Musk and Trump are stopping the distribution of live-saving aid and firing anybody who tells the public about it

These people are just cartoonishly evil:

A new internal memo circulating inside the U.S. Agency for International Development neatly captures this split. The Washington Post reports that the memo warns USAID employees not to communicate with the press about the shocking disruptions in humanitarian assistance that are being caused by the Trump-Musk attack on the agency, which are already producing horrific consequences. The memo said this transgression might be met with “dismissal.”

The memo claims to be correcting a “false narrative in the press” about the disruptions to that assistance. It notes that Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month issued a waiver to “lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” allowing it to continue despite the Trump-Musk freeze in agency spending. This has meant that this assistance has “continued uninterrupted and has never paused,” the memo claims, while warning recipients against any “unauthorized external engagement with the press.”

This is highly disingenuous at best and mostly nonsense at worst. As The New York Times reports, some senior USAID officials recently received an email explicitly directing them to hold off on approving some of this assistance, pending more directives from on high. What’s more, according to the Times, while some of this assistance did continue due to Rubio’s waiver, much of it has encountered serious obstacles.

This assistance—which includes aid for lifesaving food, shelter, and medicine—has gotten bogged down as USAID employees and groups that partner with the agency to distribute these things have struggled to access government funding streams halted by Trump. (A judge has ordered the funds to continue.) In one case, Musk claimed that the administration had restarted some disease-prevention funding, but it remains frozen, the Times reported.

The directive ordering USAID employees to refrain from discussing this with the press represents an unnerving turn in this saga, given how ugly and blatant it is. “This is basically telling USAID personnel not to tell the truth about what they have seen,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior USAID official, told me, adding that this functionally commands USAID staff to “get in line with the propaganda narrative.”

Yet the memo also shows that USAID leaks are infuriating Trump officials precisely because they are exposing the horrifying consequences of the Trump-Musk efforts to cripple this agency.

In this context, let’s also recall that the USAID inspector general recently released a report finding that due to the Trump-Musk pause of funding, nearly $500 million in food assistance was at risk of spoiling. That revealed an extraordinarily cruel and wanton attitude toward the global poor, and barely 24 hours after the USAID inspector general revealed all this, Trump fired him.

Another result of President Elon’s takeover of the administrative state is people faithfully serving the public being stranded in terrible situations:

January 28 began as a normal day for “Marcus Doe,” an employee of the U.S. Agency for International Development stationed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

He boarded a shuttle, bound for his desk at the U.S. Embassy in Kinshasa. His children got on their school bus heading a different direction.

Within hours, everything changed.

Violent political demonstrations erupted and protesters attacked the U.S. Embassy. By the end of the day, most staff were told to evacuate.

But just how they would get back to the United States was unclear:The White House had frozen foreign aid spending about a weekearlier and put senior USAID leaders on leave. The agency had stopped paying for employee travel.

Marcus began to feel “an intense sense of panic” that the U.S. government would abandon itsworkers in Kinshasa. When he finally made it to Washington after a harrowing journey by boat and plane, Marcus was put on administrative leave.

[…]

The USAID staffers in Kinshasa made it back to D.C., but they left behind everything from baby books and children’s favorite toys to vehicles and regular access to neonatal care, according to their sworn declarations. One family had to leave behind their dog.

They don’t know whether they will receive a paycheck or reimbursement, or whether they will even have a job now that they have been stranded in an oddly familiar land.

I am old enough to recall that when Joe Biden did not press the “no chaos” button when removing troops from a failed state, this was widely treated as dispositive evidence that he was incompetent and the weeks of negative coverage delivered a blow to his approval ratings he never recovered from. I’m sure the same principle will be applied to a much more damaging set of facts involving his successor!