A “special government employee,” wealthy beyond the dreams of Croesus, chose as his first target the poorest and most vulnerable people on Earth. On Sunday evening, Elon Musk and his peach-fuzz goons locked employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development out of their email accounts, shut down the agency website, announced that nearly everyone would be fired and crowed that USAID had been fed into a “wood chipper.” President Onlooker muttered approvingly that the agency had it coming because it was dominated by “radical left lunatics.” Musk called them criminals.

USAID is a duly constituted government agency created by Congress and the president. By law, it can be shut down “only” by Congress and the president. The attempt to close it by the whim of a ketamine-popping oligarch is flagrantly illegal, and will eventually, one assumes, be reversed by the courts. But that could take months (and there’s a sting in the tail, which I’ll come to in a minute).

Meanwhile, Americans who work for the agency, most of them overseas, have been thrown into chaos, and the people who benefit from the assistance have been left in the lurch. Until last week, USAID was the largest distributor of humanitarian assistance on Earth. Today, by abruptly pulling the plug, the world’s greatest humanitarian country has become one of its least, raising a huge middle finger to those facing hunger, disease, war and oppression.

Silicon Valley types like to move fast and break things. I guess that’s fine if the only thing you break is your own bank account, but applying that spirit to foreign assistance (again, without a shred of legal authority) means breaking human beings. And it means criminal waste. Wasn’t Musk supposed to be seeking to limit waste? According to a source with knowledge of foreign assistance activities at the Department of State and USAID, there are currently more than 475,000 metric tons of American food commodities (purchased from American farmers in Texas, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa) that have already been ordered and are now at risk of becoming spoiled on railroad sidings or ports. Another 29,000 metric tons, valued at $30 million, are reportedly sitting in a Texas warehouse and cannot be shipped to needy people.

Most of the 10,000 people who work for USAID have no idea if they will ever see another paycheck. Those in conflict zones like Ukraine are unsure whether they retain diplomatic status. They’ve been told to come home, but they have no guidance about how or whether the government will pay for their transportation. They’ve been locked out of their phones and their computers and feel anxious and isolated.