What DOGE activities are you referring to that added hundreds of billions in costs and killed millions of people?
Though I'm counting that as future potential costs and deaths.
Ignoring the obvious opinion of the author, anybody who has ever worked on any sort of medium to large scale migration, refactoring or rewriting of a computer system knows that's a comically ridiculous timescale and when it inevitably fails there will be consequences, counted in both money and lives.
But that's a (very near) future fuck-up that he will almost certainly spin or move the goalposts for.
That you can draw a direct line to right now, not much other than all the cuts to critical infrastructure.
To be clear, I'm not arguing against cuts and efficiency initiatives, i'm saying he's an idiot who doesn't know what he's doing, so his implementation will be shoddy and dangerous.
See: The Cybertruck, The Boring Company, The Decline of X.
As you are implying though, nothing major so far, aside from USAID i suppose (or the VA), does removing systems actively (and provably) preventing deaths count?
These are systematic problems that will take a while to shake out into their inevitable consequences.
He'll probably still fail upwards though, unless he gets luigi'd or just drops dead of a ket induced heart attack or something.
(We haven’t seen the costs of slashing these materialize yet, but with PEPFAR in particular there’s a very good chance millions will die without access to the drugs provided under the program.)
(There’s no need for logical extremes here: PEPFAR wasn’t a very expensive program.)
If getting rid of existing affordable aid is murder, why is failing to render new affordable aid not? Doesn't this inherently place an incentivization mechanism and inherent preference for the old ways of doing things, when newer ways can be more efficient and save more lives with fewer dollars?
Short answers aside, could you stop with the indirection? The original question was whether millions of people could die due to funding cuts. The answer is yes, regardless of your moral views about how you should spend your own money.
Taking treatment away from them in lieu of a very good reason is tantamount to murder. "Empathy is weakness" or "going after the woke mind virus" or "Organization X is a criminal organization [non-evidenced]" or "we need more cushion for tax cuts for the wealth" do not qualify as good reasons.