By Anthony Joseph

By all accounts, Elon Musk’s short but thunderous stint as a special government employee has left America reeling, and the world mourning.

As Musk walks away from Washington after barely 130 days of chaotic governance via his so-called “DOGE team,” what he leaves behind is not innovation, but incalculable harm: gutted federal agencies, destroyed international aid programs and the seeds of global death and despair.

While Musk’s reign was styled as a libertarian experiment in “efficiency,” it amounted to a brutal war on the social fabric. With all the gleeful recklessness of a billionaire-turned-cartoon villain, Musk wielded executive influence like a chainsaw, targeting critical public infrastructure while extracting private data under the guise of modernization. DOGE, originally hyped as a cute meme coin and tech joke, mutated under Musk into something else entirely: a governing philosophy driven by mockery, deregulation, and disdain for the vulnerable.

Take the case of USAID and PEPFAR, once cornerstone programs in America’s soft power and global moral responsibility. Under Musk’s oversight, USAID was slashed and kneecapped. The result? According to Boston University analysts, 55,000 adults and 6,000 children have died already from preventable HIV-related causes in just four months since the DOGE team’s policies were enacted. That’s 61,000 lives erased, not through war, but through bureaucratic sabotage. Scale that over four years, and we’re potentially talking about millions of unnecessary deaths, global collateral damage in Musk’s domestic vanity project.

This isn’t just about dollars and budget lines. Musk may have boasted about saving $65 billion out of a multitrillion-dollar budget, but what he really saved was nothing of human value. He burned bridges where lives depended on them, particularly in the Global South, where USAID’s programs supported fragile health systems. It is grotesque to imagine a billionaire’s ideology costing this many lives, yet here we are.

And still, Musk’s fanbase cheers. They cheer as steel tariffs rise and children’s toy prices inflate. They cheer as federal town halls turn into angry battlegrounds between betrayed constituents and ghost politicians who dare not show their faces. And as Musk returns to his empire at Tesla, X, and SpaceX, the workers there must reckon with this reality: their genius CEO is being compared, credibly, to figures like Pol Pot and Stalin not for what he did, but for what he dismantled.

This is America’s flirtation with techno-authoritarianism gone violently real. This wasn’t just deregulation, it was dereliction. This wasn’t innovation, it was institutional immolation. The death toll from DOGE policies is not hypothetical. It is happening. It is real. And the stain of it will follow Musk, and all who stood by him, far longer than any meme coin or Twitter trend ever could.

Elon Musk’s brief legacy as a policymaker is a warning. When power is handed to unelected billionaires who treat government like a startup and human beings like data points, the result isn’t disruption, it’s devastation. And for the millions who may yet suffer from the fallout, Musk’s experiment in political vanity may be remembered not as bold, but as bloody.

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