Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a near-perfect predator. In 1882, Robert Koch, the physician who discovered the microbe, told a room full of scientists that it caused one in seven of all deaths. In 2023, after a brief hiatus, tuberculosis regained from COVID its status as the world’s deadliest infectious disease—a title it has held for most of what we know of human history.

Some people die of TB when their lungs collapse or fill with fluid. For others, scarring leaves so little healthy lung tissue that breathing becomes impossible. Or the infection spreads to the brain or the spinal column, or they suffer a sudden, uncontrollable hemorrhage. Lack of appetite and extreme abdominal pain can fuel weight loss so severe that it whittles away muscle and bone. This is why TB was widely known as “consumption” until the 20th century—it seemed to be a disease that consumed the very body, shrinking and shriveling it. On a trip to Sierra Leone in 2019, I met a boy named Henry Reider, whose mix of shyness and enthusiasm for connection reminded me of my own son. I thought he was perhaps 9 years old. His doctors later told me that he was in fact 17, his body stunted by a combination of malnutrition and tuberculosis.

The cure for TB—roughly half a year on antibiotics—has existed since the 1950s, and works for most patients. Yet, in the decades since, more than 100 million people have died of tuberculosis because the drugs are not widely available in many parts of the world. The most proximate cause of contemporary tuberculosis deaths is not M. tuberculosis, but Homo sapiens. Now, as the Trump administration decimates foreign-aid programs, the U.S. is both making survival less likely for people with TB and risking the disease becoming far more treatment-resistant. After decades of improvement, we could return to something more like the world before the cure.

[Read: The danger of ignoring tuberculosis]

Anyone can get tuberculosis—in fact, a quarter of all humans living now, including an estimated 13 million Americans, have been infected with the bacterium, which spreads through coughs, sneezes, and breaths. Most will only ever have a latent form of the infection, in which infection-fighting white blood cells envelop the bacteria so it cannot wreak havoc on the body. But in 5 to 10 percent of infections, the immune system can’t produce enough white blood cells to surround the invader. M. tuberculosis explodes outward, and active disease begins.

Certain triggers make the disease more likely to go from latent to active, including air pollution and an immune system weakened by malnutrition, stress, or diabetes. The disease spreads especially well along the trails that poverty has blazed for it: in crowded living and working conditions such as slums and poorly ventilated factories. Left untreated, most people who develop active TB will die of the disease.

In the early 1980s, physicians and activists in Africa and Asia began sounding the alarm about an explosion of young patients dying within weeks of being infected instead of years. Hours after entering the hospital, they were choking to death on their own blood. In 1985, physicians in Zaire and Zambia noted high rates of active tuberculosis among patients who had the emerging disease now known as HIV/AIDS. TB surged globally, including in the U.S. Deaths skyrocketed. From 1985 to 2005, roughly as many people died of tuberculosis as in World War I, and many of them also had HIV. In 2000, nearly a third of the 2.3 million people who died of tuberculosis were co-infected with HIV.

[Read: Tragedy would unfold if Trump cancels Bush’s AIDS program]

By the mid-1990s, antiretroviral cocktails made HIV a treatable and survivable disease in rich communities. While a person is taking these medications, their viral levels generally become so low as to be undetectable and untransmittable; if a person with HIV becomes sick with tuberculosis, the drugs increase their odds of survival dramatically. But rich countries largely refused to spend money on HIV and TB meds in low- and middle-income countries. They cited many reasons, including that patients couldn’t be trusted to take their medication on time, and that resources would be better spent on prevention and control. In 2001, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development had this to say when explaining to Congress why many Africans would not benefit from access to HIV medications: “People do not know what watches and clocks are. They do not use Western means for telling time. They use the sun. These drugs have to be administered during a certain sequence of time during the day and when you say take it at 10:00, people will say, ‘What do you mean by 10:00?’” A 2007 review of 58 studies on patient habits found that Africans were more likely to adhere to HIV treatment regimens than North Americans.

