219: Atul Gawande on Musk’s Destruction of USAID

The Al Franken Podcast

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4.6 • 7.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Elon Musk and DOGE have been taking a chainsaw to the federal government since Trump was re-elected. It could take us generations to fully recover from the damage inflicted by the careless and cruel nature of these cuts. We're joined by American surgeon, author, and public health advocate Atul Gawande to discuss just how devastating these actions are. During the Biden administration, Gawande was a senior official at USAID. He walks us through many of the great works the program did around the world… and the damaging and deadly road that lies ahead now that it's been gutted.

We also discuss the state of our healthcare system and the popularity of Medicaid expansion. The Affordable Care Act has improved the lives of millions of Americans, but Donald Trump and the Republicans threatened to take it away from Americans in his first term. Does he dare try again?

To hear more from Atul, check out his recent piece in The New Yorker about the chaotic attempt to freeze federal assistance: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/behind-the-chaotic-attempt-to-freeze-federal-assistance

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everybody. We got a great one today, you know, for a change because Dr. Atul Gawande is my guest.
0:10.6	Atoole is one of our great Americans, a surgeon, professor at Harvard Medical School, author of four New York Times bestsellers.
0:19.5	And for three years, he was the assistant administrator
0:22.3	of USAID's Bureau of Global Health. USAID is an amazing organization, which has saved millions
0:30.0	upon millions of lives overseas since President John F. Kennedy established it in 1961,
0:37.3	and as you may know, Trump and Musk have all but
0:40.4	shut USAID down, which means that millions will die overseas who would otherwise have lived but for
0:48.2	Trump and Musk, the richest man in the world, killing millions of the poorest people in the world.
0:55.5	You see, Musk called USAID a criminal enterprise.
1:00.7	A little bleak, but in case you want yet another reason to hate Trump and Musk,
1:05.3	today's podcast is your ticket.
1:08.3	Of course, there is the matter of the tariffs on Liberation Day. Trump laid out his
1:14.5	tariff program and said it was not subject to negotiation. Remember, he said he wouldn't negotiate.
1:21.1	And then he started to negotiate. Then he said again that he wouldn't negotiate. Then he
1:26.5	started to negotiate again. Then this past Wednesday,
1:30.3	he caved after the bonds market went nuts. And then the stock market had its best day since 2008,
1:37.4	only after having its worst day since the height of the pandemic. So now we supposedly have maybe,
1:48.6	I don't know, 80 some days until Trump tells us what he's doing.
1:55.0	In the meantime, every American in the market has lost money, unless I guess you were short-selling.
2:02.4	At the beginning of 2025, the International Monetary Fund put out its economic forecast for the coming year.
2:08.0	The U.S. economy, they said, was in better shape than just about all others, and now it's even odds that we're going into a recession. We are not going to fully recover from this.
2:14.8	In The New York Times, Tom Friedman said this is Trump's equivalent of Biden's botched exit from this. In the New York Times, Tom Friedman said, this is Trump's equivalent
	...

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