Americans have plenty to worry about these days when it comes to infectious-disease outbreaks. This is the worst flu season in 15 years, there’s a serious measles outbreak roiling Texas, and the threat of bird flu isn’t going away. “The house is on fire,” Denis Nash, an epidemiologist at CUNY School of Public Health, told me. The more America is pummeled by disease, the greater the chance of widespread outbreaks and even another pandemic.

As of this week, the federal government may be less equipped to deal with these threats. Elon Musk’s efforts to shrink the federal workforce have hit public-health agencies, including the CDC, NIH, and FDA. The Trump administration has not released details on the layoffs, but the cuts appear to be more than trivial. The CDC lost an estimated 700 people, according to the Associated Press. Meanwhile, more than 1,000 NIH staffers reportedly lost their jobs.

Perhaps as notable as who was laid off is who wasn’t. The Trump administration initially seemed likely to target the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, a cohort of doctors, scientists, nurses, and even veterinarians who investigate and respond to disease outbreaks around the world. Throughout the program’s history, EIS officers have been the first line of defense against anthrax, Ebola, smallpox, polio, E. coli, and, yes, bird flu. Four recent CDC directors have been part of the program.

The layoffs were mostly based on workers’ probationary status. (Most federal employees are considered probationary in their first year or two on the job, and recently promoted staffers can also count as probationary.) EIS fellows typically serve two-year stints, which makes them probationary and thus natural targets for the most recent purge. EIS fellows told me they were bracing to be let go last Friday afternoon, but the pink slips never came. Exactly why remains unclear. In response to backlash about the planned firings, Musk posted on X on Monday that EIS is “not canceled” and that those suggesting otherwise should “stop saying bullshit.” A spokesperson for DOGE did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

This doesn’t mean EIS is safe. Both DOGE and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s newly confirmed health secretary, are just getting started. More layoffs could still be coming, and significant cuts to EIS would send a clear message that the administration does not believe that investigating infectious-disease outbreaks is a good use of tax dollars. In that way, the future of EIS is a barometer of how seriously the Trump administration takes the task of protecting public health.

Trump and his advisers have made it abundantly clear that, after the pandemic shutdowns in 2020, they want a more hands-off approach to dealing with outbreaks. Both Trump and Kennedy have repeatedly downplayed the destruction caused by COVID. But so far, the second Trump administration’s approach to public health has been confusing. Last year, Trump said he would close the White House’s pandemic office; now he is reportedly picking a highly qualified expert to lead it. The president hasn’t laid out a bird-flu plan, but amid soaring egg prices, the head of his National Economic Council recently said that the plan is coming. Kennedy has also previously said that he wants to give infectious-disease research a “break” and focus on chronic illness; in a written testimony during his confirmation hearings, he claimed that he wouldn’t actually do anything to reduce America’s capacity to respond to outbreaks.

The decision to spare EIS, at least for now, only adds to the confusion. (Nor is it the sole murky aspect of the layoffs: Several USDA workers responding to bird flu were also targeted, although the USDA told me that those cuts were made in error and that it is working to “rectify the situation.”) On paper, EIS might look like a relatively inconsequential training program that would be apt for DOGEing. In reality, the program is less like a cushy internship and more akin to public health’s version of the CIA.

Fellows are deployed around the world to investigate, and hopefully stop, some of the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The actual work of an EIS officer varies depending on where they’re deployed, though the program’s approach is often described as “shoe-leather epidemiology”—going door to door or village to village probing the cause of an illness in the way a New York City detective might investigate a stabbing on the subway. Fellows are highly credentialed experts, but the process provides hands-on training in how to conduct an outbreak investigation, according to Nash, the CUNY professor, who took part in the program. Nash entered EIS with a Ph.D. in epidemiology, but “none of our training could prepare us for the kinds of things we would learn through EIS,” he said.

In many cases, EIS officials are on the ground investigating before most people even know there’s a potential problem. An EIS officer investigated and recorded the United States’ first COVID case back in January 2020, when the virus was still known as 2019-nCoV. It would be another month before the CDC warned that the virus would cause widespread disruption to American life.

More recently, in October, EIS officers were on the ground in Washington when the state was hit with its first human cases of bird flu, Roberto Bonaccorso, a spokesperson with the Washington State Department of Health, wrote to me. “Every single outbreak in the United States and Washington State requires deployment of our current EIS officers,” Bonaccorso said.

EIS is hardly the only tool the federal government uses to protect the country against public-health threats. Managing an outbreak requires coordination across an alphabet soup of agencies and programs; an EIS fellow may have investigated the first COVID case, but that of course didn’t stop the pandemic from happening. Other vital parts of how America responds to infectious diseases were not spared by the DOGE layoffs. Two training programs with missions similar to that of EIS were affected by the cuts, according to a CDC employee whom I agreed not to identify by name because the staffer is not authorized to talk to the press.

The DOGE website boasts of saving nearly $4 million on the National Immunization Surveys, collectively one of the nation’s key tools for tracking how many Americans, particularly children, are fully vaccinated. What those cuts will ultimately mean for the future of the surveys is unknown. A spokesperson for the research group that runs the surveys, the National Opinion Research Center, declined to comment and directed all questions to the CDC.

And more cuts to the nation’s public-health infrastructure, including EIS, could be around the corner. RFK Jr. has already warned that certain FDA workers should pack their bags. Kennedy has repeatedly claimed that public-health officials inflate the risks of infectious disease threats to bolster their importance with the public; EIS fellows are the first responders who hit the ground often before public officials are even sounding the alarm bells.

Ironically, the work of the EIS is poised to become especially pressing during Trump’s second term. If measles, bird flu, or any other infectious disease begins spreading through America unabated after we have fired the public-health workforce, undermined vaccines, or halted key research, it will be the job of EIS fellows to figure out what went wrong.

