From fringe to federal: The rise of eugenicist thinking in US policy

“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates said of Elon Musk during an interview with The Financial Times earlier this month. Gates indirectly referenced Musk’s role in gutting the federal agency United States Aid for International Development (USAID), where billions of dollars had gone towards global poverty reduction and the eradication of diseases for decades. That is, until Musk led the charge for President Donald Trump’s unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to dismantle USAID in February. “And unless we reverse pretty quickly, that’ll be over a million additional deaths” of children worldwide, Gates said in an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, expanding on his Financial Times comments.

Despite what Gates and others may think, Musk’s disdain for human lives isn’t limited to his role in leading DOGE. Nor is this just Musk’s thinking. Trump has deployed in his administration and in his relationships with billionaires a group of the old and new eugenicists. Some of these leading men believe...