Elon Musk and his apologists are getting upset by people pointing out that his illegal destruction of USAID had resulted in the avoidable deaths of countless people in exchange for no benefits whatsoever. Always both a maximalist and a liar, he’s claiming that no deaths at all have resulted from his termination of extremely cost-effective aid programs. This is obviously false, as systematic evaluation reveals:

Elon Musk really doesn’t want you to say he’s responsible for the deaths of millions.

Earlier this week, Musk threatened to sue Rep. Ro Khanna for charging him with destroying the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and putting millions of lives at risk around the world:

“There needs to be accountability for Elon Musk,” Khanna said. “You know, they’re celebrating that he created 4,400 millionaires [with his SpaceX IPO], but they don’t talk about the 4.5 million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling USAID.”

In response, Musk called Khanna a liar, threatened to sue, and said he should be in prison.

But Khanna is making a perfectly reasonable claim here. In that quote, he is (carefully) citing a peer-reviewed study that estimated the effects of dismantling USAID. It found that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will result in 14 million deaths overall by 2030, of which 4.5 million will be children under the age of 5.

This is probably a high-end estimate, but even lower end projections with different methodologies sit between 670,000 and 1.6 million annual deaths compared to a fiscal year 2023 baseline.

In other words, the toll from USAID cuts seems to be at best around two-thirds of a million people annually1; that’s about as many people as were killed during the Civil War. At worst, Musk is tied to the deaths of 14 million.

If DOGE had managed to cut tens of billions of dollars from the federal budget, Musk and his defenders would certainly have taken credit. It’s bizarre then to disclaim responsibility for the tragic consequences of the cuts they did make.

“But where are the names? Name the names!” Well, here you go [gift link]:

“There is not even a single dead child!” Musk protested on social media. I noted that I had met many families of children who had died — and that’s when he concluded that I was lying.

Musk’s assertion that not a single child died is absurd, yet he doubled down: “They cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!”

On X, I began to give Musk some names. Let me elaborate:

Jibia was a 10-year-old girl, ranking third out of 58 students in her fourth-grade class in Rwamwanja, Uganda. Aid cuts meant that the local clinic ran out of $2 bed nets to protect from mosquitoes, as well as anti-malaria medicines. Jibia died of malaria last July, her mother told me outside the family home. Medical records confirmed that, and health workers told me that she would have been fine without the aid cuts: Replacing her tattered bed net with a new one could have prevented malaria, and in any case drugs would have helped her to recover promptly.

Yamah Freeman hemorrhaged while pregnant with her third child in her village in Liberia. The United States had provided ambulances to the local hospital, but the aid cuts under Musk and President Trump meant that the ambulances had no fuel. The strongest young men in the village placed her on their shoulders and raced down the path toward town, shouting encouragement to her as they ran, but she bled to death along the way. Her parents and sister told me about this, and I visited her grave.

Achol Deng, 8, had been infected with H.I.V. at birth in South Sudan but had been kept alive by American-provided medicines costing just 12 cents a day. The dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. and the resulting chaos meant that she lost her caseworker and access to medicines, and soon died of an opportunistic infection, health workers told me.

I could keep going. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts have cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide. A study published in the Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates, the aid defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030.

DOGE would, in itself, suffice to make Trump one of the worst presidents in American history. And all the money in the world won’t make Elon Musk any less of a horrible person and I’m happy that it’s getting to him.

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[It is, in fact, pretty clearly worse for all.]

As regular readers know, car bloat is killing us. Recently, the New York Times created an impressive interactive article that details the problems of massive pickups and SUVs in the US. It’s well worth a look.

Perhaps it would make sense for governments to limit the size of vehicles, for the benefit of all. Or perhaps we should all start adding some whirling spike clubs.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/21/us/trucks-suv-pedestrian-crashes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.t1A.miKT.vy9klsVEpc7s&smid=url-share

A federal judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida has dismissed Trump v. Murdoch, tRump’s defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal.

In a 17-page order, Judge Darrin Gayles found that, even assuming everything in Trump’s complaint is true, Trump’s lawsuit “comes nowhere close” to meeting the standard for defamation. Gayles does not weigh in on whether the 2003 Trump letter was genuine, but notes that the lawsuit fails to establish that the reporters acted with “actual malice.”

Specifically, Gayles notes that the reporters reached out to Trump and others for comment, and printed Trump’s denial that he authored the letter in the piece. This showed that the reporters both investigated the letter’s authenticity and allowed readers to draw their own conclusions.

Yet another reminder that the outlets that help him, whether it’s through putting a thumb on the outlet’s editorial scales or handing over huge settlements plausibly deniable cash gifts without a murmur do it because they want to help him and think they’ve found a way to cover their bias.

There’s a link to the order up top. Most available documents are available here, for free.

People who post off-topic comments think the Opinions section of the Wall Street Journal is too liberal.

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[We can still hope for a future of renewable energy.]

I have never understood people who dislike wind turbines. They become a prominent part of any landscape once erected, that much is true. But to me, they are wondrous. They represent the possibility of a better, cleaner future, a future when we are no longer burning a dwindling supply of fossil fuels and polluting the very air we breathe. Aside from oil company executives, who wouldn’t want that?

