Paul Krugman: On Holding Elon Musk Accountable

Full transcript HERE. The opening paragraphs:

For most of last year, Elon Musk was the second most powerful man in America. He was running a large part of the government’s budget. And during that time, he established a track record of evil incompetence. I mean, really evil and really incompetent on enormous scales. And why aren’t people talking about it more?

Hi, I’m Paul Krugman, doing a brief follow-on to my discussion that was posted earlier today with Ro Khanna, the Congressman from Silicon Valley, who’s a very interesting guy in many ways.

One of the things that has made him especially interesting in the last few days is that he said something entirely reasonable, which is that if Democrats retake Congress, they should hold investigations into the role of Elon Musk as head of DOGE, the sort of not exactly but effectively government agency, in destroying USAID, the agency that was the principal channel for aid to the most desperate, poorest people in the world.

That’s entirely reasonable, and Khanna went on to say that there are credible estimates that the cancellation, the destruction of Doge has led to millions of unnecessary deaths, including millions of children — which is exactly true. There are studies that say that there is both in the field evidence of widespread death as a result of the cancellation and, of course reasonable health models. Because what do you think happens when you cut away tens of billions of dollars of aid to people who are living right on the edge? So of course it’s a reasonable thing to say.