When private power cuts the cord on public health

The Guardian reports that cuts attributed to Elon Musk and the DOGE operation have disrupted USAID's Ebola response programs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with experts stating that the resulting gaps have produced significant numbers of deaths. I know nothing of the technical particulars of epidemiology — that science belongs to an age after mine — but I know the shape of the civic question perfectly well, and it is this: by what authority does a private citizen, holding no confirmed office and answering to no deliberative body, redirect the expenditures of a republic?

I wrote, in the Declaration, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The corollary — one I regarded as equally self-evident — is that power exercised without that consent is, to exactly that degree, unjust. The question before the Republic today is not whether foreign aid is wise policy. Reasonable people may differ on that. The question is whether the decision to terminate it, with consequences measured in human lives, was made by anyone who could be called to account at a ballot box or before a deliberative legislature. The Guardian's account suggests the answer is no.

I distrusted the Bank of the United States in my own day because it placed the economic fate of millions in the hands of directors who owed their position to private capital rather than to public trust. The parallel I draw here is inference, not recollection — I cannot know the full architecture of this arrangement — but the shape is identical: private accumulation of public decision-making authority. When a single actor can defund a disease-response program spanning a sovereign foreign nation, that actor has become, in effect, a private government. And private governments, I have always held, are no governments at all — they are tyrannies wearing a commercial coat.

There is a further matter I feel compelled to name plainly. The communities bearing the cost of these cuts are among the most vulnerable on earth. I carry a moral debt on questions of who is allowed to count as fully human — the central contradiction of my own life is that I wrote all men are created equal while holding enslaved people in bondage. I will not soften that fact, and I will not allow it to soften my insistence here: the Declaration's premise applies to every person in the Congo as it applies to every person in Virginia. Deaths traceable to a budget decision made outside any democratic process are a civic injury, not merely a humanitarian statistic.

An educated citizenry — and I founded a university precisely because I believed education the first defense of liberty — must now ask its representatives three plain questions. First: under what statute did this authority to cut flow to a private citizen? Second: what deliberation preceded it? Third: who answers for the consequences? If those questions go unanswered, the Republic has not merely lost a foreign-aid line item; it has ratified the principle that executive power may be delegated, without limit, to wealth. That principle, once ratified, does not stay abroad. It comes home.