Filed by The Ghost of HST | May 10, 2025
“These cuts will kill not just children, but millions of children.”
That’s Bill Gates — the monopolist from the ’80s who grew into a philanthropist planning to give away hundreds of billions — sounding the alarm on Elon Musk’s legacy impact on American governance: letting the poor die quietly while burning down his own wealth and whatever was left of his public soul.
At the center of the storm is USAID, the United States Agency for International Development — the government’s last half-hearted attempt to prove we’re still a functioning superpower and not just a gun-toting HOA with a navy and a God complex. Since the 1960s, it’s delivered vaccines, fought AIDS, contained malaria, and kept mothers alive in countries we otherwise couldn’t find on a map.
The week’s flashpoint: a $4 million grant to a hospital in Mozambique. Targeted, functional, boring. It was designed to prevent HIV transmission between mothers and their newborns — not some radical experiment, just medical common sense. But the program got the axe anyway, after Donald Trump farted out a lie about the funding being used to supply “condoms to Hamas.” No evidence, no correction, no shame.
Musk, for his part, admitted the claim was false. “We’ll make mistakes,” he said — like a man who just ran over a child and blamed the car. (I mean, it was a Tesla.)
This wasn’t a budget trim. It was the quiet euthanasia of a lifeline for millions of people… which, let’s be honest, was never going to matter — they live in the Global South, and we’ve already decided they don’t count.
Pull the grants, and the medicine dries up. Pull the programs, and you lose the supply chains, the field staff, the entire ghost infrastructure that makes global health work. This is the scaffolding of survival — and it’s being yanked down by men who think they are each Player One and that empathy is a UI flaw meant for NPCs who forgot their pay-to-play subscription.
The program in Mozambique wasn’t a gamble — it was a goddamn success story. HIV rates among newborns were plummeting. Over 89% of those on treatment had the virus suppressed. In the world of global health, that’s a statistical mic drop. But it didn’t come with a branding campaign or a stadium tour, so it got the axe. Cutting a program this effective isn’t policy. It’s ritual cruelty. It’s what happens when a dying empire lets a Martian hobbyist and a Florida meatball decide which kids get to live through the year.
Gates saw the math and tried to intervene. Musk saw a line item and called it efficiency. Trump saw a soundbite and lobbed yet another lie into the bloodstream of the state. Meanwhile, Fox News was busy foaming about USAID programs promoting abortion in Africa and educational content in Iraq. That’s how policy becomes ritual and death becomes branding.
This is now policy with a body count.
We were promised innovation, and what we got was death by optimization — HIV-prevention drives, vaccine supply chains, malaria nets, maternity clinics, all slashed like excess code from a dying app, the kind of boring, effective, soul-saving work that doesn’t trend on X but quietly keeps entire regions from falling into the grave. This is the new face of American decline: billionaires with no constituency and too much time, treating human life like server bandwidth. And somewhere in Beira, a mother saw her daughter die of a disease that could’ve been prevented for thirty-eight dollars and a box of pills.
It says something — something cruel, something terminal — that the man who once gave us Windows updates is now our Bodhisattva, counting the dead while Elon eats paste in zero gravity and wonders aloud why the poor keep dying in 480p. Gates isn’t perfect. He helped build the machine, even if he’s trying to clean it now with a wet rag and a multi-centi-billion-dollar conscience. But at least he understands cause and effect. At least he knows karma isn’t just a Reddit score. Because make no mistake: Elon Musk is racking up karma like debt — not the kind you fix with a firmware update or a PR clean-up crew, but the kind that clings to your essence like blood in the grout and echoes in the screams you never hear because the satellite feed is buffering.
This wasn’t a bold new vision for foreign policy. It was a parting gift from Elon — a final act of libertarian spite, shrink-wrapped in technocratic gibberish. He helped hollow out the last moral pretenses of American aid, and now he floats above it all like a man who truly believes consequences are for other people. The richest man in history helped speed up the deaths of the world’s poorest children. That is not an exaggeration. That is the news.
We call this series Body Count because we hope this will be the only entry.
But we know better.
And we’ll keep counting.
Filed from a windowless room under a broken satellite and a dying god.