The best way to dismantle the federal government, then repurpose it as a tool of personal power and ideological warfare, is to start with the soft targets. Entitlements and defense, which comprise more than half of federal spending and a large share of its fraud and waste, enjoy too much support for Elon Musk to roll them up easily. But nothing is less popular than sending taxpayers’ money to unknown people in poor, faraway countries that might be rife with corruption. Americans dislike foreign aid so much that they wrongly believe it consumes at least a quarter of the budget (in the previous fiscal year, aid constituted barely 1 percent). President John F. Kennedy understood the problem, and after creating the United States Agency for International Development, in 1961, he told his advisers: “We hope we can tie this whole concept of aid to the safety of the United States. That is the reason we give aid. The test is whether it will serve the United States. Aid is not a good word. Perhaps we can describe it better as ‘Mutual Assistance.’ ” At another meeting, Kennedy suggested “International Security.”

USAID continued for the next six decades because leaders of both parties believed that ending polio, preventing famine, stabilizing poor countries, strengthening democracies, and opening new markets served the United States. But on January 20, within hours of his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that froze foreign aid. USAID was instructed to stop nearly all work. Its Washington headquarters was occupied and sensitive data were seized by whiz kids from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. One of their elder members, a 25-year-old software engineer and Matt Gaetz fan named Gavin Kliger, acquired an official email address to instruct the staff of USAID to stay home.

Contractors were fired and employees were placed on indefinite leave; those on overseas missions were given 30 days to return to the States with their families. Under orders to remain silent, they used pseudo­nyms on encrypted chats to inform the outside world of what was going on. When I spoke on Signal with government employees, they sounded as if they were in Moscow or Tehran. “It felt like it went very authoritarian very quickly,” one civil servant told me. “You have to watch everything you say and do in a way that is gross.”

The website usaid.gov vanished, then reappeared with a bare-bones announcement of the organization’s dismemberment, followed by the message “Thank you for your service.” A veteran USAID official called it “brutal—­from some 20-year-old idiot who doesn’t know anything. What the fuck do you know about my service?” A curtain fell over the public information that could have served to challenge the outpouring of lies and distortions from the White House and from Musk, who called USAID “a criminal organization” and “evil.” If you looked into the charges, nearly all turned out to be outright falsehoods, highly misleading, or isolated examples of the kind of stupid, wasteful programs that exist in any organization.

A grant for hundreds of ethnic-minority students from Myanmar to attend universities throughout Southeast Asia became a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrecking crew because it went under the name “Diversity and Inclusion Scholar­ship Program”—as if the money were going to a “woke” bureaucracy, not to Rohingya refugees from the military regime’s genocide. The orthodoxy of a previous administration required the terminology; the orthodoxy of the new one has ended the students’ education and forced them to return to the country that oppressed them. One of Trump’s executive orders is called “Defending Women Against Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”; meanwhile, the administration suspended the online education of nearly 1,000 women in Afghanistan who had been studying undetected by the Taliban with funding from the State Department.

But hardly anyone in this country knows these things. Contesting Musk’s algorithmically boosted lies on X with the tools of a reporter is like fighting a wildfire with a garden hose.

With no workforce or funding, USAID’s efforts around the world—vaccine campaigns in Nepal, HIV-drug distribution in Nigeria, nutrition for starving children in Sudanese refugee camps—were forced to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who championed USAID as a senator and now, as the agency’s acting head, is its executioner) issued a waiver for lifesaving programs. But it proved almost meaningless, because the people needed to run the programs were locked out of their computers, had no way to communicate, and feared punishment if they kept working.

The heedlessness of the aid wreckers recalls Nick Carraway’s description in The Great Gatsby of Tom and Daisy Buchanan: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” An agency of 10,000 employees is shrinking to about 300 and, despite its statutory independence, being dissolved into the State Department. The veteran USAID official I spoke with foresaw a skeletal operation reduced to health and food assistance, with everything else—education, the environment, governance, economic development—gone. But even basic humanitarian programs will be nearly impossible to sustain with the numbers that the administration envisions—for example, 12 staff members for all of Africa.

“This is the infrastructure and architecture that has given us a doubling of the human lifespan,” Atul Gawande, the writer and surgeon who was the most recent, and perhaps last, head of the agency’s Bureau for Global Health, told me. “Taking it down kills people.”

Trump and Musk’s destruction of USAID was a trial blitzkrieg: Send tanks and bombers into defenseless Poland to see what works before turning on the Western powers. The assault provided a model for eviscerating the rest of the federal bureaucracy. It also demonstrated the radicalism of Trump’s view of America’s role in the world.

Every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama understood that American power was enhanced, not threatened, by attaching it to alliances, institutions, and values that the American people support, such as freedom, pluralism, and humanitarianism. This was the common idea behind Harry Truman’s Marshall Plan for postwar Europe, Kennedy’s establishment of USAID, Jimmy Carter’s creation of the U.S. refugee program, and George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. These weren’t simple acts of generosity. They were designed to prevent chaos and misery from overwhelming other countries and, eventually, harming our own. They expanded American influence by attraction rather than coercion, showing people around the world that the Leviathan could benefit them, too. Political scientists call this “soft power.”

Every president betrayed these ideas in one way or another, making U.S. foreign policy a fat target for criticism at home and abroad, by the left and the right. Kennedy used foreign aid to wage a bloody counterinsurgency in South Vietnam; Carter put human rights at the center of his policy and then toasted the repressive shah of Iran; Bush, claiming to be spreading democracy to the Middle East, seriously damaged America’s global legitimacy. USAID antagonized host governments and local populations with its arrogance and bloat. “We had a hand in our own destruction,” one longtime official told me. “We threw money in areas we didn’t need to.”