In the mid-2000s, programs such as PEPFAR and the Global Fund finally began distributing antiretroviral therapy to millions of people living with HIV in poor countries. PEPFAR, a U.S.-funded initiative, was especially successful, saving more than 25 million lives and preventing 7 million children from being born with HIV. These projects lowered deaths and infections while also strengthening health-care systems, allowing low-income countries to better respond to diseases as varied as malaria and diabetes. Millions of lives have been saved—and tuberculosis deaths among those living with HIV have declined dramatically in the decades since.

Still, tuberculosis is great at exploiting any advantage that humans hand it. During the coronavirus pandemic, disruptions to supply chains and TB-prevention programs led to an uptick in infections worldwide. Last year, the U.S. logged more cases of tuberculosis than it has in any year since the CDC began keeping count in the 1950s. Two people died. But in some ways, at the beginning of this year, the fight against tuberculosis had never looked more promising. High-quality vaccine candidates were in late-stage trials. In December, the World Health Organization made its first endorsement of a TB diagnostic test, and global health workers readied to deploy it.

[Read: America can’t just unpause USAID]

Now that progress is on the verge of being erased. Since Donald Trump has taken office, his administration has dismantled USAID, massively eliminating foreign-aid funding and programs. According to The New York Times, hundreds of thousands of sick patients have seen their access to medication and testing suddenly cut off. A memo released by a USAID official earlier this month estimated that cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis will rise by about 30 percent in the next few years, an unprecedented regression in the history of humankind’s fight against the disease. (The official was subsequently placed on administrative leave.) Research on tuberculosis tests and treatments has been terminated. Although the secretary of state and Elon Musk have assured the public that the new administration’s actions have not disrupted the distribution of life-saving medicine, that just isn’t true. A colleague in central Africa sent me a picture of TB drugs that the U.S. has already paid for sitting unused in a warehouse because of stop-work orders. (Neither the State Department nor DOGE employees responded to requests for comment.)

Last year, roughly half of all international donor funding for tuberculosis treatment came from the U.S. Now many programs are disappearing. In a recent survey on the impact of lost funding in 31 countries, one in four organizations providing TB care reported they have shut down entirely. About half have stopped screening for new cases of tuberculosis. The average untreated case of active tuberculosis will spread the infection to 10 to 15 people a year. Without treatment, or even a diagnosis, hundreds of thousands more people will die—and each of those deaths will be needless.

By revoking money from global-health efforts, the U.S. has created the conditions for the health of people around the world to deteriorate, which will give tuberculosis even more opportunities to kill. HIV clinics in many countries have started rationing pills as drug supplies run dangerously low, raising the specter of co-infection. Like HIV, insufficient nutrition weakens the immune system. It is the leading risk factor for tuberculosis. An estimated 1 million children with severe acute malnutrition will lose access to treatment because of the USAID cuts, and refugee camps across the world are slashing already meager food rations.

For billions of people, TB is already a nightmare disease, both because the bacterium is unusually powerful and because world leaders have done a poor job of distributing cures. And yet, to the extent that one hears about TB at all in the rich world, it’s usually in the context of a looming crisis: Given enough time, a strain of tuberculosis may evolve that is resistant to all available antibiotics, a superbug that is perhaps even more aggressive and deadly than previous iterations of the disease.

[Read: Resistance to the antibiotic of last resort is silently spreading]

The Trump administration’s current policies are making such a future more plausible. Even pausing TB treatment for a couple of weeks can give the bacterium a chance to evolve resistance. The world is ill-prepared to respond to drug-resistant TB, because we have shockingly few treatments for the world’s deadliest infectious disease. Between 1963 and 2012, scientists approved no new drugs to treat tuberculosis. Doing so stopped being profitable once the disease ceased to be a crisis in rich countries. Many strains of tuberculosis are already resistant to the 60-year-old drugs that are still the first line of treatment for nearly all TB patients. If a person is unlucky enough to have drug-resistant TB, the next step is costly testing to determine if their body can withstand harsh, alternative treatments. The United States helped pay for those tests in many countries, which means that now fewer people with drug-resistant TB are being diagnosed or treated. Instead, they are almost certainly getting sicker and spreading the infection.