Regrettably, turbines in Gloucester, Massachusetts, are being decommissioned well before the end of their useful lives. Gloucestrian Sarah Shemkus wrote about the loss.

Link: https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/wind/my-citys-wind-turbines-shutting-down

And no matter how many bad faith arguments are constructed to explain why this doesn’t apply to the housing market, this remains true in that context as well:

After decades of explosive growth, Austin, Texas, in the 2010s was a victim of its own success. Lured by high-tech jobs and the city’s hip reputation, too many people were competing for too few homes. From 2010 to 2019, rents in Austin increased nearly 93%—more than in any other major American city. And home sale prices increased 82%, more than in any other metro area in Texas.

But starting in 2015, Austin instituted an array of policy reforms aimed at encouraging the development of new housing, especially rentals. The city changed zoning regulations to allow construction of large apartment buildings, particularly near jobs and transit. In 2018, voters approved a $250 million bond measure to build and repair affordable housing. Permitting processes were reformed to speed development and reduce costs.

The efforts worked. From 2015 to 2024, Austin added 120,000 units to its housing stock—an increase of 30%, more than three times the overall rate of growth in the United States (9%).

Rents fell. In December 2021, Austin’s median rent was $1,546, near its highest level ever and 15% higher than the U.S. median ($1,346). By January 2026, Austin’s median rent had fallen to $1,296, 4% lower than that of the U.S. overall ($1,353). This decline occurred even though the city population grew by 18,000 residents from 2022 to 2024. In apartment buildings with 50 or more units, rents fell 7% from 2023 to 2024 alone—the steepest decline recorded in any large metropolitan area. Rents declined about 11% in older non-luxury buildings that cater to lower-income renters, known as Class C buildings.

Austin’s success serves as an important example of how regulatory barriers to building more housing are often varied and interconnected. No single solution can solve a housing shortage, but Austin has taken multiple steps that have helped to unlock large amounts of housing supply in its market and reverse rent growth, including rent for tenants of lower-cost, older apartments. The city continues to take forward-looking steps—among them reforming building codes, streamlining permitting, and facilitating the construction of small apartment buildings—to reduce housing underproduction and improve affordability for existing and future residents.

It cannot be emphasized enough that NIMBYS in urban centers in blue states are enemies of civil rights however they would like to think of themselves. NIMBYism also means that what should be more broadly-shared prosperity is both attenuated and disproportionately captured by incumbent homeowners (and, in many cases, the heirs of incumbent homeowners):

But there’s just no sign of any kind of Bay Area population boom. As high tech went from an interesting sector of the American economy to a globally dominant force, the places that saw booming population growth were Phoenix, Houston, Vegas, the remote exurbs of Los Angeles, and Fort Worth.

The three largest companies in the world by market cap are all located in the Bay Area. So is number eight and number nine, and number 10 was founded there.

But it’s not the largest metro area in the world. Or the largest metro area in the country. Or even the largest metro area in California. And that’s despite the weather and basic natural amenities there being dramatically nicer than those that greeted people who moved to Chicago and Detroit and other industrial hubs during their boom times. Alongside the trillion-dollar valuations and insta-fortunes, we in some sense should have been building a Tokyo-scale megacity, with San Francisco looking like Manhattan, skyscrapers next to Caltrain stations, and Marin County featuring the apartment towers it’s depicted as having in “Star Trek: Picard.”

Of course, mega-growth would have caused lots of traffic jams and stressed infrastructure and required the construction of new bridges or tunnels across the bay and new roads and rail lines. But it is possible to do these things. America has fast-growing metro areas. It’s just that unlike in the past, the growth is not concentrated where the economic boom is happening.

Americans sometimes look with envy on the rapid economic growth achieved in China during this period. But if you look at Shenzhen or any other major Chinese city, what you see is dramatic physical transformation across the course of the 21st century. That’s precisely what American public policy has been hostile to, not just in the Bay Area but almost everywhere that isn’t an unincorporated area on the fringes of a Sunbelt metro area.

To have a broad-based economic boom, we need a boomtown.

I get, of course, that “well, just move” is not the answer to the economic problems of struggling areas. At the same time, it’s just factually the case that millions of people did move during this period.

If they had moved to Mega City San Francisco Bay instead of to the suburbs of Fort Worth, almost all of them would have higher incomes. Not because they would have been rich software developers, but because they’d have been selling shovels during the gold rush — doing whatever jobs they do now, but at ground zero for global innovation.

It’s also true that the agglomerations around the tech industry itself would have been even sharper. But then beyond that, you have economic linkages across the country. You don’t build a megacity with only local resources. All of America’s manufacturing might would have gone into building the buildings and supporting the infrastructure that make a megacity. Even a dynamic as simple as “people with bigger homes would buy more appliances” would create jobs and economic opportunities for people far away from California.

Making it legal to build housing, especially multifamily housing, is not a magic bullet that will solve anything, but it would be an enormous net benefit for both equal citizenship and economic growth.

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