Elon Musk rips into '60 Minutes' for misleading report on firings at USAID

A "60 Minutes" report tried to drum up emotional support for employees fired from the U.S. Agency for International Development by the Trump administration, and Elon Musk fired back on social media.

USAID was one of the more prominent targets of the DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency headed by Musk to root out wasteful spending and corruption. Democrats were outraged that workers were denied entry to USAID offices and accused Musk of acting unconstitutionally.

'These are folks who had decades and decades of public service serving USAID across administrations from, you know, George Bush to Obama to the first Trump administration.'

The report featured an interview with Kristina Drye, a former USAID worker who was fired during the DOGE shutdown.

“People are really scared," said Drye in the report. "I think that, 12 days ago, people knew where their next paycheck was coming from. They knew how they were going to pay for their kids' day care, their medical bills. And then, all gone overnight,” Drye said.

Musk retweeted a screenshot from the report and disputed the characterization of the treatment of the workers.

"60 Mins are such liars. As the Community Note states, all employees were offered 8 months of pay & benefits," he wrote.

Drye went on to criticize the manner in which the DOGE fired the employees.

"They had to leave the building. And these are folks who had decades and decades of public service serving USAID across administrations from, you know, George Bush to Obama to the first Trump administration. And they were never able to walk back in the building again," she explained.

The report included complaints from a former RNC member and USAID administrator who called the accusations of corruption against the agency "nonsense." It also brought on Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, who reiterated the accusation that the DOGE was improperly accessing private information.

"I think DOGE is an unelected, unofficial, small group of young tech bros who are charging into different federal agencies getting into their core computer systems, doing things with them that at least I don't know the full details of, copying and downloading reams of data," said Coons.

Musk brushed away the privacy concerns by arguing that he had access to private data after co-founding PayPal.

"Bruh, if I wanted to rummage through random personal s**t, I could have done that at PAYPAL. Hello???" he wrote.

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