when another plane crashes, or a hurricane hits Florida without sufficient warning, or the next pandemic takes America by surprise? Many people may die avoidable deaths for the rest of us to learn that one billionaire’s “waste” is really a country’s strength.

With every passing day, it is harder to remember that Elon Musk was not always a political firebrand. The old Musk advocated for his business interests and professed to care deeply about climate change, but he largely stayed out of partisan politics. As a result, he was much more popular. He hosted Saturday Night Live and walked the Met Gala’s red carpet. He also received substantive honors, including election to one of the oldest and grandest institutions of science, the Royal Society. The fellowship put Musk in elevated company: In 2018, he traveled to London to add his signature to the society’s charter, alongside those of Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, and Isaac Newton.

Thousands of scientists are now calling for Musk’s name to be blotted out from that charter’s fine vellum pages. The effort kicked off last summer, when 74 fellows (out of roughly 1,600) sent a letter to the Royal Society’s leadership, reportedly out of concern that Musk’s X posts were fomenting racial violence in the United Kingdom and could therefore bring the institution into disrepute. In November, one of the signatories, the neuropsychologist Dorothy Bishop, resigned from the Royal Society in protest of what she saw as inaction; her statement cited Musk’s derogatory posts about Anthony Fauci and the billionaire’s promotion of misinformation about vaccines. Then, last month, Stephen Curry, a biologist who is not himself a Royal Society fellow—or a guard on the Golden State Warriors—wrote an open letter calling for Musk’s expulsion, for many of these same reasons. It has since been signed by more than 3,400 scientists, including more than 60 actual fellows.

The society has not taken any disciplinary action in response to these entreaties. Musk himself made no comment on the campaign to oust him until March 2, when Geoffrey Hinton, “the Godfather of AI” (and a member of the Royal Society Class of 1998), lent his voice to the cause. In a reply to Hinton on X, Musk said that only “craven, insecure fools” care about awards and memberships. Despite this I’m-not-mad bravado, Musk seemed stung. He did not respond to emailed questions, but on X, he did accuse Hinton of cruelty. The following evening, the Royal Society convened a meeting to discuss the matter. It took place behind closed doors, and what transpired is still not entirely clear. (In an email to The Atlantic, the society said that all matters relating to individual fellows are dealt with in strict confidence.) According to one report, the society now plans to send a letter to Musk, though what it intends to write was undecided as of last week. At least for now, Musk’s fellowship seems to be safe.

This roiling at the Royal Society comes at a tricky time for scientific institutions, especially universities. Having perhaps waded too far into political disputes in recent years, the leaders of these institutions are now trying to stay out of politics at the precise moment when politicians are trying to damage them. Musk may have been spared, so far, by an understandable desire among the Royal Society’s leadership to stay neutral. Scientific organizations that succumbed to political orthodoxies, or enforced them, have often come to regret it. During the Cold War, some scientists in the United States faced professional penalties or outright ostracization because they were suspected of being Communists. In the Soviet Union, dissenting biologists were shipped to the gulag. At the peak of China’s Cultural Revolution, a physicist who worked on the “Western science” of general relativity could be charged with resistance and denounced at a public rally.

[Read: The death of government expertise]

These cases are extreme, but subtle interminglings of politics and science can be toxic in their own way. They can undermine the atmosphere of free inquiry that gives science its unique power, its ability to sift good ideas from bad in pursuit of a more expansive and refined vision of the universe. Even an institution’s well-meaning statement of support for a social cause may have a chilling effect on any member who does not happen to agree. A scientist’s success is determined in no small part by their peers’ appraisal of their work and character. Scientific institutions should therefore avoid actions that could be interpreted as political litmus tests. They largely do: No university would deny a Donald Trump–supporting grad student’s application for enrollment, at least not as a matter of official policy. And likewise, mere support for Trump should not and would not disqualify Musk from the Royal Society.

Of course, Musk’s support for Trump is not the issue here. In her resignation letter, Bishop raised the matter of his scientific heresies, specifically about vaccines, to argue that he breached the society’s code of conduct, which prohibits fellows from undermining the society’s mission. In 2021, Musk posted and later deleted a cartoon that depicted Bill Gates as a fearmongering villain who was trying to control people with COVID vaccines. In 2023, he insinuated that the NBA player Bronny James’s cardiac arrest could have been a side effect of those vaccines. Outrageous as these posts may be, Musk is allowed to be wrong about some things. Scientists are unevenly brilliant, if they are brilliant at all, and some of the best were heretics or even fools on one scientific issue or another. Lynn Margulis revolutionized evolutionary biology. She also promoted pseudoscientific theories of HIV transmission. Freeman Dyson had a better handle on the physical laws of the universe than almost anyone since Einstein, but he went to his grave a climate-change skeptic. Kicking Margulis and Dyson out of polite scientific society for these consensus violations would have impoverished science.

[Read: The erasing of American science]

The best case for booting Musk from the Royal Society doesn’t concern his beliefs at all. It proceeds from his actions, the way that he is degrading the world of science on Trump’s behalf. In the months since the 2024 election, he has made himself into a tool of Trump’s administration, a chain saw, in his own telling. And with that chain saw, the president has begun dismembering America’s great scientific institutions. The Royal Society is an ancestor of those institutions. During its centuries-long heyday, it funded scientific research that wouldn’t otherwise have been pursued. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health do this today, on a much larger scale. The Royal Society’s members are right to feel a twinge of solidarity as they watch Musk and his Department of Governmental Efficiency push deep staff cuts at the NSF and the NIH, and hear reports that deeper cuts are to come. In their speed and extent, these force reductions have no precedent in the history of American science.

Musk has done all of this in the name of efficiency, but scientific research is antithetical to unrelenting thrift. Basic research needs some slack to allow for false starts and trial and error. Musk of all people should know this. When the Royal Society announced that Musk would be made a fellow, it cited SpaceX’s advances in rocketry, first and foremost, and rightfully so. The company has made reusable rockets a reality, and if its larger Starship model starts working reliably, it will enable a host of new wonders in space. But SpaceX’s success required long experimental phases and lots of exploded rockets, all of which cost money. A big chunk of that money came from NASA, a scientific institution whose checks are signed by the U.S. taxpayer. Last week, it was reported that NASA, too, will soon face budget cuts. They are said to be concentrated in its science division.

Maybe Musk values scientific institutions only as a means to his personal ends. Maybe he sees them as disposable ladders that he can cast off after he has climbed to new heights of wealth. Either way, scientists are finding it difficult to fight back. They don’t have much money. Their petitions and open letters can be cringeworthy. But at the very least, they ought to withdraw the honors that they have extended to Musk. They don’t have to let him retain the imprimatur and gravitas of the Royal Society, one of the most storied institutions to have come down to us from the Enlightenment. If you give a man a medal, and he returns with a torch to burn your house down, figure out how to stop him, fast. But also: Rip the medal from his chest.