Did Elon Musk Sentence Millions to Death by Dismantling USAID?

The study cited by Rep. Ro Khanna as the basis for that claim is statistical nonsense

By Aaron Brown of Reason. Aaron Brown teaches statistics at New York University and at the University of California at San Diego. Excerpts:

"As I explained when I first wrote about the Lancet study for Reason in July of last year, with some basic arithmetic and a bit of common sense, you can see why the study's topline figures are nonsense. Just put the claim that nearly 92 million people were saved by USAID between 2001 and 2021 into perspective: During this period, the world's total death rate fell substantially. If the death rate prior to 2001 had remained steady for the next 20 years, about 79 million additional people would have died, according to data from the United Nations.

So how could USAID have saved 92 million lives? That's more than 100 percent of the global mortality decline, meaning that not only was USAID responsible for saving all 79 million people who didn't die thanks to the fall in the total death rate, but it saved an additional 13 million who otherwise would have died if not for USAID's charitable efforts.

Since I wrote about this study, its authors have effectively backed away from their number. The Lancet published formal critiques and a non-response reply. None of this produced a correction, a retraction, or a single follow-up story in the outlets that ran the 92 million figure. The number is still in circulation, still being cited by Khanna, and still generating threats of litigation from Musk.

Reason emailed several of the study's co-authors, laying out the criticisms cited in this article and video. They didn't respond.

The study's authors failed to establish that USAID saved any lives at all because they built a statistical model based entirely on correlation: Funding for USAID doubled during the study period. Since global mortality fell over the same time span, the two trends correlate, which is all their evidence adds up to. The authors did do a lot of complex statistical hocus-pocus, which they explained in a dense, technical online appendix, making the analysis look sophisticated. But all they were doing was correlating two lines with no evidence that one affected the other."

"On February 2, 2026, Lancet Global Health, a sister journal of The Lancet, published by the same house, ran a paper titled "The Impact of Two Decades of Humanitarian and Development Assistance and the Projected Mortality Consequences of Current Defunding to 2030.""

"The new paper looks at all official development assistance: every donor country, every agency, roughly $250 billion in 2023—and found it associated with a 23 percent reduction in age-standardized all-cause mortality across low- and middle-income countries. The original paper looked at USAID alone, which, at its peak, was somewhere around a sixth of global official development assistance, and found it associated with a 15 percent reduction.

These estimates don't square. The same research group, using the same technique, has now credited one agency with roughly two-thirds of the mortality effect of all foreign aid on Earth."

Related post:

Did USAID Really Save 90 Million Lives? Not Unless It Raised the Dead: A Lancet study’s inflated numbers are being used to push a partisan narrative, not inform public policy (2026)