Drug-resistant TB is harder to cure in individual patients, and so the aid freeze will directly lead to many deaths. But giving the bacteria so many new opportunities to develop drug resistance is also a threat to all of humanity. We now risk the emergence of TB strains that can’t be cured with our existing tools. The millennia-long history of humans’ fight against TB has seen many vicious cycles. I fear we are watching the dawn of another.

This article has been adapted from John Green’s forthcoming book, Everything Is Tuberculosis.

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.

Lenacapavir, which stops HIV from replicating inside cells, has passed early safety tests.

At Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, late last month, Elon Musk sheepishly admitted that DOGE had “accidentally canceled very briefly” Ebola-prevention programs. After a nervous chuckle, he claimed that the oversight had been swiftly corrected. But it wasn’t. The truth is far more disturbing—this administration didn’t just pause a line item; it has actively dismantled the infrastructure the country relies on to detect and confront deadly pathogens.

For more than a decade, I have worked as a physician and public-health expert responding to infectious diseases around the world. In 2014, while treating Ebola patients in Guinea, I contracted and survived Ebola myself. I know how lethal Donald Trump’s assault on America’s outbreak preparedness could be. We are sure to regret it.

DOGE’s slash-and-burn campaign has hit everything from the NIH to the National Weather Service. The cuts to global health, however, are especially alarming. It’s unclear what Musk thought would happen when he fed the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper,” as he proclaimed with gleeful indifference on X, the social-media megaphone he owns. Ditto what Trump thought when he withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization and effectively muzzled the CDC. But the result has been that, in little more than a month, America has transformed itself from a preeminent global-health leader into an untrustworthy has-been. Undermining even one of these institutions would have posed a serious threat; gutting them all at once is an invitation for future outbreaks.

The fallout from these sweeping cuts is particularly evident when examining USAID, or what’s left of it. The agency’s tagline was “From the American people,” and perhaps the American people didn’t understand that it was also for them. Musk disparaged the agency outright—declaring it a “criminal organization.” The White House pointed to alleged wasteful spending, including funding for a “DEI musical” in Ireland (which wasn’t even funded by USAID, it turned out). In decrying the agency’s downfall, many Democrats focused more on the importance of “soft power” foreign policy than on-the-ground impact. Yet much of USAID’s budget was devoted to addressing humanitarian and health crises abroad with the implicit goal of preventing these emergencies from reaching our own shores. (Explicitly, the goal was to “advance American security and prosperity.”) Americans are safer when instability and infectious threats are effectively managed on foreign lands.

[Donald Moynihan: The DOGE project will backfire]

USAID was also the primary funder of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, established in 2003 under George W. Bush. PEPFAR has saved more than 25 million lives and helped smother the global HIV pandemic. More than 20 million people—500,000 of them children—were receiving HIV treatment through the program when Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office pausing all foreign aid for 90 days. Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised that waivers would allow the life-saving work to continue, but few have materialized. Meanwhile, USAID staff who were placed on administrative leave can’t distribute medicines or cover costs for transport and personnel. After this dismantling, PEPFAR’s activities in hundreds of places around the world remain restricted at best, and fully paused at worst. Without the support long provided by the program, thousands of people will likely die far younger than they would have with proper medical care. PEPFAR’s current authorization ends later this month; its future after that is unclear.

Similarly, USAID’s efforts to stop Ebola at its source are also now gone. USAID’s role in Ebola containment has long been essential. During the 2014 West Africa outbreak—during which more than 11,000 people died—USAID oversaw training of local health-care workers, the building of Ebola treatment centers, and passenger screening at the borders and airports. A decade later and just days into Trump’s second term, Uganda reported another Ebola outbreak. This time, though, the foreign-aid freeze Trump had put in place meant that USAID was unable to supply the usual resources for transporting lab specimens or implementing airport screening. The day after Musk reassured the Cabinet that Ebola prevention had been swiftly restored, the State Department canceled crucial contact tracing and surveillance efforts for Uganda’s outbreak. With USAID nowhere to be found, the WHO scaled up its own response. That’s something, for now, but America’s absence is shameful.

