Elon Musk has long claimed civilization will collapse unless we raise the birth rate. Meanwhile, his “DOGE” group is slashing billions in funding for pregnant and nursing mothers and their children.
When Sevonna Brown learned that Elon Musk’s quasi-governmental Department of Government Officiency (“DOGE”) had ordered payment stopped on her $2 million plus NIH grant for maternal community healthcare, she started hitting the phones. She was to cease operations immediately, and there was a lot of work in progress that needed to be halted.
Women on their way to lactation appointments would have to turn around. Home visits helping pregnant and postpartum women with blood pressure spikes and suicidal ideation would be cancelled. Domestic violence shelters for pregnant women would shutter, and deliveries of food and formula to new mothers and their babies would stop.
The network of services for mothers and children that Brown had spent more than a decade building was coming to a screeching halt. “The world has literally gone dark,” she said.
Brown is the founder of Sanctuary Medicine & a cooperative member at Restore Forward in Brooklyn, NY. Her work supporting people through pregnancy and new parenthood was funded in part through the New York CHAMP Center of Excellence, a community maternal health research and care center that lost support after DOGE cancelled more than $10 billion in grants from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Given Musk’s endless warnings that falling birthrates pose an existential threat to civilization, DOGE’s abrupt gutting of maternal health services is simultaneously ironic, and exactly what you’d expect from an effort whose blunders may well exceed its claimed, but difficult to verify, achievements. A father to an estimated 14 children, he has said he thinks “civilization is going to crumble” if women don’t have more babies. He has offered his sperm to acquaintances and blamed birth control for decreasing pregnancy rates. “It should be considered a national emergency to have kids,” he wrote last summer.
Musk has donated millions of dollars to fund research on fertility. But at this point, he has taken much more from pregnant women and new mothers than he has given. In February, DOGE threatened a seven-year, $168 million NIH initiative to improve maternal health across the state of Michigan. It suspended more than $27 million in grants to women’s health centers, laid off federal workers running programs for expecting mothers on Medicaid, and cancelled $1.6 million in funding for maternal and postpartum care at the Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, GA.
“We can’t claim to care about birthrates while defunding the very systems that make pregnancy, birth, and parenting safe,” says Emilie Rodriguez. A medical anthropologist, doula, and co-founder of The Bridge Directory, a group of perinatal maternal healthcare providers, Rodriguez worked with Sevonna Brown on the CHAMP Center of Excellence grant.
The CHAMP Center’s grant focused on providing care to Black women, who — in New York City — are nine times more likely to die in childbirth than their white counterparts. “New York City should be one of the safest places in the world to give birth—but for far too many Black and Brown women, it’s not,” said Victoria St. Clair, a doula and community member who helped administer the NY-CHAMP grant. “The numbers are painful, and the lived experiences behind them are even more so. Still, I want to be clear: no one should be afraid to become pregnant or start a family here … We believe every person deserves to bring life into this world without risking their own.”
Many of the DOGE cuts have been justified as part of an “anti-woke” agenda, which aims to cut medical care for traditionally underserved populations. “We got word that there were words we had to eliminate out of our grants – like, women, and Black, and undocumented, underserved, immigrants,” Rodriguez explained. “It’s not just censorship that’s at stake, it’s erasure,” she said.
Whatever their intent, the cuts are likely to worsen healthcare for mothers and children of all races and ethnicity, said Leslie Root, a professor at Colorado University and Associate Director at the school’s Population Center. Root pointed to a recently gutted team at NIH that, until recently, administered the long-standing Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) study. The team conducted tentpole research on the unexpected infant deaths previously known as SIDS, or sudden infant death syndrome.
“Anyone who’s had a kid, who’s gone through those early days of parenting, knows the terror of putting your baby to bed and waking up with a jolt asking, ‘are they still breathing?’”
Donald Trump, like Elon Musk, has expressed a desire to help young Americans who want to start a family. “I’ll be known as the fertilization president,” he said last week, as Musk’s DOGE cut funding to the Health Resources Services Administration’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau, the NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the CDC’s Division of Reproductive Health.
A recently laid off staffer from the Division of Reproductive Health described working on a set of federal guidelines for the safe use of contraceptives — guidelines that are essential to ensuring safe pregnancies in women with conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, lupus and MS.
“The guidelines can be the difference between these women being able to safely start families or not, and in some cases even save their lives,” they said.
The DOGE cuts have also decimated programs for children’s health. It has terminated more than $1 million in grant funding for a children’s behavioral health study in Massachusetts, more than $750,000 to treat kids with respiratory disease at the Seattle Children’s Hospital, more than $200,000 to treat children with skeletal problems at Boston Children’s Hospital, more than $12 million in treatment and prevention of HIV in children at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, almost another million in HIV treatment at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a whopping $12 billion in funding for state child vaccination programs. (Child vaccinations have saved an estimated 154 million lives over the past 50 years.)
People affected by the DOGE cuts may not recognize those offices’ names, Sevonna Brown said, but they’ll feel their impact nearly immediately. “The average pregnant mother sitting in a shelter does not know what HHS is, but she knows what her SNAP benefit is…she knows what her Medicaid card is.” (SNAP helps pregnant women and new mothers access food and formula, and Medicaid provides health insurance to more than 70 million Americans each year.)
DOGE has billed itself as a way to cut fat from the federal government, saving taxpayers valuable cash. But Dr. Uma Reddy, who led the NY-CHAMP project, said that the interventions carried out by her team probably saved taxpayers money. Helping women avoid mental and cardiovascular health crises avoids expensive care down the road, and saves women and their children from needless suffering.
In recent days, the DOGE cuts have rankled even conservatives and proponents of the Trump Administration’s agenda. Fox News commentator Jesse Waters recently complained to viewers of his primetime show that his mother was upset about the cuts, and that his sister — an employee at Johns Hopkins University — could be personally affected by them.
In the meantime, Sevonna Brown’s network of healthcare providers are trying to pick up the slack. “We’re taking food out of our own fridges. We’re sharing. We’re doing mutual aid. We have to show up for people, we can’t leave people alone. … We can’t leave a mom who can’t nurse or breastfeed without formula. We are making it happen, and that’s straining our families and our communities.”
