Hundreds of thousands of children will die because a thin-skinned manbaby briefly turned the presidency over to an even bigger one

This report [free link] on the destruction of USAID is a chillingly instructive window into the Trumpian mode of governance. The process started with a vague executive order, and the original idea wasn’t to end USAID (which had survived the first Trump administration with the strong support of Marco Rubio) so much as to mine it for the nominal basis of fake anecdotes about WASTE, FRAUD, AND ABUSE that could be used to justify Elon’s huge pending cuts, like this:

On Tuesday, Jan. 28, Karoline Leavitt took the podium at the White House for her first media briefing as Mr. Trump’s press secretary. Ms. Leavitt listed examples of spending that the administration had frozen. One stood out.

“There was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza,” Ms. Leavitt said. “That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.”

After Ms. Leavitt’s briefing, U.S.A.I.D. staff went to Laken Rapier, the agency’s political appointee for public affairs, and told her that the money in question wasn’t for condoms, but for family planning more broadly, such as birth-control pills, according to people familiar with the exchange.

More important, the Gaza in question was Gaza province, a part of Mozambique, in southern Africa — almost 4,000 miles away from the Gaza Strip. They urged Ms. Rapier to alert the White House, so it could at least avoid repeating the statement.

The warnings from staff went unheeded. The following day, Mr. Trump expanded on the claim during a White House event. “We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas,” he said, generating laughter. Mr. Trump added that Hamas used condoms “as a method of making bombs,” without explaining what that meant.

“These were the types of payments, and many others,” Mr. Trump said. “I could stand here all day and tell you the things that we found.”

An anodyne and obviously beneficial plan to distribute birth control in Mozambique becoming TERRORIST CONDOM BOMBS in the Gaza Strip is an all-too-representative example of how the MAGA information puke funnell operates. It would almost be funny if it wasn’t for the consequences. What happened is that Big Balls’s friend issued a baseless and illegal order the professionals at USAID refused to immediately follow:

The next day — Thursday, Jan. 30 — marked a turning point. Instead of redirecting U.S.A.I.D., the Trump administration and DOGE began moving to shut it down.

That morning, DOGE members approached top U.S.A.I.D. officials, seeking to back up their assertion that some of the people sent home were involved in improper payments.

That evidence turned out to be thin: It revolved around an email that Luke Farritor sent to his teammates in which he shared the results of his review of U.S.A.I.D. payments since the executive order was signed.

“I could be wrong,” Mr. Farritor wrote in the message, which was reviewed by The Times. “My numbers could be off.”

The members of DOGE also said they would not allow the senior employees who had been put on leave to come back, regardless of the evidence, according to an internal memo reviewed by The Times. They demanded that some of those people be fired.

Senior career staff members pushed back. Nick Gottlieb, U.S.A.I.D.’s director of employee and labor relations and the person who had put the 57 people on leave three days before, told Mr. Gray in the memo that he believed keeping the people on leave was unjustified, and that DOGE’s orders to fire some of them were unlawful.

“There is no evidence any of them attempted to circumvent the president’s orders,” Mr. Gottlieb wrote. He added that he would report DOGE’s actions to the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency that protects federal employees, including whistle-blowers.

Mr. Gottlieb sent those employees a follow-up email on Thursday afternoon, saying he had no grounds for keeping them on leave.

It was, in the eyes of DOGE and the White House, the ultimate act of resistance — a clear-cut case of insubordination by a career official.

And it was, by many accounts, the moment that sealed U.S.A.I.D.’s fate.

[…]

DOGE made a striking demand, ordering Mr. Gray to consent to locking every U.S.A.I.D. employee worldwide out of the agency’s systems, including phones and emails. Mr. Marocco, who joined some of those conversations by phone, echoed that demand, the people said.

Mr. Gray refused. Mr. Lewin then called Mr. Musk, and handed the phone to Mr. Gray. Mr. Musk repeated the demand, according to the people familiar with what happened.

Again, Mr. Gray refused. He said that U.S.A.I.D. staff members were in the midst of being evacuated from the Democratic Republic of Congo because of civil unrest. They were fighting Ebola in Uganda. They were helping move food into Gaza.

Suddenly cutting off access to U.S.A.I.D. systems could get people killed, Mr. Gray said.

The result of Gray just doing his job and not getting some of his courageous employees put at risk for their lives was one of the richest men in world history making the impulsive decision to destroy the agency and condemn countless poor people to their doom out of pure spite:

On Sunday, Feb. 2, thousands of U.S.A.I.D. staff members lost access to their email accounts and computer systems, according to a lawsuit filed by employees. At 12:20 p.m. that afternoon, Mr. Musk wrote on X: “U.S.A.I.D. is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”

That evening, Mr. Trump weighed in publicly on U.S.A.I.D. “It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out,” he told reporters a little after 7 p.m. “And then we’ll make a decision.”

Within a few hours, that decision was announced — not by the president or his secretary of state, but by Mr. Musk.

That night around midnight, Mr. Musk said on X that he had obtained Mr. Trump’s approval to shut down the agency.

“As we dug into U.S.A.I.D.,” Mr. Musk said, “it became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it, but we have actually just a ball of worms.”

Around 12:45 a.m. that morning — Monday, Feb. 3 — a DOGE member emailed U.S.A.I.D. employees, telling them not to come into the office that day. At 1:54 a.m., Mr. Musk posted his now-infamous message on X: “We spent the weekend feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”

At the agency’s Washington offices that morning, staff members who got in fielded requests from colleagues to collect their personal items. One person recounted going desk to desk with a tote bag, gathering up family photos to return to their owners.

Not far away, at the State Department, Mr. Marocco told a meeting of senior diplomats and other officials that U.S.A.I.D. was getting shut down. “We’re going to be doing this,” Mr. Marocco said, according to a person who was in the meeting. Career officials in the room were too shocked to respond.

At this point I’m reminded of Ross Douthat asserting that there wasn’t much risk in a second Trump administration because Elon Musk would be involved. Oopsie! Even in the unlikely event that Elon isn’t coming back, the lives destroyed by his tenure and the goons he installed are going to take years to fully comprehend.