Moreover, the WHO may not have the capacity to do so for much longer. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order moving to withdraw from the WHO, accusing it of demanding “onerous payments from the United States.” In 2023, the U.S. contributed $481 million—an eighth of what Americans spend on professional dog-training services every year—to WHO’s operating budget. Admittedly, many Americans—fueled by Trump’s denigration of the organization—developed a deep distrust of the WHO following perceived missteps during the coronavirus pandemic. Even its supporters can see the organization’s flaws—it’s bureaucratic, sclerotic, and overdue for reform. Despite these shortcomings, it is an organization we desperately need, and no real alternative exists.

WHO is the only international organization that can identify and respond to emerging threats early on, such as flare-ups of unidentified outbreaks like the one currently circulating in northwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its global network of laboratories to detect infectious threats—known as the Gremlin—relies heavily on U.S. support and is now at risk of closure. And even as its partnerships alongside U.S. colleagues have strengthened surveillance, containment, and readiness abroad, the WHO also helps us here at home. On the same day as Musk’s Ebola comments, the FDA canceled the meeting where experts decide next season’s flu-vaccine composition. Going forward, the U.S. will have to wait on WHO guidance for that crucial decision and download the recipe for next year’s flu shot. If America keeps abdicating its leadership, it will be forced to rely on an organization whose funding it is slashing and whose collaboration it is severing. Although the WHO might still scrape together funds and staff, that’s not guaranteed—especially if other nations follow Trump’s example and cut ties or funding.

[Katherine J. Wu: Inside the collapse at the NIH]

With USAID and WHO under siege, more responsibility for global disease detection and response would fall on the CDC. But the future of the world’s preeminent “disease detectives” is at risk as well. The plan to slash the next cohort of CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officers—think Kate Winslet’s character in Contagion—was thankfully stopped at the 11th hour, but about 750 CDC staff were still let go in recent cuts, including many stationed on outbreak front lines across the country and around the globe (about 180 of those terminated were later reinstated). Certain pages on the CDC website were deleted, and when a judge ordered them restored, many had been dramatically altered. CDC communications such as the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report—which providers rely on to track health threats—were abruptly paused for the first time in more than 60 years. CDC staff were also ordered to stop communicating with, and to take their names off any scientific papers written with, anyone from the WHO, further weakening the CDC’s reach and insight into what’s happening around the world. Whether the issue is cuts to USAID, defunding the WHO, or hobbling the CDC, the end result is the same: America is walking away from global health leadership, making the entire world less safe—including us.

Understand how this will work at a practical level: Until recently, countries had compelling reasons to report outbreaks, even if such transparency sometimes came with travel bans or other stigmatizing restrictions. Those sticks were often worth the carrots, namely USAID funding and CDC expertise that would appear and help quickly end outbreaks. Now, with no carrots on offer, why would any country submit to the stick? Future outbreaks may be reported too late or not at all—leaving America oblivious to emerging health crises. Since 2014, seven public-health emergencies of international concern (PHEICs) have been declared by the WHO. The number of Ebola outbreaks is escalating, and climate change will intensify the emergence and spread of known and potentially unknown microbes.

It is in America’s interest to reverse course immediately and rebuild the crucial infrastructure needed to detect and respond to outbreaks. Not only is this the right thing to do, but it also makes economic sense. In 1980, at the height of the Cold War, the WHO declared smallpox eradicated—a milestone achieved through joint U.S. and Soviet support. Americans invested about $30 million to stamp out smallpox, a fraction of what the country now saves every year by no longer needing to vaccinate against or treat smallpox—to say nothing of the lives saved.

Americans believe that about 25 percent of the country’s budget is spent on foreign aid. In reality, the figure is 1 percent, or at least it was. USAID’s entire 2023 spending was $43 billion—a 20th of the U.S. defense budget and about what Musk’s enterprises have received in government funding. The CDC’s was even less, just $9 billion.