But the alternative to the hypocrisies of soft power and the postwar liberal order was never going to be a chastened, humbler American foreign policy—­neither the left’s fantasy of a plus-size Norway nor the right’s of a return to the isolationist 1920s. The U.S. is far too big, strong, and messianic for voluntary diminish­ment. The choice for this superpower is between enlightened self-­interest, with all its blind spots and failures, and raw coercion.

Trump is showing what raw coercion looks like. Rather than negotiate with Canada and Mexico, impose U.S. demands with tariffs; rather than strengthen NATO, undermine it and threaten a conflict with one of its smallest, most benign member countries; rather than review aid programs for their efficacy, shut them down, slander the people who make them work, and shrug at the humanitarian catastrophe that follows. The deeper reason for the extinction event at USAID is Trump’s contempt for anything that looks like cooperation between the strong and the weak. “America First” is more imperialist than isolationist, which is why William McKinley, not George Washington or John Quincy Adams, is Donald Trump’s new presidential hero. He’s using a techno-futurist billionaire to return America to the late 19th century, when the civil service was a patronage network and great-power doctrine held that “might makes right.” He’s ridding himself and the country of restraining codes—the rule of law at home, the rules-based order abroad—and replacing them with a simple test: “What’s in it for me?” He’s unilaterally disarming America of its soft power, making the United States no different from China, Russia, or Iran. This is why the gutting of USAID has received propaganda assistance and glowing reviews from Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.

Transactional logic has an obvious appeal. Dispensing with the annoying niceties of multilateral partnerships and foreign aid brings a kind of clarity to international relations, showing where the real muscle is, like a strip-down before a wrestling match. Set loose, the U.S. might be strong enough to work its will on weaker friends and neighbors, or at least claim to do so. Trump’s threat of tariffs to intimidate Colombia into allowing deportation flights to land there was like the assault on USAID—an easy demonstration project. His domination of the propaganda sphere allows him to convince the public of victories even where, as with Canada, there was never much of a dispute to begin with. If NATO dissolved while the U.S. grabbed Greenland, many Americans would regard it as a net win: We’d save money and gain a strategic chunk of the North Atlantic while freeing ourselves of an obligation whose benefit to us wasn’t entirely clear.

It isn’t obvious why funding the education of oppressed Burmese students serves our national interest. It’s easier to see the advantages of strong-­arming weak countries into giving in to our demands. If this creates resentment, well, who said gratitude mattered between nations? Strength has its own attractive force. A sizable cohort of Americans have made their peace with Trump, not because he tempered his cruelty and checked his abuses but because he is at the height of his power and is using it without restraint. This is called power worship. The Russian invasion of Ukraine won Vladimir Putin a certain admiration in countries of the global South, as well as among MAGA Americans, while Joe Biden’s appeals to democratic values seemed pallid and hypocritical. The law of “might makes right” is the political norm in most countries. Trump needs no explaining in Nigeria or India.

Coercion also depends on the American people’s shortsightedness and incuriosity. Trump’s flood of executive orders and Musk’s assault on the federal government are intended to create such chaos that not even the insiders most affected understand what’s happening. An inattentive public might simply see a Washington melee—the disrupters against the bureaucrats. Short of going to war, if the U.S. starts behaving like the great powers of earlier centuries and the rival powers of our own, how many Americans will notice a difference in their own lives?

According to Rubio, the purpose of the aid pause is to weed out programs that don’t advance “core national interests.” Gawande compared the process to stopping a plane in midair and firing the crew in order to conduct a review of the airline industry. But the light of the bonfire burning in Washington makes it easier to see how soft power actually works—how most aid programs do serve the national interest. Shutting down African health programs makes monitoring the recent outbreak of Ebola in Uganda, and preventing its spread from that region to the rest of the world, nearly impossible. In many countries, the end of aid opens the door wider to predatory Chinese loans and propaganda. As one USAID official explained: “My job literally was countering China, providing develop­ment assistance in a much nicer, kinder, partnership way to local people who were being pressured and had their arms twisted.” When 70 Afghan students in central Asia, mostly women, had their scholarships to American universities suddenly suspended and in some cases their plane tickets canceled, the values of freedom and open inquiry lost a bit of their attractiveness. The American college administrator responsible for the students told me, “Young people who are sympathetic to the United States and share our best values are not only not being welcomed; they’re having the door slammed in their faces.”

Most Americans don’t want to believe that their government is taking life­saving medicine away from sick people in Africa, or betraying Afghans who sacrificed for this country. They might disapprove of foreign aid, but they want starving children to be fed. This native generosity explains why Trump and Musk have gone to such lengths to clog the internet with falsehoods and hide the consequences of their cruelty. The only obstacle to ending American soft power isn’t Congress, the bureaucracy, or the courts, but public opinion.

One of the country’s most popular programs is the resettlement of refugees. For decades, ordinary American citizens have welcomed the world’s most persecuted and desperate people—European Jews after World War II, Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon, Afghans after the fall of Kabul. Refugees are in a separate category from most immigrants: After years of waiting and vetting by U.S. and international agencies, they come here legally, with local sponsors. But Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller see them as no different from migrants crossing the southern border. The flurry of executive orders and memos has halted the processing of all refugees and ended funding for resettlement. The story has received little attention.

Here’s what the program’s shutdown means: I spoke with an Afghan special-forces captain who served alongside Americans—­when Kabul was about to fall in 2021, he prevented armed Taliban at the airport from seizing U.S. weaponry, but he was left behind during the evacuation. Arrested by the new regime, the captain was imprisoned for seven months and suffered regular and severe torture, including the amputation of a testicle. He managed to escape with his family to Pakistan in 2023 and was near the end of being processed as a refugee when Trump took office. He had heard Trump criticize the Biden administration for leaving military equipment behind in Afghanistan. Because he had worked to prevent that from happening, he told me, “that gave me a hope that the new administration would value my work and look at me as a valuable person, a person who is aligned with all the administration is hoping to achieve, and that would give a chance for my kids and family to be moved out safely.” Biden’s ineptitude stranded the captain once; Trump’s coldheartedness is doing it again.

