At first you would smell the smoke every time you stepped outside. You would notice the haze hanging in the distance and the way the sky looked different than it used to. You would talk about it with neighbors. You would check the weather. You would wonder when it would finally end.
But now imagine the fire keeps burning for so long that life begins reorganizing itself around it. The smoke is still there every morning. It is still there when you leave for work. It is still there when you come home. Days turn into weeks. Weeks turn into months.
After a while, the smell follows you home. It settles into your clothes, your furniture, your hair, and the spaces where you are supposed to feel comfortable. Eventually there is less discussion about the fire because there is no point. Everyone already knows it is there. Everyone is already living with it.
There is something about this story that has been eating at me, and the more reporting that comes out, the worse it gets.
There is something about this story that has been eating at me, and the more reporting that comes out, the worse it gets. When Democrats are back in power, the first priority cannot be branding or unity speeches. It has to be accountability. Real accountability. Because what Elon Musk and Donald Trump did to USAID was not a policy disagreement. It was lethal.
USAID was one of the most effective public health tools the United States ever created. It helped stop outbreaks before they spread. It kept nutrition programs running in refugee camps. It supported vaccines, HIV treatment, malaria prevention, and basic medical care in communities that rely on it every single day. It saved lives at a scale most Americans never hear about.
Trump and Musk cut it off in a matter of hours. No transition. No plan. No warning for the countries that depended on it. The results were exactly what anyone with a conscience would expect.
Atul Gawande’s piece in The New Yorker put words to the scale of the disaster. The most important line comes from historian Richard Rhodes, quoted directly:
“We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’ which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respected tracker of current impact.”
— The New Yorker, Nov. 5, 2025
That phrase describes it perfectly. Public man made death. Not a natural tragedy. Not an unpredictable event. A political choice that ended hundreds of thousands of lives. Most of them children.
Meanwhile, Musk was treated like royalty inside the White House. He used his money and his access to push decisions that destroyed programs keeping entire communities alive. Then he went back online to fight with Bill Gates and troll people on X, as if none of it mattered.
This is what happens when billionaires buy influence with no limits. People with real power face no consequences for the damage they cause. They erase records. They pressure state officials. They shut down programs that cost them nothing and save millions of lives.
So here is what I want from Democrats in 2028: I want a candidate who will say clearly that there will be investigations into Doge, into the shutdown of USAID, and into the role Elon Musk played in all of it. I want commitments to restore and expand USAID. I want guardrails so no future president can tear it down on a whim.
If we do nothing, the message is clear. If you are rich enough, powerful enough, and shameless enough, you can make decisions that kill enormous numbers of people and walk away untouched.
We owe the truth to the families who were affected. We owe accountability to the country. And we owe it to the world to make sure this never happens again.
Nine years ago today I started my Grateful Dead Fandom blog in hopes of selling some of my wire wrap necklaces. I have posted very little Grateful Dead content and I'm pretty sure that I have never posted a single wire wrap necklace.