[Nicholas Florko: Spared by DOGE—for now]

Despite his actions, Musk clearly understands that these systems are essential for America’s security. After admitting his Ebola error, he quickly clarified: “I think we all want Ebola prevention.” That would require pulling USAID’s most essential remnants out of the dustbin. The U.S. must also reengage with the WHO and negotiate the terms of its renewed support and engagement with the organization before it’s too late. And for all the distrust many Americans harbor toward the CDC post-pandemic, they must rally around it—an agency whose role will become only more indispensable as measles, bird flu, and other pathogens spread across the country.

Now, and with startling speed, the country is turning its back on global health. In doing so, it is endangering other nations, and also itself. USAID’s account on X, once a digital chronicle of its achievements, is gone. When I search for it on my phone, I get an error message: “Something went wrong. Try again.” We must heed that warning. Musk and Trump have destroyed the shield that once protected America from the next global contagion. Deadly diseases don’t bother with borders; no wall will keep them out. If America stays the course, “Something went wrong” will become the epitaph of a great country, one that once led the world in global health preparedness. It will be deeply missed.

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At least the Oval Office meeting held by President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was held in front of the cameras. False friendliness in public by Trump and Vance, followed by behind-the-scenes treachery, would have been much more dangerous to the Ukrainian cause.

Instead, Trump and Vance have revealed to Americans and to America’s allies their alignment with Russia, and their animosity toward Ukraine in general and its president in particular. The truth is ugly, but it’s necessary to face it.

Today’s meeting gave the lie to any claim that this administration’s policy is driven by any strategic effort to advance the interests of the United States, however misguided. Trump and Vance displayed in the Oval Office a highly personal hatred. There was no effort here to make a case for American interests. Vance complained that Zelensky had traveled to Pennsylvania to thank U.S. ammunition workers, because, Vance charged, the appearance amounted to campaigning for the Democratic presidential ticket. “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump angrily explained. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia.”

Both the president and vice president showed the U.S.-led alliance system something it needed urgently to know: The national-security system of the West is led by two men who cannot be trusted to defend America’s allies—and who deeply sympathize with the world’s most aggressive dictator.

Through the Cold War period, Americans were haunted by the fear that a person with clandestine loyalties to a hostile foreign power might somehow rise to high office. In the late 1940s, the Alger Hiss case convulsed the country. Hiss’s accusers charged—and it later proved true—that Hiss had betrayed U.S. secrets to Soviet spymasters in the 1930s, when Hiss served as a junior official in the Department of Agriculture. The secrets were not very important; they included designs for a new fire extinguisher for U.S. naval ships. But Hiss himself was a rising star. The possibility that a person with such secrets in his past might someday go on to head the Department of State or Central Intelligence Agency once tormented Americans.

But what if the loyalties were not clandestine, not secret? What if a leader just plain blurted out on national television that he despises our allies, rejects treaties, and regards a foreign adversary as a personal friend? What if he did it again and again? Human beings get used to anything. But this?

It’s not hard to imagine a president of Estonia or Moldova in that Oval Office chair, being berated by Trump and Vance. Or a president of Taiwan. Or, for that matter, the leaders of core U.S. partners such as Germany and Japan, which entrusted their nations’ security to the faith and patriotism of past American leaders, only to be confronted by the faithless men who hold the highest offices today.

We’re witnessing the self-sabotage of the United States. “America First” always meant America alone, a predatory America whose role in the world is no longer based on democratic belief. America voted at the United Nations earlier this week against Ukraine, siding with Russia and China against almost all of its fellow democracies. Is this who Americans want to be? For this is what America is being turned into.

The Trump administration’s elimination of PEPFAR, the American program to combat HIV infection in Africa, symbolizes the path ahead. President George W. Bush created the program because it would do immense good at low cost, and thereby demonstrate to the world the moral basis of American power. His successors continued it, and Congresses of both parties funded it, because they saw that the program advanced both U.S. values and U.S. interests. Trump and Vance don’t want the United States to be that kind of country anymore.

