Taxpayers will pay at least $475 billion so Elon Musk can have fun giving babies HIV

Here’s some math that every American needs to know:

+ $160,000,000,000
That’s the amount Elon Musk claims his (largely illegal) cost-gutting efforts have benefited taxpayers. He has not substantiated it seriously and is a world-historical liar, but since it’s just over 8% of what he promised to cut, let’s go with it for now.

- $135,000,000,000
That’s the amount the Partnership for Public Service estimates Musk has cost taxpayers with his capricious and heartless firing and re-hiring of federal employees.

- $500,000,000,000
The IRS predicts tax revenues will be down by that much, thanks to the Musk-led “rapid demolition” of the agency responsible for collecting our taxes.

American taxpayers will pay about $475,000,000,000 for 100 work days from the wealthiest man alive. And that's not even counting Musk's tax cuts and new no-bid contracts.

And what have we gotten in exchange for our nearly half trillion dollars?

Brett Murphy and Anna Maria Barry-Jester at ProPublica report:

One million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Up to 166,000 people will die from malaria. New cases of tuberculosis will go up by 30%. Two hundred thousand more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade.

And that’s not all, explains the MIT Technology Review:

Around 1,400 infants are being infected by HIV every day as a result of the new US administration’s cuts to funding to AIDS organizations, new modeling suggests.

Calculating the current and future damage DOGE’s efforts are doing to America’s medical research, universities, and health care system is almost impossible to put into numbers, let alone words.

But STAT News tried:

By STAT’s own analysis, billions of dollars that would normally be flowing out to universities, academic medical centers, and nonprofit research organizations have either been staunched or clawed back.

Harder to wrap one’s mind around is the human toll of all these cuts — the thousands of personal tragedies playing out across the country, far beyond the NIH’s Maryland campus — as labs go dark and careers evaporate and clinical trials for new medicines lag. That trauma looks like a young scientist suddenly worried about paying rent, a researcher halting her study of maternal mortality, a lung disease specialist forced out of his dream job by his own conscience, a cancer patient facing a treatment delay, a university administrator trying to hold it all together.

And what is Musk getting out of all this slashing, clearly backed by the president he installed and the GOP establishment that has lusted for the moment when they could lawlessly choke off much of the good our federal government does?

Zachary Bassu at Axios reports:

He's leaving with his reputation wounded, relationships severed, companies in crisis, fortune diminished — and little to show for DOGE but chaos and contested savings.

And as Donald Trump said, “He doesn't need to do this."

So why did Elon Musk do it? And why will he continue to do it? Because we know his promises to step back will likely just leave Trump in the Linda Yaccarino position as the face of the government, while Musk continues to pull many of the strings.

We have to assume he’s doing it for his pure love of the damage, death, and dismay.