Gordon Brown continues spat with Elon Musk as he slams USAID funding cuts

Elon Musk has been condemned by former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown over cuts to the US Agency for International Development – or USAID for short.

Signage has been stripped from the agency’s Washington D.C. headquarters in footage captured by NBC News, while Musk has branded USAID a “criminal organization” and US president Donald Trump has said the money spent by the agency – much of which he claims was spent “fraudulently” – is “totally unexplainable”.

However, in a piece for The Guardian on Friday (February 7), titled ‘Be clear about what Trump and Musk’s aid axe will do: people will face terror and starve, many will die’, Brown started off by saying that “an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or above could not have caused more carnage”.

“Recent floods in Asia and droughts in Africa have been catastrophic, yet they have inflicted less damage and affected fewer people than the sudden withdrawal of billions of dollars of US aid from the world’s most volatile hotspots and its most vulnerable people.

“Coming alongside President Trump’s plan for a US takeover of Gaza, the US administration’s resolve to shut down its international aid agency sends a clear message that the era when American leaders valued their soft power is coming to an end.

“This new stance is not just “America first” but “America first and only” – and a gift to Hamas, IS, the Houthi rebels, and all who wish to show that coexistence with the US is impossible,” Brown said, warning that “desperate people” will look to extremists who will tell them “that the US can never again be trusted”.

Brown even pointed out US generosity is actually “in the country’s self interest”, given that “the creation of a more stable world benefits us all”.

He continued: “We all gain if USAID can mitigate the spread of infectious diseases, prevent malnutrition in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan, halt the upsurge of IS in Syria and support a fair, humanitarian reconstruction of Gaza and Ukraine.

“Only the narrowest and most blinkered view of what constitutes “America first” can justify the disaster America has unloaded on the world.”

Musk has since commented on Brown’s article by reposting a tweet from Bernie (known on the platform as @Artemisfornow) in which she says the former PM is having a “globalist meltdown”, pointed to the former politician’s roles as the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education and the World Health Organization’s Ambassador for Global Health Financing, and highlighted USAID’s funding of UN and WHO programmes.

“We see you, Gordon, we see you,” she wrote, adding a clown emoji to the end of her post.

The Twitter/X owner, ever a man of words when tweeting, quoted the tweet and simply commented: “Wow.”

It’s not the first time that Musk and Brown have taken swipes at each other, as the Twitter/X owner accused the ex-PM of an “unforgivable crime against the British people” in relation to his handling of child sexual abuse and grooming gangs.

Brown clapped back via a statement from a spokesperson, who said: “When it comes to the exploitation and abuse of children and young women by sex grooming gangs, the priority for all people in public life should be to secure justice for the survivors, punishment for the perpetrators, and action at local and national level to ensure that these kind of horrific crimes can never be allowed to happen again.

“But that collective endeavour is undermined when some individuals and media outlets instead propagate outright lies about the reasons that these crimes happened in the past.”

Elsewhere, Donald Trump has once again pondered the idea of serving a third term as president and he also announced he'll be declassifying documents relating to the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr - and the grandson of JFK isn't happy about it.

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