American allies urgently need a Plan B for collective security in a world where the U.S. administration prefers Vladimir Putin to Zelensky.

The American people need to reckon with the mess Trump and Vance are making of this country’s once-good name—and the services they are performing for dictators and aggressors. There may not be a deep cause here. Trump likes and admires bad people because he is himself a bad person. When Vance executed his personal pivot from Never Trump to Always Trump, he needed a way to prove that he had truly crossed over to the dark side beyond any possibility of reversion or redemption; perhaps his support for Russia allowed him to do that. But however shallow their motives, the consequences are profound.

In his first term, Trump sometimes seemed a rogue actor within his own administration. The president expressed strange and disquieting opinions, but his Cabinet secretaries were mostly normal and responsible people. The oddball appointees on the White House staff were contained by the many more-or-less normal appointees. This time, Trump is building a national-security system to follow his lead. He has intimidated or persuaded his caucus in the House to accept—and his caucus in the Senate not to oppose—his pro-authoritarian agenda.

The good and great America that once inspired global admiration—that good and great America still lives. But it no longer commands a consensus above party. The pro-Trump party exposed its face to the world in the Oval Office today. Nobody who saw that face will ever forget the grotesque sight.

In its earliest days, the second Trump administration cut off lifesaving food and medical aid to countries worldwide. It halted efforts to stop teens from joining drug cartels in Mexico. And it shut down programs aimed at resettling Afghans who assisted U.S. troops during the fight against the Taliban.

But at least initially, the budget for expensive artwork to hang in U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide remained robust.

The State Department planned, for instance, to purchase a $650,000 “triple-height suspended sculpture” for its embassy in Brasília. It had designs on a $55,000 “wall installation” in Malawi. A “textile work” that costs $105,000 and a $94,000 “suspended sculpture that would span two levels” were on the books for Mauritius. And $550,000 was set aside for “three ceiling suspended sculptures” that would hang in the “main atrium space” of the American embassy in Riyadh.

The intended purchases, which total nearly $2 million, were described to me by a U.S. government official with information about the State Department’s spending plans. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of retribution. I verified the planned acquisitions by reviewing a government document—dated earlier this month, weeks after Donald Trump took office—with itemized descriptions of the artwork.

When I asked about the planned purchases this week, a State Department spokesperson said that they had been developed and approved by the Biden administration. The spokesperson claimed in an email that “in line with the Trump administration’s priorities, all art-related purchases are suspended until further notice.” The spokesperson added that “zero taxpayer dollars” had been spent on the art.

But when pressed for information about when the purchases had been suspended or how the order had been carried out, the State Department spokesperson did not specifically answer. The suspension of art purchases, the spokesperson said, was not a result of executive action by Trump. Instead, the spokesperson said, “halting the purchase is rooted in an organizational ethos of reevaluating expenditures with the objectives of the new Administration in mind.”

Asked a second time when the State Department had decided to no longer buy the art, the spokesperson did not provide any timeline or evidence that the purchases had been suspended before I raised the question.

The lack of transparency over the suspension of art purchases contrasts with the gleefully public way in which Trump and Elon Musk, the billionaire DOGE co-founder, have approached cuts to foreign aid. Trump’s administration has slashed the foreign-aid budget in the name of rooting out “waste” and “fraud.” Musk, the world’s richest man, has described USAID, without evidence, as a “criminal” enterprise and has boasted of skipping “great parties” so he could spend the weekend feeding the agency “into the wood chipper.”

Had the art purchases gone through, they would not have been out of the ordinary. Such acquisitions are a staple of government spending and count toward the half percent of the federal budget that is allocated to the State Department. The department’s Art in Embassies Program explains on its website that it “bridges cultures and strengthens ties with our allies through the power of visual art and creative exchanges.”

The program, described as a collaboration with artists, museums, collectors, and galleries worldwide, “curates around 60 exhibitions each year and has established more than 100 permanent art collections in diplomatic spaces spanning 189 countries.”