A sense of loyalty and compassion isn’t extraneous to American identity; it is at the core of national pride, and its betrayal exacts a cost that can’t be easily measured. The Biden administration created a program called Welcome Corps that allows ordinary Americans to act as resettlement agencies. (My wife and I participated in it.) In Pennsylvania, a retiree named Chuck Pugh formed a sponsor group to bring an Afghan family here, and the final medical exam was completed just before Inauguration Day. When resettlement was abruptly ended, Pugh found himself wondering, Who are we? I know what I want to think, but I’m just not sure. The sponsor group includes Pugh’s sister, Virginia Mirra. She and her husband are devout Christians and ardent Trump supporters. When I asked her early this month how she felt about the suspension of the refugee program, she sounded surprised, and disappointed—she hadn’t heard the news. “I feel sad about that,” she said. “It does bother me. It’s starting to sink in. With these people in danger, I would wonder if there would be an exception made for them. How would we go about that?” Her husband frequently sends American-flag lapel pins to Trump, and I suggested that he write the president about the Afghan family. “I will talk to my husband tonight,” Mirra said. “And I will continue to pray that the Lord will protect them and bring them to this country by some means. I do believe in miracles.”

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Era of Might Makes Right.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

If you have tips about the remaking of the federal government, you can contact Charlie, Ian, and Matteo on Signal at @cwarzel.92, @ibogost.47, and @matteowong.52.

DOGE has achieved “God mode.” That’s according to an employee in senior leadership at USAID, who told us that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency now has full, unrestricted access to the agency’s digital infrastructure—including total control over systems that Americans working in conflict zones rely on, the ability to see and manipulate financial systems that have historically awarded tens of billions of dollars, and perhaps much more.

The employee’s account, along with the accounts of several others across federal agencies, offers the clearest portrait yet of just how deep DOGE has burrowed into the systems of the federal government—and the sensitive information of countless Americans.

In the coming weeks, the team is expected to enter IT systems at the CDC and Federal Aviation Administration, and it already has done so at NASA, according to sources we’ve spoken with at each of those agencies. At least one DOGE ally appears to be working to open back doors into systems used throughout the federal government. Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who was recently appointed director of the Technology Transformation Services, requested privileged access to 19 different IT systems administered by teams within TTS, according to two federal workers we spoke with who are familiar with his request. With this level of control, Shedd would be able to not only view and modify federal data, but also grant and revoke access to other people. (In a written statement, Will Powell, the acting press secretary for the General Services Administration, of which TTS is a part, said Shedd needs this level of access to rapidly identify “areas for optimization and efficiencies” and insisted that he is working with “appropriate GSA officials” to follow established protocols.)

[Read: The government’s computing experts say they are terrified]

Over the past few days, we’ve talked with civil servants working for numerous agencies, all of whom requested anonymity because they fear what will happen if they lose their job—not just to themselves, but to the functioning of the federal government. Their observations reveal the abnormal degree of power that DOGE has already achieved. Federal agencies are subject to various forms of administrative and legal oversight, but they operate separately from one another for good reasons: to support a specialized purpose and to insulate them from undue outside influence. Now they effectively roll up to Elon Musk. (Neither the White House nor DOGE responded to requests for comment for this story. Earlier this week, a White House official claimed that Musk is not the head of DOGE. He is clearly the group’s functional leader.)

Among the federal agencies we reported on, USAID is the only one where we could confirm that DOGE has acquired God-mode access across the entire digital system. (The Trump administration has sought to effectively shut down USAID since the inauguration.) But as Musk and his acolytes enter a growing number of federal databases and IT systems, their unfettered access at USAID offers a sense of what they might be able to do elsewhere. At NASA, for example, it could mean access to knowledge about sensitive government technologies used for defense. At the CDC, such ability could expose millions of Americans’ health data and allow DOGE to access labs that store deadly pathogens. At Treasury, such access would allow Musk’s employees to view Americans’ names, Social Security numbers, and financial information. “It is not ridiculous to think they’d have bank-account and routing numbers for every single person in the United States,” the senior USAID source said. “What do you do with this information? I had to ask myself, Do I file my taxes this year or not? I had to sit and debate that.”

The federal government does not typically grant such wide-ranging access to a single entity, let alone one that is effectively under the control of an unelected, erratic, and politically extreme actor such as Musk. The group is working on behalf of Donald Trump, but sources we spoke with emphasized that the level of access DOGE possesses means that the organization may already be able to siphon data that Musk or his agents could hold on to forever, long after his time as a government liaison, or even after a potential falling-out with the president.

One experienced government information-security contractor offered a blunt response to the God-mode situation at USAID: “That sounds like our worst fears come true.” The purpose of DOGE’s incursions remains unclear to employees at these agencies. Musk was supposed to help improve the workings of the government—that is DOGE’s stated purpose. But in the offices where the team is reaching internal IT systems, some are beginning to worry that he might prefer to destroy it, to take it over, or just to loot its vaults for himself.

“Once they’re in, they’re in,” the USAID employee told us. And this is a big part of the problem in a nutshell: Access is everything, and in many cases, DOGE has it.

At USAID and other agencies whose employees we spoke with, leaders explained that Musk’s team could copy and remove information from government servers without anybody knowing. The team could then feed this classified information into AI tools, either for training purposes or to mine the data for insights. (Members of DOGE already reportedly have put sensitive data from the Education Department into AI software.) Within USAID, DOGE has full access to human-resources information—Social Security numbers, addresses, reputational data such as performance reviews, plus classified information and disciplinary information. The USAID source noted that DOGE can also control USAID systems that help with disbursement of funds, building-access tools, and payroll: “If they wanted to change how much a person is making, they could modify that, given their access in the system.” According to the employee, DOGE is also inside of an internal system for managing contracts and grants, which functions like a high-security online marketplace where USAID plans and approves billions in government spending.

