Wiles later recounted that she had confronted Musk directly and refused to let his actions pass without challenge. In her words, she had called him on the carpet — a figurative way of saying she demanded accountability for his decisions and behavior. Speaking with firm conviction, she reminded him that it was unacceptable to abruptly deny employees access to their workplaces. Such an action, she told him, might have seemed like an administrative maneuver to enforce control, yet it disregarded the human and organizational repercussions that followed. At the outset, Wiles herself admitted she did not fully understand how dramatically the drastic reductions in USAID’s programs would damage the intricate global network of humanitarian aid. Only later did she come to realize the scale of that impact. She confessed that she had been largely unaware of the vast magnitude of USAID’s grant-making operations—how those funds supported medical initiatives, stabilized fragile communities, and provided life-saving resources to vulnerable populations. As the situation unfolded, however, the consequences became painfully clear. With vaccination campaigns across parts of Africa coming to a halt, the direct outcome would not be bureaucratic inconvenience but the tragic, measurable loss of human lives. The human cost transformed a policy decision into an ethical crisis. Within days, Wiles began to receive increasingly desperate calls from leaders of relief organizations and from former high-level government officials who had previously managed international aid. Their voices conveyed urgency and alarm: they warned that thousands of lives hung in precarious balance, dependent on decisions made far from the field but with immediate, mortal implications.
Expanding on the conversation, Wiles described another moment of action. She explained that Marco was en route to Panama when they reached him to deliver urgent instructions. On the call, they informed him that, as a Senate-confirmed appointee, he would need to assume the role of custodian—essentially the acting guardian and caretaker—of the U.S. Agency for International Development during the unfolding turmoil. Marco, in a tone that conveyed both resignation and readiness, responded simply, acknowledging his duty and agreeing to step in. Nevertheless, despite these attempts to stabilize the situation, Musk remained determined to move forward at full speed. Wiles characterized his leadership style vividly: all throttle, no brake—a metaphor for relentless momentum that prioritizes rapid execution over cautious deliberation. As she explained, Musk believed in completing tasks with ferocious efficiency, convinced that incrementalism—step-by-step progression and bureaucratic patience—would never propel a rocket to the moon, whether literally in aerospace or figuratively in governmental reform. That mentality, she admitted, carried both visionary drive and inherent risk. Wiles noted that such an approach inevitably meant, as she put it, breaking some china—disrupting established systems and upsetting long-standing processes in pursuit of acceleration. Yet even she conceded that few rational observers could defend the existing USAID procedures as effective; the consensus, she said, was that the institution’s processes were cumbersome, inefficient, and painfully outdated. In her view, while Musk’s impulsive methods risked collateral damage, his criticism of bureaucracy found sympathetic resonance. Still, the episode illuminated the profound tension between decisive innovation and conscientious governance—a tension in which speed and ambition clashed with caution, compassion, and the realities of human consequences.
Sourse: https://www.theverge.com/policy/846054/elon-musk-susie-wiles-doge-usaid
