NY Times columnist compares Elon Musk to history's worst murderers over USAID cuts

Fox News

2 days ago

New York Times columnist David Brooks suggested Elon Musk belongs on a list of history's greatest mass murderers, including Pol Pot, Mao and Stalin due to DOGE'S cuts to USAID.
"So far, 55,000 adults have died of AIDS in the four months since Trump was elected; 6,000 children are dead because of what DOGE did. That's just PEPFAR, the HIV. You add them all up, that's 300,000 dead, and we're four months in. You add that all up and accumulate that over four years the number of dead grows very high," Brooks said on PBS News Hour Saturday.
"There are mass murderers in the world, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, Stalin. We don't have anybody on the list from America," Brooks added.
The New York Times columnist conceded the so-called deaths that he claims Musk is responsible for are not "the same kind of genocide" perpetrated by the despots he cited, but maintained that Musk's closure of USAID made him partially responsible for mass deaths.
The casualty counts Brooks cited were provided by a Boston University digital tracker that monitors deaths that it claims occur from changes in U.S. foreign aid created by Global Health Professor Brooke Nichols. When filtered for USAID cuts, the tracker states that 99,528 adults and 207,680 children have died this year from "funding discontinuation."
The communist regime Khmer Rouge killed between 1.5-3 million people between 1975 and 1979 in the Cambodian Genocide when the group plunged the country into mass violence targeting intellectuals and religious minorities following their overthrow of the Cambodian Monarchy and installation of Pol Pot as dictator in 1975.
Thirty-eight million people died of starvation during Mao's Great Leap Forward and the ensuing famine it produced. Mao biographers Jung Chang and Jon Halliday estimate that Mao was responsible for over 70 million peacetime deaths.
Stalin killed over six million of his own citizens in the gulags, the Great Terror and other actions.
Brooks is purpotedly one of the few conservative voices at the New York Times. However, the columnist has espoused liberal views on a host of topics and has praised Biden's presidency. He has also positioned himself as a fierce critic of President Donald Trump.
"Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies," Brooks wrote in a recent column.
USAID was set up in the early 1960s to act on behalf of the U.S. to deliver aid across the globe, particularly in impoverished and underdeveloped regions. The agency now operates in 60 nations and employs some 10,000 people, two-thirds of whom work overseas — though most of the on-the-ground work is contracted out to third-party organizations funded by USAID, according to a BBC report.
The Trump administration, however, has argued that USAID is a corrupt organization that is mishandling U.S. taxpayer dollars. DOGE froze USAID funds and sent much of its staff home shortly after Trump took office. Musk, who was spearheading the DOGE effort to root out "waste, fraud and abuse" in government, has said the agency is beyond repair. The Trump administration announced that it would be cutting 90% of all USAID contracts in April.
U2 frontman Bono recently made a similar claim as Brooks on Joe Rogan's podcast, saying 300,000 people have died due to USAID cuts. Musk swiftly shot back on social media, calling the Irish rocker a "liar/idiot" and claiming that there have not been any deaths from USAID cuts.
"He's such a liar/idiot Zero people have died!" The Tesla CEO posted.
Musk and Brooks did not respond to Fox News Digital's request to comment.