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 in a philosophy known as longtermism. For humanity to survive and spread itself across the galaxy in its trillions in the eons to come, men like them must steer the way. For it is they who must make the tough decisions of allowing a significant number of present-day humans to die off to protect this distant future. And with Trump, men like Musk are guiding US domestic and foreign policies in eugenicist and longtermist ways, leaving millions in actual or potential peril.

Perhaps the leading example of old-style eugenicist thinking in Trump’s orbit is Robert F Kennedy Jr, currently serving as US Secretary for Health and Human Services (HHS). There are two positions he publicly holds which truly show Kennedy to be a 20th-century eugenicist. One is his stance against vaccines over the years, especially the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella). In the 1990s, a handful of scientists once claimed MMR was responsible for an uptick in the frequency of doctors diagnosing children as autistic. Even though numerous studies have refuted these claims, anti-vaccine advocates like Kennedy continue to undermine public confidence in vaccine programmes. “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a Holocaust, what this is doing to our country,” Kennedy said in 2015 of MMR and his belief that it can cause autism. He later apologised for his offensive use of autism in comparison with the Holocaust.