People Power: I Saw Musk’s Chaos First-Hand—Millions of People Will Die
Today's guest columnist had a front-row seat as DOGE freeze lifesaving aid overnight—and was appalled to watch Elon Musk tell the world that his behavior had not cost lives.
With PunchUp created for the people, by the people, we hand our loudspeaker to you, in People Power. Lorine Ghabranious spent more than 20 years working at USAID or with USAID-funded programming, focusing on learning, evaluation, and systems change. That was until Elon Musk’s DOGE hollowed it out, and she lost her job. Now residing in the U.K.—a country derided by Musk for its supposed racial divide and crime issues—she is perfectly positioned to give her take on his controversial and divisive interview with The Economist earlier this month. If you’d like to write for PunchUp, contact Tom via punchuptom@proton.me with your pitches.
On the evening of January 19, 2025, a strong, clear thought popped into my head: this might be the last day of my current reality.
What unfolded over the next few weeks and months went beyond anything I could have imagined.
The following day, Donald Trump returned to office and immediately signed an executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), with Elon Musk unofficially at the helm. They set their sights on USAID first. Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Conservative Leadership, had targeted the agency, so I expected scrutiny.
What shocked me was that USAID went first despite its long-standing, bipartisan support from Republicans like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.
Hell hath already reclaimed one of them, though.
By January 24, there was a realization that this was unlike other changes in administration, as it froze nearly 100 percent of all foreign aid spending in an unprecedented move. Every program stopped in an instant.
Critical HIV/AIDS care and antiretrovirals, malaria net distributions, food assistance for malnourished children, health worker training, anti-trafficking support, emergency response to global disasters. All of it halted.
Most of us who worked at or on USAID programs did so because we are at our core humanitarians, but that ecosystem was never just altruism. It was an important instrument of U.S. foreign policy—soft power that bought influence more cheaply than any military could, on under 1 percent of annual federal spending.
Then confusion, panic, and chaos took over.
Do we stop everything we’re working on?
Is this just temporary while DOGE reviews our programs?
What happens to those who are relying on our programs and services?
Is this legal?
Where the fuck is Congress?
Thousands of questions, very few answers. So we did what we did best: united, mobilized on Capitol Hill, and helped the agencies targeted next.
“Zero died from DOGE. Zero. Point. Zero.”
That’s what Musk told The Economist’s Zanny Minton Beddoes earlier this month. A basic search—one even his dismal AI model Grok could manage—turns up study after study documenting the opposite.
The Center for Global Development estimated the 2025 death toll from USAID cuts at 500,000 to 1,000,000—matching impactcounter.com, the site BU’s Brooke Nichols built to document the human toll. And The Lancet projects an additional 9.4 million deaths by 2030, 2.5 million of them kids younger than five, because of global aid budget cuts, including those taken by DOGE.
Let that sink in. 9.4 million additional deaths—2.5 million of them small children—within the next four years, all preventable.
Shunning any accountability, Musk shifts blame anywhere but DOGE. This is from the man who argues that anyone in government without “deep technical understanding” who “isn’t driving the frontier of AI” can’t be trusted to judge direction, which is his case against creating a government regulatory body.
Yet he and DOGE, with zero-point-zero years of government experience, felt qualified to gut agencies they never bothered to understand, spewing lies and leaving a trail of (alleged) ketamine-fueled incompetence.
Funny how that works…
“I think I got a little too involved in politics. I got carried away, frankly.”
Or so Musk told Minton Beddoes. But he hasn’t learned a thing, and he keeps doing the one thing he’s consistent at: talking from both sides of his mouth. He can’t resist getting “carried away” all over again, weighing in on European politics and racial matters on X, while claiming to support “normal people”—a phrase doing a lot of heavy lifting.
He calls Europe, and London in particular, “dangerous,” stating his view that “civil war” in Britain is “inevitable,” despite admitting his last U.K. visit was “a few years ago.” As a current U.K. resident and long-time U.S. resident, that doesn’t match my experience. The data doesn’t either, though we’ve learned neither Elon nor Trump care much for facts.
He reaches for the classic “I’m not racist—I married someone who isn’t white” trope, but then, when Beddoes asks if he’s anti-Muslim, he spews a racist line insinuating Muslims condone rape and murder. It’s laughable how thoroughly he contradicts himself in a single interview. He throws enough spaghetti at the wall that some is bound to stick.
Throwing Stones From A Glass House
Musk’s companies are winning over investors and consumers with a trail of unfulfilled promises, timelines, and visions longer than a CVS receipt. For all the reverence for his vision, he can’t deliver the one thing he’s promised for a decade: self-driving cars.
Nor do they seem to be arriving anytime soon. Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving logged record crashes in May. The Cybertruck was also just declared the biggest car “flop” of all time. Starlink satellites are falling from orbit instead of burning up as promised. But at least he uncovered fraud and abuse, saving the U.S. Government money, right? Also no.
But don’t fret, the newly minted trillionaire has a new prediction that “money won’t matter in 2036” and we will be entering into an “age of amazing abundance.” Sound familiar? Another utopian vision close enough to feel attainable yet perpetually around the corner. In the meantime, he wants people to further grow his wealth by buying into SpaceX’s newly public stock.
You almost feel bad for Musk’s increasing irrelevance and detachment from reality until you remember that actually, as the world’s first and only trillionaire, he has the resources and power to build that utopia now, using his own logic that money won’t matter soon.
It’s time we take back our collective power. Starve him of the attention he craves and fund organizations, communities, and people actually making the world better—not just saying the words while lining their pockets.
Lorine Ghabranious is a systems thinker, practitioner, and ICF-certified coach with over 20+ years of work at the intersection of learning, community-led action, and innovation. Alongside her coaching practice, she supports Career Pivot, a support network for former federal workers, and is exploring solidarity and regenerative economic models. Ghabranious holds a Master’s degree in Human Values and Global Ethics from King’s College London and a Bachelor’s in History with a minor in Elementary Education from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is currently based in Brighton, England.