First, they fired the people who look after the nuclear bombs, then had to hurriedly find where they went and hire them back.

They got rid of the government agricultural workers responsible for fighting bird flu — which has sent the cost of America’s breakfast soaring.

Then, amid rising public concern that an Ebola outbreak in Africa could leapfrog to the US, Elon Musk took his chainsaw to the most prominent US experts on the disease.

“We won’t be perfect. But when we make mistake, we will fix it very quickly,” later backtracked Musk, who is running President Donald Trump’s effort to eviscerate the federal government.

“With USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola, Ebola prevention. I think we all want Ebola prevention. So, we restored the Ebola prevention immediately,” he said.

This haphazard nihilism is symptomatic of Musk’s approach with the de-facto Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): destroy first, ask questions later.

Claims that DOGE has already saved tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer cash are dubious — despite evidence trumpeted by conservative media of frivolous spending. Trump’s claim, for instance, that the now expunged US Agency for International Development spent $100 million on condoms for Hamas is absurdly untrue.

The president’s voters will shed few tears for federal workers kicked out of their jobs with little notice and less compensation. Tearful USAID workers had only 15 minutes to clear their desks on Thursday. But then, as with much of the Trump agenda, the cruelty is the point.

There’s nothing wrong with curtailing bloated government. When the public thinks its cash is being wasted, governance loses legitimacy.

But screw-ups by Musk and his DOGE boys are revealing one key truth — they have no clue how government works. Conservatives might view the federal government as the home of liberal elites. But it pays out pensions, administers health care for seniors and the poor, and keeps keeps planes in the sky. Every state capital has a big federal building — and it’s now dawning on some of Trump’s cheerleaders that hundreds of thousand of government jobs exist outside the Beltway.

A backlash is building as GOP lawmakers get upbraided by constituents back home.

“Things are happening so fast and furiously,” Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis said. “We need to take a step back and make sure that we’re doing things in a way that we are rooting out the waste, the fraud and the abuse and the mismanagement, making programs efficient but not resulting in unintended consequences.”

That’s not Musk’s way. He’s treating the government to the kind of creative destruction — with the emphasis on destruction — that rocked his tech businesses, rocket ship company and social network X.

If this carries on, Trump may pay a price for giving the world’s richest man almost limited government power, come the midterm elections next year.

Even when government is working, financed and fully staffed, things can go badly wrong — the botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the comically mismanaged Obamacare website come to mind.

But when the government is being deliberately desecrated, disasters are all but guaranteed.

Thousands of lives at stake

The obliteration of USAID has had a devastating impact on global public health programs like PEPFAR, the global HIV/AIDS program initiated by President George W. Bush that has saved millions of lives and was one of the most successful US foreign policy programs in decades. The Trump administration insists that it has offered waivers for life-saving treatments. But reports on the ground suggest that cash often isn’t getting through to clinics.

This doesn’t just affect HIV/AIDS patients whose US-provided anti-retroviral drugs keep the disease not just from worsening, but from spreading to new victims. It also risks dismantling the early warning health systems that stop outbreaks becoming epidemics.

Meanwhile wanted to find out whether an emergency operation like the one mounted by the Obama administration that successfully put down a 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa would be possible after Musk’s carnage.

Here’s what Dr. Yukari Manabe, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who is also a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, told us.

“There have been some restrictions on travel for people that would normally respond (to outbreaks). So, I think that there are going to be difficulties sending the number of people in addition, people who might normally have dealt with viral hemorrhagic fever outbreaks may not be able to do that. They’ve either been fired or they are not around to do that,” Manabe said.

Without the same support, vital health services USAID built could crumble, she said. “Having people from whom you can bounce ideas off, I think, are very important, and having people who have helped build that capacity.

“They’ve trained people on the ground to be able to do this as well,” Manabe said. “So, countries in the West African Ebola outbreak who had had PEPFAR as part of the programming that they had within their countries, in general, did better in terms of the number of cases that they had.”

What to look for next week

Trump will take his latest victory lap on Tuesday night with a prime time, televised address to Congress. A man who loves adulation will get plenty from Republican lawmakers who control both chambers. It will be another moment of vindication for a president whose followers smashed their way into the very House of Representatives chamber from where he’ll speak, on January 6, 2021.

Trump’s message will be simple: He’s saving America.

But the GOP euphoria will be tempered by the reality that the president’s agenda hangs on the miniscule Republican majority in the House of Representatives. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik hasn’t yet taken up her post as the new US ambassador to the United Nations because House Speaker Mike Johnson can’t afford to lose her vote.

It’s one thing for Trump to fire off executive orders, to trample US treaties, to call for the annexation of Canada and to threaten to invade Greenland and Panama. True, lasting, political change requires Congress to act. If he wants his huge tax cut and to fund his mass deportation plan, Trump must inspire unity among his political troops.

