Musk's Legacy of Death vs the Rising Movement for Life

As lies about “waste, fraud, and abuse” echo in big, ugly budget bill, it's time to build a movement around the people who will be hurt first & worst

In an Oval Office send-off today, Trump feted Elon Musk for the role he played in a position of unprecedented access to government data under the auspices of an audit of “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

No doubt, these three ills exist in any human institution as large as the US government. But history and experience have shown that any good faith effort to eliminate abuse in a government that serves hundreds of millions of people requires the kind of care and precision you would expect from a surgeon.

Elon Musk chose a chain saw as the symbol of his pseudo-governmental scam.

DOGE was a scam from the start. It was never a department of the government because Congress played no role in creating it. And it was never about efficiency because it took broad and dramatic action to eliminate whole programs before there was any time to conduct an investigation of potential “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

DOGE is a scam, but its consequences are real. According to research at Boston University, more than 300,000 people have died because of the careless cuts Musk made to the USAID program, decimating US investment in fighting hunger and disease around the world.

During the hour Trump and Musk celebrated themselves in the Oval Office today, 103 more people died.

Our Dean at Yale Divinity School, Greg Sterling, spoke out with moral clarity from the very beginning of these cuts. Here’s an excerpt from what he wrote for MSNBC in February.

Whether a person is American or from another country, whether they live next door or half a world away, whether they are our best friend or a complete stranger, Christianity compels its followers to care for them and to help them. Today, this core Christian value is under threat, not from foreign enemies but from our own government, which has proudly proclaimed that the U.S. Agency for International Development is going into the “wood chipper.”…

While I am not in a position to judge all of the policies or practices of USAID, I do know the agency is charged with caring for vulnerable children throughout the world. The U.S. is — and should be — the largest donor for children in the world. Yet, with the latest announced cuts in federal spending, many of the programs that have helped people in need across the globe are at risk, such as the AIDS relief effort credited with saving 25 million lives, mostly in Africa.

These life-saving and life-sustaining programs were canceled because Elon Musk lied and called them “waste, fraud, and abuse.” His lie meant that children died of malnutrition, diarrhea, and tuberculosis. It meant folks showed up for medical appointments and didn’t receive the ARV drugs they need to stay healthy. Countries around the world are asking what has happened to the United States because they have seen the suffering caused by Musk’s lie about “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

We need moral clarity about the lie because it is not going away. Musk’s illegal actions have been halted by courts and protested in the streets. We suspect Musk is departing the Trump regime because his approval rating is lower than Trump’s at 35%. But the lie about “waste, fraud, and abuse” continues in the big, ugly budget bill that is now before the Senate.

Here’s an example from the text of the bill that passed the House.

You may recall, Trump said, “Don't f— with Medicaid,” when he met with the Republicans in the House a couple of weeks ago. He understands how unpopular these cuts are. They would leave 11 million Americans without healthcare and threaten access to critical care for everyone in rural communities. Almost no one wants this. So the text of the bill calls it “wasteful spending.”

Like Musk’s chainsaw, the $1.1 trillion of total cuts proposed in this big, ugly bill would put Medicaid, SNAP, and green energy programs through the woodchipper. They would balloon the deficit in ways that threaten Medicare, all to offset tax cuts for the wealthy and extreme spending on war and more masked militias to attack immigrant communities.

These cuts based on the same lie would also kill—only this time, the people whose lives are threatened are in our communities. They are in our churches and mosques and synagogues, in our schools and community centers. Musk may be leaving, but the lies continue. And now, the lies are coming for us.

As devastating and maddening as this is, we know every lie has its limits in a universe that is held together by truth. No lie can live forever, just as no tyrant can abuse power without eventually facing consequences. People can be deceived. We can be distracted. We can even be self-absorbed. But when death draws near enough to touch us, people also have an innate instinct to live.

This is what we see: life is rising up in people to cry out for life.

That’s what we hear in the graduation speeches that are calling young people to stand for truth and in the judicial decisions that are making clear that Trump’s abuse of power is illegal. Life is rising up to cry for life in protests and direct actions, in legal motions and in petitions to members of Congress. At Moral Mondays in DC, which will continue this coming Monday, June 2^nd, we’ve witnessed life welling up in people who refuse to accept the unnecessary death.

How do we stop the lie? This is the question we hear most these days. It’s at the center of our prayers. This is what we know: we stop the lie by standing with the people who are most directly harmed by it.

The big, ugly budget bill in the Senate right now is a direct attack on poor and working people in America. It takes Musk’s scam and turns it on the so-called populism of the MAGA movement. Stagnant wages and rising costs made Americans desperate for change in 2024. Trump promised lower prices and higher wages, but he has not delivered either. Instead, he’s fighting for a big, ugly bill that would mean death for poor and working Americans.

The DOGE scam is killing people all around the world; unless 3 Republicans in the Senate take a stand against this big, ugly bill, the lie about “waste, fraud, and abuse” will soon be killing people in your neighborhood.

But we know what to do. When the impact of a lie is so clear, we have the opportunity to build something new around shared truth. The Trump regime came to power by playing to fear and division. But by embracing a lie that kills poor people, they have energized a moral opposition.

According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s

Robert P. Jones

, who publishes on Substack at White Too Long, “If you look at the population as a whole, only 30% of American adults cast a vote for Trump in 2024. There’s no legitimate way to read this election as a blank check for the destructive attacks on our nation’s basic values and institutions.” This is a reflection of the fact there were more eligible voters who chose not to vote than who cast a ballot for either Trump or Harris. Indeed, as we argue in our book White Poverty, poor and low-income people, who have historically been low-propensity voters, are the largest swing vote in any US election. In raw numbers, they have the power to swing elections even in states not considered “in play”—if they thought their vote would make a significant difference in their lives.

With one big, ugly bill, the Trump regime and Republicans in Congress have made it clear that poor and working Americans lives depend on stopping their agenda.

PRRI’s data from the first months of this year suggest nonvoters are already feeling that their vote may matter more than they’d though it did. More than a third of nonvoters from 2024 now regret their decision not to cast a ballot in 2024, and among those regretful nonvoters 68% agree Trump is a dictator who must be stopped. It’s a striking data point: nonvoters are almost as opposed to the Trump regime as Democrats.

Now is the time to link up, build a big, broad moral fusion coalition, and commit ourselves to follow the leadership of people who know their lives are at stake. They are crying out around the world, and they are increasingly crying out for their lives close to home.

If we don’t stand with them now, we’ve seen enough to know that the lie will come for all of us eventually.