Elon Musk's DOGE Once "Accidentally" Axed Ebola Prevention Efforts

An estimated 131 people have died from the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, out of 513 suspected cases, the country’s health authorities have said. With the virus also detected in Uganda, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared the current outbreak involving the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola a “public health emergency of international concern.” Officials say the Bundibugyo strain may have circulated undetected for six to eight weeks in northeastern DR Congo before lab testing confirmed the virus, complicating efforts to contain it. For years, the US supported networks of laboratories and emergency-response programs through agencies such as USAID and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These programs were designed not only to fight outbreaks, but also to identify and contain dangerous pathogens before they spiraled into regional crises. On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the US from the WHO. All US government funding to the WHO was officially terminated in January 2026, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. One of the major targets of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was USAID, the taxpayer-funded aid agency responsible for supporting outbreak prevention and global health initiatives. During Trump’s first cabinet meeting in February 2025, Musk announced that DOGE had “accidentally” canceled US Ebola prevention efforts before restoring them once the mistake was identified. But as WIRED reported at the time, in reality, the aid response from the US has been severely curtailed by the destruction of the country’s largest foreign aid arm. Current and former USAID workers told WIRED in February 2025 that Ebola experts did not believe issues with Ebola prevention programs had been resolved. Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and a former USAID official, warned in a post on X that the very delayed detection, limited medical countermeasures, and DOGE-era cuts to global outbreak-response tools could make the current Ebola outbreak especially difficult to contain.