Keep an eye on which Supreme Court justices show up. Their attendance at such events is always politically charged — even though they’re usually stone faced and sit out standing ovations.

The high court will have the critical final say on the legality of many of Trump’s power grabs and will define the destiny of his presidency and the Constitution. That means even a stray smile from one of the arch conservatives on the bench that implies favor for Trump’s political cause could ignite a political furor.

In January 1988, one of Taiwan’s most senior nuclear engineers defected to the United States after passing crucial intelligence on a top-secret program that would alter the course of Taiwan’s history.

Colonel Chang Hsien-yi was a leading figure in Taiwan’s nuclear weapons project, a closely guarded secret between the 1960s and ‘80s, as Taipei raced to develop its first nuclear bomb to keep pace with China.

He was also a CIA informant.

Chang exposed Taiwan’s secret nuclear program to the United States, its closest ally, passing intelligence that ultimately led the US to pressure Taiwan into shutting down the program – which proliferation experts say was near completion.

“I decided to provide information to the CIA because I think it was good for the people of Taiwan,” said the 81-year-old. “Yes, there was political struggle between China and Taiwan, but developing any kind of deadly weapon was nonsense to me.”

Chang’s story bears similarities with that of Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli whistleblower who famously exposed his country’s clandestine nuclear program to the world. But while Vanunu went public with his country’s progress, Chang’s whistle-blowing was done in secret and without any fanfare.

Taiwan’s nuclear ambitions

In 1964, just 15 years after the Chinese civil war ended with communist victory, leaving Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists controlling only Taiwan, Beijing successfully tested a nuclear weapon – deeply unsettling the government in Taipei which feared it could one day be used against the island.

Two years later, Chiang launched a clandestine project to lay the technical groundwork for nuclear weapons development over the next seven years. The Chungshan Science Research Institute ran the project under the Defense Ministry, and it was there that Chang began working as an army captain a year later.

He was picked for advanced nuclear training, which would involve stints in the US. After studying physics and nuclear science in Taiwan, he attended Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Despite Taipei’s official statements that its nuclear research was only for peaceful purposes, Chang said students sent to the US were all aware of their true mission: learning skills for weapons development.

“We know precisely – even though it’s not in the written statement – we know what we are going to do, what kind of area we should concentrate on,” Chang said.

“We were kind of excited and trying to get the job done,” he added. “All we did was focusing on the area they assigned us, we put all our efforts to do it, to learn as much as possible.”

While he was at Oak Ridge, Chang recalled, the CIA already had an interest in him.

“In 1969 or 1970, I remembered receiving a phone call,” he said. The caller said he was “with a company and they are interested in the nuclear power business… they offered to take me out for lunch.”

“At that time, I said I had no interest because I had a mission-oriented assignment. But I was not aware he was from the CIA; I only knew that after quite a few years.”

American suspicions

In 1977, a year after attaining a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Chang returned to Taiwan. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel and spearheaded the development of computer codes for simulating nuclear explosions at the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research (INER), a national laboratory that covertly advanced weapons development under civilian pretenses.

Taiwanese leaders faced a delicate balancing act: the United States strongly opposed new nuclear weapons programs anywhere in the world, and Taipei could not afford to alienate its most crucial ally. The US has long relied on nuclear deterrence as part of its broader strategy to counter China’s stockpiling of nuclear warheads. But, under a policy of nonproliferation, it opposes any country newly developing nuclear weapons.

Back then, Taiwan was not the wealthy and vibrant democracy it is today. It was a developing economy under the autocratic rule of the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang. That regime continued to hold a seat at the United Nations until 1971, and maintained formal diplomatic relations with the United States until 1979.

To minimize the risk of its nuclear ambitions being exposed, the island only sought to secretly establish the capability to produce nukes quickly at any time, but not build a stockpile.

“Taiwan’s cover stories were unbelievably good,” said David Albright, a nuclear proliferation expert and author of “Taiwan’s Former Nuclear Weapons Program: Nuclear Weapons On-Demand.”

“They always emphasized that the research was only for civil purposes… (US) officials didn’t know how to breach this cover story.”

But the risk of a cross-strait nuclear conflagration weighed on Chang. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who assumed power in 1978, warned that if Taiwan acquired nuclear weapons, China would respond with force.

“I think they’re quite serious,” Chang added. “I believed in that.”

“I didn’t want to have any conflict in any way with mainland China,” he said. “Using any kind of deadly chemical or nuclear weapons… it’s nonsense to me. I believe we are all Chinese and that doesn’t make sense.”

So when CIA agents approached Chang again during a trip to the United States in 1980, he agreed to speak.

“They said, ‘We know you, and we’re interested in you,’ and we had a conversation,” Chang said, adding that the Americans put him through a “very thorough” lie-detector test to ensure he was not a double agent. He assisted the CIA with some ad hoc tasks before becoming an informant in 1984.