Inside NASA, according to one agency employee we spoke with, DOGE workers already have access to contracts, partnerships, performance reviews, classified national-security information, and satellite data, among other materials. The NASA worker told us that such knowledge could erase generations of advantage in aerospace and defense capabilities if it falls into the wrong hands. Agency technologies such as propulsion systems, novel materials, and satellites overlap with Department of Defense projects. Someone with information about NASA’s thermal-protection or encryption technologies could take advantage of vulnerabilities in aerospace vehicles, for example.

[Derek Thompson: DOGE’s reign of ineptitude ]

USAID employees have felt more acute effects of DOGE’s operations. Employees there say they have been rattled by the demands of DOGE engineers: “They have walked in and said to senior staff, You have 15 minutes to do this or you’re fired,” the USAID senior leader told us. Now USAID staff are “operating in a zero-trust environment.” With its God-mode IT control at the agency, DOGE can read emails and chats, plus see who’s attending which meetings. The source described employees in a recent meeting growing alarmed when transcription services seemed to turn on without warning. An employee at NASA reported similar concerns, after unfamiliar messages appeared on workstations. “We’re operating believing our systems are completely bugged,” one person told us.

The senior USAID official fears that DOGE could terminate somebody working in a conflict zone like Ukraine, Sudan, or Ethiopia from an agency system. “If they lose access to their USAID laptop, phone, and accounts, for a lot of them that’s their only means of communication. We are putting their lives on the line,” one said.

For those who have watched DOGE storm into their workplace, what is perhaps most terrifying is its attempts to scale. If DOGE were to acquire God-mode administrative access across many systems, several sources told us, that level of control could affect every citizen at home, and many American interests abroad: personal financial data, defense secrets, and more, all in the palm of Musk’s hand.

There’s reason to believe that health information may be next. The Trump administration fired roughly 700 people at the CDC last weekend. As in other agencies, the firings will hollow out expertise but also remove obstacles to further changes. A CDC employee told us that the agency’s Office of the Chief Information Officer is expecting DOGE, but “no one has seen anyone yet.”

The individual, who has knowledge of how CDC information systems work, fears that DOGE could gain access to an abundant store of sensitive information about health and disease. This year, the CDC is supposed to roll out a central data platform for public-health surveillance and emergency response to better address new threats such as H5N1 bird flu and old ones such as measles. The new system, called the One CDC Data Platform, promises to aggregate all of the CDC’s public-health data, including hundreds of thousands of daily anonymized lab tests, data from emergency-room visits, and measurements from wastewater disease-reporting sites.

The design and rollout of this system were already controversial inside the agency, our source said, even before Trump and Musk came on the scene. Putting everybody’s health data in one place carries risks. Although the health data the CDC houses are usually de-identified or aggregated, “people with very stigmatizing illnesses could be identified by certain characteristics” if the data are exposed or misused, the CDC worker said. What’s more, plenty of health data contain information that, when correlated with other data outside the system, could pinpoint specific individuals. Given all of the data that DOGE appears to be capable of siphoning from all over the government, such identification could become much easier. The CDC collects electronic health-record details from all over the country, meaning that this could affect just about everyone—including us, and you too.

CDC systems control more than mere information about disease. At the agency’s facility in Atlanta, the CDC stores the microbes that cause disease and can hold secrets to treatment. Some are relatively benign, such as strains of E. coli. Others are intrinsically dangerous, including the Ebola and Marburg viruses, and bacterium that causes tuberculosis. These materials are housed in labs with associated biosafety levels. The highest level, BSL-4, applies to only a small number of labs around the world containing “dangerous and exotic” microbes, as the CDC describes them, that pose a high risk of spread.

Access to such labs is managed by computers, and management of those computers is local to the CDC. If DOGE got the same kind of access to CDC IT systems as it has elsewhere, would that give the group direct access to CDC facilities? “Yes, those are all out of CDC level,” our source at the agency told us. Does that mean that DOGE could gain direct access to BSL-4 labs? we asked. “It’s definitely possible,” the employee said.

[Read: If DOGE goes nuclear]

Our source hoped that such a prospect would be averted. (To repeat, DOGE hasn’t taken control of CDC IT systems yet, at least as far as our source knew.) But the employee also explained that the recent layoffs will reduce the agency’s ability to defend against IT or security errors, on top of diminishing morale. The CDC did not respond to requests for comment about whether someone with full, local IT control could indeed grant entry to, or control over, BSL-4 labs and their contents.

The risk of harm, abuse, or political revenge is clear. But simple, brazen corruption is also a concern among the federal workers we spoke with. The CDC staffer wondered if DOGE’s unelected and seemingly unaccountable leadership, including Musk, might simply want to sell the public-health data the CDC collects. Democratic leaders have also expressed the worry that Musk’s interest in SpaceX, which has received billions of dollars in contracts from NASA over the years, creates an untenable conflict of interest. The NASA employee worried that Musk would end up “reaping all of the profits of the investment that the American public put into NASA’s research, which was being shared with the country.” NASA holds technical specs and research data for SpaceX competitors, and insiders fear that such information will soon be compromised, too. They also worry that classified NASA R&D in areas such as quantum, biotech, and astrobiology could be stolen for private gain.

A number of lawsuits have been filed seeking to limit DOGE’s access, with mixed results. Meanwhile, Trump and Musk have both attacked judges who have ruled against their interests; Musk has said they should be impeached. Trump has also indicated that he might just ignore the courts—an act that would be challenging to counter, providing plenty of opportunity for the administration to get its way. Across agencies, leaders have started to step aside voluntarily. Jim Jones, head of the Food and Drug Administration’s food division, resigned this week. Michelle King, who ran the Social Security Administration, stepped down too rather than carry out DOGE’s wishes. The resignations may be principled, but they open the door for more compliant replacements.