But at a time when the foreign-aid budget is being decimated, the planned purchases stood out.

In Mexico City, prior to the cuts, USAID had been in the process of launching programs focused on stopping gender-based violence and dissuading young people from joining cartels. Combined, the programs would have cost less than $1 million for one year, a Mexico-based Foreign Service officer told me. But those efforts are now suspended indefinitely. Meanwhile, plans to install a $110,000 painting outside the embassy’s executive suite were proceeding as of earlier this month.

“Nothing that they’re doing makes sense in terms of efficiency,” said the Foreign Service officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “And so it’s really not cool that whoever is making these decisions would think that $1 million worth of art is what the State Department should be spending their money on now.”

The Trump administration is firing some 2,000 USAID workers in the United States and is set to recall nearly all of the agency’s officers stationed abroad. Last week, a federal judge cleared the way for the plan to move ahead, with most internationally based USAID employees given 30 days to return to the country.

“I’ll probably have to live in a family member’s basement,” the Mexico-based Foreign Service officer told me. “Are they going to pay us; are they going to fire us when we land?”

Within hours of taking office, Trump issued a blanket freeze on foreign aid, including drugs to treat HIV and food for starving children. Within days, a halt-work order swept across USAID; workers overseas were left in limbo, with no ability to do work, as food and other supplies sat unused. Over recent weeks, as Musk and the White House accused USAID workers of criminality and fraud without providing evidence, Pete Marocco, a Trump loyalist put in charge at USAID, has moved to systematically dismantle the agency.

When confronted by a reporter with some of the disinformation he’s spread about USAID, Musk responded: “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect, and should be corrected.” Since then, he has continued to post falsehoods to his more than 200 million followers on X, his social-media platform.

In a court filing on Wednesday, Marocco said that 92 percent of USAID contracts, totaling roughly $57 billion, “were terminated” after a review by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Told of the planned art purchases before the apparent suspension, current and fired USAID employees reacted with derisive laughs and expletives.

“No, no,” a recently fired USAID worker told me. “And then I get cut because I’m providing, like, fucking grain from American farmers in Kansas to farmers in Southern Africa. Fuck that.”

With approximately the same amount of money that had earlier been set aside for embassy art, the fired USAID worker said, the U.S. could continue supporting farmers in Southern Africa as the region recovers from one of its worst droughts in recent history.

It was crucial to “get these seeds, to get them planted before the rainy season. And we were just getting them in there. And now the plug was pulled,” the fired worker said. “Now we’re letting those fields just, to what, to rot?”

A Foreign Service officer who recently had to evacuate from the Democratic Republic of the Congo told me that she is living in a basement with her husband and children. She’d been instructed to return to Washington and report to USAID headquarters, only for the office to be closed to all staff.

“I haven’t been sleeping; I haven’t been eating,” the officer said. “My husband has not been doing either of those things either. We’ve both been frantically applying for jobs and checking our finances.”

“I essentially am grieving the loss of a life, a profession, security, trust in our government, possibly all of our belongings and our democracy,” she told me.

Over in Doha, Qatar, the State Department had plans to acquire a $60,000 series of “works on paper” drawings. Qatar is one of the main processing points for Afghan refugees, including those who helped the U.S. government during its war against Taliban fighters and who are vulnerable to retaliation now that the radical-Islamist movement is in power. More than 2,000 Afghans are stuck in Doha after Trump indefinitely suspended funding for a program that relocated Afghans to the United States.

“I’ve been to the ambassador’s houses in Mexico City and Doha, I’ve been to those places, and there’s a shit ton of art already,” says Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran and the head of #AfghanEvac, a coalition of veterans and advocates helping Afghans who are seeking resettlement.

“We can’t fund taking care of our wartime allies to the tune of $18,000 per person,” VanDiver told me, citing government figures. “But we can buy sculptures and art so that President Trump’s ambassadors can look at more pretty things in addition to the pretty things already there.”