For the next four years a CIA case officer, identified only as “Mark,” met with Chang every few months at safehouses around Taipei, including a condo near Shilin Night Market – one of the island’s most famous street food destinations.

In those meetings, the CIA asked him to corroborate intelligence, share information about recent projects at INER, and take photos of sensitive documents.

“All those conversations were quite professional. He would take a pencil and notebook to write down my answers,” Chang said. “He kept saying that they will try their best to keep me and my family safe.”

The Chernobyl disaster in 1986, a catastrophic nuclear accident in Ukraine that exposed hundreds of thousands of people to harmful radiation, solidified Chang’s conviction that halting Taiwan’s nuclear weapons program was imperative.

That same year, Vanunu publicly exposed details of Israel’s clandestine nuclear program, handing what he new to the British media and causing an international sensation. He was later kidnapped by Mossad agents, returned to Israel and prosecuted, spending years in prison.

A new chapter of life

Chang’s life – and those of his wife and three children – took a dramatic turn in January 1988, when the CIA exfiltrated them to the US.

By then, President Ronald Reagan’s administration had amassed sufficient evidence and seized the opportunity created by the death of President Chiang Ching-kuo – Chiang Kai-shek’s son – to pressure his reformist successor Lee Teng-hui into cooperation.

Albright, the expert and author, said Chang was the most crucial informant in arming Washington to shut down the Taiwanese program.

“The United States had been in a cat-and-mouse game with Taiwan over its nuclear program for years,” he said. “Chang really made sure the US had heavy evidence that Taiwan couldn’t deny… and directly confront the Taiwanese.”

In the months after Chang’s departure, the US sent specialists to dismantle a plutonium separation plant – a facility designed to extract nuclear materials for weapons production. The team also oversaw the removal of heavy water, a substance used as a coolant in nuclear reactors, and irradiated fuel, nuclear fuel that can be reprocessed to extract materials for nuclear weapons.

Hero or traitor?

To date, Chang’s decision to work with the CIA has remained controversial in Taiwan, which in the intervening years has continued its massive industrial and economic expansion, becoming a full democracy in the 1990s.

But cross-strait hostilities persist. Taipei has come under growing military pressure from China, which now has the world’s largest military and is becoming more assertive in its territorial claims over Taiwan. The Chinese communist Party has vowed to take Taiwan by force if needed, despite having never controlled it.

Beijing dwarves Taiwan’s military, spending about 13 times more on defense. Some have argued that if Taiwan had successfully acquired nuclear weapons it could have served as an ultimate deterrent – paralleling Ukraine, where Russia might not have invaded if Kyiv had retained its Soviet era nuclear arsenal instead of giving it up.

Some Taiwanese have criticized Chang, saying he overstepped by deciding unilaterally that the island is better off without a nuclear deterrent.

“I believe he is a traitor,” said Alexander Huang, an associate professor in strategic studies at Tamkang University, because the weapons “would be seen as a useful tool in bargaining for a better diplomatic result” with Beijing.

But Su Tzu-yun, a director of Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said the lack of a nuclear option has not overly affected Taiwan’s modern defense capabilities, because precision ammunition can be used to achieve similar objectives to those of tactical nuclear weapons.

“The Taiwanese government back then thought that if China landed in Taiwan, it could use tactical nuclear weapons to eliminate the landing troops,” he said. “But in their absence, we can also employ precision weapons like missiles to replace them.”

Taiwan buys these weapons from the US, which – despite shutting down the nuclear program – remains its key military partner, supplying ammunition, training, and defense systems.

Besides weaponry, the island has what some consider a more effective deterrent than nuclear bombs. In 1987 – just one year before the nuclear program was shut down – tech entrepreneur Morris Chang founded the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which now produces an estimated 90% of the world’s super-advanced semiconductor chips for tech companies, including Apple and Nvidia.

The island’s integral role in the global semiconductor supply chain, some observers say, would be enough to deter China from launching an invasion, forming what is dubbed its “Silicon Shield.”

Albright, who conducted extensive research into the Taiwanese program, also said its success would not have been beneficial to Taiwan.

“I think [it] would have raised the military risk of a Chinese attack,” he said, while Washington could have also responded by “reducing its security commitment or limiting military aid” once Taiwan’s capabilities were known.

As for Chang Hsien-yi, who became a Christian and enjoyed playing golf outside a part-time role at a nuclear safety consultancy firm, the decision he made four decades ago was correct.

“Maybe that’s good for the Taiwanese people. At least [we] didn’t provoke mainland China in a such way to start an aggressive war against Taiwan,” Chang said.

“I did it with my conscience clear, there is no betrayal – at least not to myself.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will meet European leaders at a vital summit in London on Sunday, after his extraordinary argument with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office left Western allies reeling and threw the future of the Russia-Ukraine war into deep uncertainty.