The request from Shedd, the former Tesla engineer, in particular, illustrates the variety of avenues and back doors that DOGE and Musk’s allies may have available to enter the government’s systems. According to the two federal workers we spoke with about Shedd’s efforts, such access typically is not granted to TTS leadership and requires a specific reason and the permission of each system’s owner. Shedd initially issued a blanket request, the sources told us, and is now attempting to bypass the individual system owners by seeking permission from other officials, circumventing standard security procedures. He also had not completed a background check, which is usually required for such access, at least as of when he first made the request, according to our sources. How much access Shedd has been granted remains uncertain.

This is the DOGE playbook: There are no norms to be respected, and everything is up for grabs. Once the damage is done, it will be difficult to remedy, especially if DOGE staffers can themselves grant or remove access to others at their discretion.

Musk and DOGE’s first month has been so chaotic, their incursions so haphazard, that assessing what has even happened is difficult. DOGE claims to be improving the government, but the agency workers we spoke with feel that they are being hacked instead. So it is worth stepping back to note the most basic fact: No good reason or case can be made for one person or entity to have this scope of access to this many government agencies containing this much sensitive information. Even in one government office, full administrative access to all systems is the rarest privilege. In the aggregate, across the whole of the government, it would be unfathomable.

As Elon Musk and President Donald Trump attempt to unlawfully obliterate USAID, its advocates have focused on the many ways that shutting off foreign aid damages U.S. interests. They argue that it exposes Americans to a greater risk of outbreaks such as Ebola and bird flu, stifles future markets for domestic producers, and cedes the great-power competition to China. These arguments are accurate and important, but they have overtaken a more fundamental—and ultimately more persuasive—reason for the U.S. to invest in foreign aid: It’s essential to America’s identity.

Following World War II, every U.S. president until Trump used his inaugural address to champion foreign aid and invoke the country’s long-held ideals of decency and generosity. They maintained that Americans had a moral duty to help the deprived. Once Trump was elected in 2016, however, U.S. leaders and aid advocates grew reluctant to talk about altruism. President Joe Biden made no mention of the world’s needy in his inaugural address.

I’m as much to blame for this shift as anyone. I served as USAID’s head speechwriter for six years under the past two Democratic administrations. In that role, I prioritized tactical arguments about America’s safety and well-being in order to persuade the shrinking segment of Republicans who were sympathetic to foreign aid. For a time, it worked. During the Biden administration, Congress spared USAID’s budget from the most drastic proposed cuts, and the agency received unprecedented emergency funding to deal with a series of humanitarian disasters, conflicts, and climate catastrophes.

[Read: The cruel attack on USAID]

Today, however, that line of reasoning is failing. Trump, Musk, and their allies are convinced that administering foreign aid weakens America, rather than enriching or securing it. Marco Rubio used to be one of the agency’s biggest supporters; now, as secretary of state, he’s maligning its staff and abetting its demolition.

A more compelling message lies in the fact that Trump and Musk’s foreign-aid freeze could be one of the cruelest acts that a democracy has ever undertaken. In 2011, when Republican members of Congress proposed a 16 percent cut in annual foreign aid, then–USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah conservatively estimated that it would lead to the deaths of 70,000 children. That is more children than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Depending on how thoroughly Trump and Musk are allowed to dismantle USAID, the casualties this time could be worse. (A federal judge has temporarily blocked their plan to put staffers on leave.)

By assaulting the foreign-aid system, Rubio, Musk, and Trump are redefining what it means to be American: small-hearted rather than generous; unexceptional in our selfishness. To respond by arguing that foreign aid simply benefits Americans is to accede to their view, not combat it.

Instead, advocates of foreign aid should appeal to a higher principle: To be American is to care about those in need. The country is already primed for this message. Americans are an exceptionally charitable people, donating more than $500 billion each year. And although polling shows that a narrow majority of Americans want to cut foreign aid in the abstract, they strongly support the specific programs it funds, including disaster relief, food and medicine, women’s education, and promoting democracy.

[Read: Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play]

That support derives above all from a moral belief. According to a poll by KFF, only 25 percent of respondents cited economic or national-security interests as the most important reason for America to invest in the public health of developing countries. Nearly double—46 percent—said that it’s the right thing to do.

A modern blueprint exists for tapping into Americans’ concern for the world’s poor. During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, proponents of foreign aid emphasized America’s values ahead of its interests, inspiring communities of faith and galvanizing a nationwide youth movement. Rock stars and celebrities echoed the message, which penetrated pop culture. When an earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, a telethon featuring performances by Beyoncé and Taylor Swift raised $61 million; stars including Leonardo DiCaprio and Julia Roberts staffed the phones. No one mentioned security or prosperity. Empathy was enough.

Today, the political and cultural coalitions that championed foreign aid are severely diminished. The Republicans whom USAID once counted on have gone silent. Few faith leaders or celebrities are calling for foreign aid to resume. No widespread youth movement is demanding that we end poverty now. Proponents, myself included, stopped focusing on inspiring the American people, so it’s no surprise that they are uninspired. But we can motivate them again. We just need to appeal to their hearts as much as their minds.

THE SPEED OF THE CRUELTY has been stunning.

In a matter of a few weeks, the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk, has decimated America’s main provider of global humanitarian aid, the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Founded in 1961, USAID has, until now, worked in more than 100 countries, promoting global health, fighting epidemics and starvation, providing treatment for people with HIV/AIDS, educating children and combatting child sex trafficking, resettling refugees and supplying shelter to displaced people across the globe, and supporting programs in maternal and child health and anti-corruption work.