King Charles has also accepted an invitation to meet Zelensky on Sunday, the Ukrainian leader said.

Zelensky landed in Britain on Saturday ahead of the talks, which the West hopes will revive momentum towards an acceptable peace deal that had appeared to be slowly building this week, only to come crashing down in a nasty few minutes on Friday.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Zelensky met at Downing Street on Saturday where the two men signed an agreement to accelerate $2.8 billion worth of loans to Ukraine. The first tranche of funding is expected to be disbursed next week, according to the UK government.

But the leaders at Sunday’s summit – which includes presidents and prime ministers from across Europe, convened by Starmer – will have a difficult challenge ahead of them.

“It’s crucial for us to have President Trump’s support,” Zelensky said in a series of posts on X on Saturday morning. “He wants to end the war, but no one wants peace more than we do.”

“We’ve been fighting for three years, and Ukrainian people need to know that America is on our side,” he said.

The spectacle of the American president and vice president berating the leader of a war-torn ally stunned Europe and would have delighted the Kremlin. It added intensity to Sunday’s summit, which had initially sought to build on the progress achieved during a similar meeting in Paris last weekend.

Trump and JD Vance accused Zelensky of being ungrateful for American military support, for “gambling with the lives of millions of people,” and risking “World War III” by fighting Russia’s invading army in his country.

The scenes were Europe’s worst nightmare. One day before the shouting match, a chummy Starmer managed to get Trump to walk back previous false remarks that Zelensky was a “dictator,” voice his “respect” for Ukraine’s leader and even raise the possibility that Ukraine would claw back occupied territory from Russia in a ceasefire deal. All of those comments were notable reversals from Trump, and seemed to set the table well for Zelensky’s trip.

Now Europe is starting from square one again.

“Three years on from Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, we are at a turning point. Today I will reaffirm my unwavering support for Ukraine and double down on my commitment to provide capacity, training and aid to Ukraine, putting it in the strongest possible position,” Starmer said in a statement ahead of the London summit.

“In partnership with our allies, we must intensify our preparations for the European element of security guarantees, alongside continued discussions with the United States,” he said. “Now is the time for us to unite in order to guarantee the best outcome for Ukraine, protect European security, and secure our collective future.”

The summit will have three goals, Downing Street said: Ukraine’s short-term needs, securing a “lasting deal” to end the conflict, and “planning for strong security guarantees.”

As European leaders rushed to reaffirm their support for Zelensky on Friday evening, Starmer was noticeably silent. A few hours later, we learned why: Downing Street said he had spoken to Trump and Zelensky following their heated encounter. “He retains his unwavering support for Ukraine and is playing his part to find a path forward to a lasting peace, based on sovereignty and security for Ukraine,” Starmer’s spokesperson said.

The role of interlocutor between the Europe and the White House is one Starmer is taking seriously, even – perhaps especially – when it seems futile. It is one he will hope can reap rewards this weekend, but an increasing sense of desperation is setting in.

Yaroslav Zhelezniak, a Ukrainian member of parliament, wrote on Telegram ahead of the meetings in London: “If you thought the situation would somehow miraculously improve today… don’t count on it.”

Israel said Sunday it has stopped the entry of all humanitarian aid into Gaza following the expiry of phase one of the ceasefire deal and Hamas’ refusal of a US-backed extension.

The first phase of the ceasefire in Gaza, under which dozens of Israeli hostages and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners and detainees were freed since mid-January, reached its expiration date on Saturday.

Hamas has insisted on advancing to the second stage, accusing Israel of “ongoing manipulation” with its proposed extension to cover the Islamic holy month of Ramadan and the Jewish holiday of Passover. That extension had been proposed by US President Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff.

Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office said Sunday: “With the completion of Phase A of the hostage deal, and in light of Hamas’ refusal to accept the Witkoff framework for continuing the talks — which Israel had agreed to — Prime Minister (Benjamin) Netanyahu has decided that as of this morning, all entry of goods and supplies into the Gaza Strip will be stopped.

“Israel will not allow a ceasefire without the release of our hostages. If Hamas continues its refusal, there will be additional consequences.”

Hamas leader Mahmoud Mardawi said in a statement Sunday that “the only path to regional stability and the return of the prisoners is the full implementation of the agreement, starting with the second phase.”

Hamas wants the second phase to include negotiations for a permanent ceasefire, a complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza, the enclave’s reconstruction, “and then the release of prisoners as part of an agreed-upon deal,” Mardawi said.

“This is what we insist on, and we will not back down from it,” he added.

The Israelis want phase one to continue – the exchange of hostages, alive and deceased, in return for the continued release of Palestinian prisoners and detainees, and the flow of higher volumes of aid into Gaza. There are thought to be 24 Israeli hostages still alive in Gaza.