USAID accounts for less than 1 percent of the federal budget. With those funds, it has been responsible for building field hospitals in war-ravaged Syria and removing land mines in Cambodia, funding vaccination programs in Nigeria and access to food, water, electricity, and basic health care for millions of people in eastern Congo. It contained a major outbreak of Ebola a decade ago and prevented massive famine in southern Africa in the 1990s. More than 3 million lives are saved every year through USAID immunization programs.

[Read: America can’t just unpause USAID]

People who have worked in international development for decades will tell you that there is not a single area of development and humanitarian assistance USAID has not been involved in.

On the day of his second inauguration, Donald Trump instituted a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance. Almost all USAID contractors and staff have since been fired or put on administrative leave, the website taken down and signage removed from its headquarters in Washington, D.C. On Friday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order, enjoining the administration from placing 2,200 USAID employees on leave, but the chaos has already generated a global humanitarian crisis.

Many small organizations that relied on USAID have shut down; even the largest ones have been severely weakened. One survey reports that about a quarter of nonprofits said they might last a month; more than half said they had enough reserves to survive for three months at most.

The New York Times reports that funding for treatment for infants born in Uganda with HIV has been stopped, while in South Africa, researchers were forced to end an HIV-prevention trial, leaving women with experimental implants inside their bodies and without ongoing medical oversight. A cholera-treatment trial has been abandoned in Bangladesh. Patients have been told to leave refugee hospitals in Thailand. Soup kitchens that feed hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan have been closed.

As Mitchell Warren, the executive director of the HIV-prevention organization AVAC, told the Times’ Apoorva Mandavilli, “You’ve gotten rid of all of the staff, all of the institutional memory, all of the trust and confidence, not only in the United States but in the dozens of countries in which U.S.A.I.D. works. Those things have taken decades to build up but two weeks to destroy.”

A humanitarian worker in Sudan told The Washington Post that their organization received a stop-work order for grants covering hundreds of millions of dollars. “It means that over 8 million people in extreme levels of hunger could die of starvation,” said the aid worker. “What’s next? What do we do?”

IT WAS NOT ENOUGH for Trump and Musk, the head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to unleash mass suffering and death with the stroke of a pen. They had to slander USAID and spread lies about the agency in the process.

Musk has called USAID “evil” and a “criminal organization.” It is, according to Musk, “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” The agency, Musk added, isn’t “an apple with a worm in it” but “a ball of worms.”

“Time for it to die,” Musk posted on X.

[Read: Paranoia is winning]

For his part, Trump said USAID is a “tremendous fraud” and claimed that the people in the agency “turned out to be radical left lunatics.”

In order to promote this calumny, Trump, Musk, and their acolytes have unleashed an avalanche of falsehoods and disinformation. Not that USAID should be above criticism: As the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff has argued, it can be overreliant on contractors, endlessly bureaucratic, and prone to paying consultants with money that could be better used elsewhere. But none of that matches up with the way Musk and Trump have described it. And authoritarian leaders from around the world are now celebrating the destruction of one of the most important humanitarian organizations in the world.

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing,” George Orwell wrote in 1984.

Six years ago, my colleague Adam Serwer wrote of Trump and his movement that “the cruelty is the point.” That has never been more clear than in the president’s decision to demolish USAID. The cost savings will be minimal; the carnage will be massive. And all of the agony that will be unleashed by this decision—the cries of pain that Trump will never hear, the tears of grief Musk will never see—is not accidental. It was done with malice. This is what Trump and MAGA represent, what lies at their moral core. To be silent in the face of this is to be complicit in what they are doing.

FOR THE PAST six years, Anne Linn has worked for the President’s Malaria Initiative, another U.S. program. But she lost her job earlier this month because of Trump and Musk’s actions. Her contract with PMI was canceled.

She’s proud of her work, and proud of the fact that in the 30 countries where PMI has been operating, the malaria mortality rate has been reduced by half since President George W. Bush launched the initiative, in 2006. (Malaria still kills more than half a million people each year, about three-quarters of whom are children under 5.)

Linn is aware that foreign assistance improves America’s image in the world and helps economies prosper. But that’s not why she’s doing what she’s doing.

“As a Christian,” Linn wrote in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, “I was compelled by the Gospel, the words of Jesus, to use my life to try to diminish suffering for the world’s most vulnerable.”

She was doing that until Trump and Musk set their sights on USAID. Now, she wrote, “children, children of God, will die unnecessarily.”

In an interview with Time, Linn put it this way: “I’m here to do what I can, to be the hands and feet of God in this world. Like, what can I do to alleviate the suffering of others, of my neighbors?”

She’s worried that their suffering will increase because bed nets used to protect people from malaria are still in the warehouse and the people contracted to deliver them have a stop-work order. She spoke of her fears for the pregnant mothers and the children under 5, whom malaria can kill. “Who can read the words of Jesus Christ and think this is okay?” she asked. “That is baffling to me. If we say that we are pro-life, we cannot be okay with this.”

Linn’s question—Who can read the words of Jesus Christ and think this is okay?—haunts me and many others like me. No group is more responsible for the reign of Trump than white evangelicals. In 2024, for the third time, they voted in overwhelming numbers for Trump. Most white evangelicals will not, under any circumstances, break with him. They are beholden to him.

[Read: Trump’s assault on USAID makes Project 2025 look like child’s play]

They read the same words of Jesus as Linn does, but whereas those words have led her to relieve suffering for the world’s most vulnerable, many white evangelicals have ended up in a different place. They are in lockstep with a man who is taking delight in destroying an agency whose decimation will dramatically increase suffering for the world’s most vulnerable.

It is a remarkable thing to witness. There are tens of millions of men and women who are regular churchgoers, who attend Bible studies and Sunday-school classes and listen to Christian worship music, and who would raise a ruckus if anyone in Church leadership interpreted the Bible in a way that deviated even slightly from their doctrine on any number of issues.

And yet, many of these same people insist that their faith commitments have led them to support a president for whom the cruelty is the point. As a result, there is, somewhere in Kenya right now, a mother of three asking, “If I die, who will take care of my children?” Donald Trump and Elon Musk don’t care. It turns out that millions and millions of people who claim to be followers of Jesus don’t, either.

President Donald Trump might have campaigned on lowering the prices of groceries, but even as egg prices have become a minor national crisis, he has stayed quiet about the driving cause of America’s egg shortage: bird flu. Trump hasn’t outlined a plan for containing the virus, nor has he spoken about bird flu publicly since the CDC announced last April that the virus had infected a dairy worker. Last week, the CDC, which has ceased most communication with the public since Trump took office, posted data online that suggested humans may be able to spread the virus to cats. The agency quickly deleted the information.

Bird flu has now spread to cow herds across the country, led to the euthanization of tens of millions of domesticated poultry, sickened dozens of people in the United States, and killed one. The virus is not known to spread between humans, which has prevented the outbreak from exploding into the next pandemic. But the silence raises the question: How prepared is Trump’s administration if a widespread bird-flu outbreak does unfold? The administration reportedly plans to name Gerald Parker as the head of the White House’s Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, which was created in 2022 by Congress and is charged with organizing the responses of the various agencies that deal with infectious diseases. (I reached out to both Parker and the White House; neither replied.)

If the president names him to the post, the appointment might be the least controversial of any of Trump’s health-related picks: Parker is an expert on the interplay between human and animal health who served in the federal government for roughly a decade. But confronting bird flu—or any other pandemic threat—in this administration would require coordinating among a group of people uninterested in using most tools that can limit the spread of infectious disease.

Trump’s pick to lead the CDC, David Weldon, has questioned the safety of vaccines, and Jay Bhattacharya, the administration’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, vehemently opposed COVID shutdowns. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who likely will be installed as the head of the Department of Health and Human Services in the coming days, has implied that Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates have funded attempts to create a bird-flu virus capable of infecting humans, and that past threats of flu pandemics were concocted by federal health officials both to inflate their own importance and to pad the pockets of pharmaceutical companies that produce flu vaccines.

Many of Trump’s health appointees are united in their view that the U.S. overreacted to COVID. They—and plenty of Americans—argue that measures such as masking, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates were unnecessary to respond to COVID, or were kept in place for far too long. Faced with another major outbreak, the Trump administration will almost certainly start from that stance.

One way or another, Trump is likely to face some sort of public-health crisis this term. Most presidents do. Barack Obama, for instance, dealt with multiple major public-health crises, each brutal in its own way. Zika didn’t turn into a pandemic, but it still resulted in more than 300 American children being born with lifelong birth defects. Ebola, in 2014, killed only two people in the U.S., but allowing the virus, the death rate of which can be as high as 90 percent, to freely spread across America would have been catastrophic. In 2009 and 2010, swine flu led to more than 12,000 deaths in the U.S.; roughly 10 percent of the victims were under 18. Even if bird flu does no more than it already has, it’ll still cause a headache for the White House. Bird flu continues to wreak financial havoc for farmers, which is then trickling down to consumers in the form of higher prices, particularly on eggs.

Step by step, the U.S. keeps moving closer to a reality where the bird-flu virus does spread among people. Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that cows have now contracted the variant of the virus that was responsible for the recent fatal case in the United States. That means the chances of humans catching that strain are now higher than they were: Many recent human cases have been in dairy farmworkers. As cases of seasonal flu increase too, so does the chance of the bird-flu virus gaining mutations that allow it to spread freely between humans. If both viruses infect the same cell simultaneously, they could swap genetic material, potentially giving the bird-flu virus new abilities for transmission.

Parker clearly understands this danger. Last year, he spoke to USA Today about the potential for the virus to mutate and change the outlook of the current epidemic. He also wrote on X that “federal, state, and private sector leaders need to plan for challenges we may face if H5N1 were to make the fateful leap and become a human pathogen.” How much leeway the Trump administration will give Parker—or whoever does run the pandemic-preparedness office—to keep the U.S. out of calamity is another matter.

Plenty of public-health experts have come to look back at the coronavirus pandemic and regret certain actions. Should bird flu worsen, however, many of the same tools could become the best available options to limit its toll. Parker, for his part, expressed support during the worst parts of the pandemic for masking, social distancing, and vaccinations, and although he said in 2020 that he doesn’t like lockdowns, his social-media posts at the time suggested he understood that some amount of community-level social distancing and isolation might be necessary to stop the disease’s spread. How eager the Trump administration will be to use such tools at all could depend on Parker's ability to convince his colleagues to deploy them.

The White House pandemic-response office was set up to play air-traffic control for the CDC, the NIH, and other agencies that have a role amid any outbreak. But having a job in the White House and a title like director of pandemic preparedness does not guarantee that Parker will be able to win over the crew of pandemic-response skeptics he will be tasked with coordinating. And his job will be only more difficult after Trump sniped at the purpose of the office, telling Time in April that it “sounds good politically, but I think it’s a very expensive solution to something that won’t work.”

Although Trump appears to have thought better of dissolving the entire office, its director can’t really succeed at fulfilling its purpose without the president’s support. The only thing that could make persuading a group of pandemic skeptics to care about an infectious-disease outbreak more difficult is your boss—the president of the United States—undercutting your raison d’être. Parker has some sense of the enormity of the job he’d take on. In 2023, he tweeted, “Pandemic Preparedness, and global health security have to be a priority of the President and Congress to make a difference.” In 2025, or the years that follow, he may see firsthand what happens when the country’s leaders can’t be bothered.

There is currently no approved vaccine for the highly contagious and deadly Sudan strain of Ebola.

Uganda initiates Ebola trial after a nurse's death from the virus.

A nurse in Uganda's capital, Kampala, dies after contracting the highly infectious haemorrhagic fever.