On "Forbes Talks: Musk Watch," Forbes Staff Writer Emily Baker-White discussed her reporter showing that while Elon Musk has long claimed civilization will collapse unless we raise the birth rate, his “DOGE” group is slashing billions in funding for pregnant and nursing mothers and their children.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2025/04/11/elon_musks_war_on_moms_and_babies/
Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1
0:00 Introduction
2:18 The Latest With Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, Xai
5:42 CDC Research Cuts- DOGE
12:53 From Silicone Valley To Government Official
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Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2025/04/11/elon_musks_war_on_moms_and_babies/
Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1
0:00 Introduction
2:18 The Latest With Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, Xai
5:42 CDC Research Cuts- DOGE
12:53 From Silicone Valley To Government Official
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
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Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.
Category
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Hi, everyone. I'm Maggie McGrath, editor of Forbes Women. We have seen the Department
00:09of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, make cuts to thousands of areas of the federal
00:16government. A lot of these areas affect women. My colleague, Emily Baker White, has a news story
00:23on Forbes.com pointing out that the man kind of in charge of DOGE, Elon Musk, has long
00:29claimed that civilization will collapse unless we raise the birth rate. But DOGE is slashing
00:35billions in funding for pregnant and nursing mothers and their children. Emily, thank
00:39you for joining us to discuss this story. I'm so glad to be here. Emily, we've seen
00:44tens of thousands of government workers lose their jobs over the past few months. So many
00:50programs have been cut. We've been looking at U.S. aid. We've seen cuts at NIH, CDC, and
00:56beyond. But you took a really comprehensive bird's eye view at everything we've seen from
01:02DOGE. And you come to the conclusion that women and children are really affected. And
01:06this is counter to what Elon Musk and President Trump have said in their own personal lives
01:13and on the campaign trail. Can you just talk about what drew you to this story?
01:17Yeah. What drew me to this story was this bizarre tension. I was looking at a list of all of these
01:23terminated grants to go do science and health care in a bunch of different ways. And I kept
01:29seeing maternal and pregnant and other terms that sort of specifically looked at helping
01:36people start families, helping people get pregnant, helping people deliver babies safely.
01:40And I was like, why? This is the fertilization president. We've got like Elon Musk saying
01:46civilization is going to fall if we don't all have more babies. Why are they cutting funding
01:50to programs that are trying to help people get safely pregnant? And I did not find a satisfying
01:56answer to that question. But I did talk to some of the people whose work has had to stop. And what's
02:04really clear is whatever the intention of these cuts, they are affecting people who are trying to get
02:09pregnant. They are making it harder for people to get pregnant safely, to deliver babies safely,
02:13to go through the postpartum period safely. And it just does not make any sense.
02:18Let's dive into some of those stories you've heard. Is there something that rises to the top of your
02:23mind or that you haven't been able to get out of your mind since talking to your sources?
02:28Yeah. So one of the folks I spoke to, several of the folks I spoke to, worked on a grant that was
02:35given to something called the New York Champ Center of Excellence. And this was a hospital center that
02:42focused on providing care to local New Yorkers, and especially those who might not get care in other
02:49ways. And two of the things that are most likely to cause harm to a mother right after she gives birth
02:56are cardiovascular complications and postpartum depression. And this intervention that was funded
03:03by this grant had doulas checking in with moms and pregnant people every day, right, to make sure
03:10that they were okay. These folks were giving like food deliveries to people's houses when they needed
03:15food. They were doing lactation appointments to make sure that folks knew how to breastfeed and were
03:22breastfeeding successfully. And all of this work had to stop on a dime. And the folks who were involved
03:30in facilitating this grant, they were members of the community. And so they had to go to their
03:34neighbors, to their friends, to like people at their bus stop who they were helping and say,
03:39I can't help you anymore. We were told to stop. And when you've created that sort of community fabric,
03:47being told to stop on a dime is so disruptive to that group of people. And it takes a lot of trust
03:54to work with folks in this way. And it takes a lot of trust to talk about your reproductive health,
04:02to talk about your pregnancy with a member of the community. And that trust was just shattered
04:06when the grant was canceled. And one of the most amazing things about this is these people are still
04:13delivering food. They are still going. They're not getting paid. They're not employed. But they said,
04:17I'm not going to leave this person. I'm not going to leave this person who needs my help. They're taking
04:21food out of their own fridges and delivering it to these new moms. And that I cannot get out of my
04:26head. Oh, my goodness. Well, we've seen through Forbes Women the statistics around doulas and how
04:33doulas can improve pregnancy and healthy birth outcomes. And so it can feel like a lot of these
04:40cuts are just ignoring the scientific and medical evidence we have for some of these programs. Did you
04:48get anyone in the administration to respond to that aspect specifically?
04:53We didn't. But interestingly, one of the people who worked on the study told me,
04:58you know, it actually was probably saving money. It was probably saving money to have doulas going in
05:05and helping these folks and making sure that they don't develop problems that they're going to have
05:11to get solved other ways. Right. If you like an ounce of prevention is worth a lot. And most of
05:18these folks were on Medicaid anyway. Right. And so if they did develop complications and those
05:23complications weren't caught until later, it would be many thousands of dollars in the hospital to help
05:27them. And that's taxpayer money, too. So to cut a program that was likely saving taxpayers money and
05:35preventing people from serious injury or death doesn't make a lot of sense.
05:43It's true for this specific program. And it's also true as you zoom out, as you do in this piece,
05:48and you look at the comprehensive aspect of these cuts. We've been covering the cuts to the CDC team
05:53covering infertility research. There's no one at the CDC right now who is an expert in infertility or IVF.
06:00And that's just one other team on top of the teams that you spoke with. Are we able to extrapolate
06:06the effects on public health that we could see in the next year, two or five, if these cuts remain in
06:13place? Yeah. So this is this is one of the really hard things is that there is a lot of disruption
06:19right now. There is a lot of pain right now. But a lot of the folks who were doing work at the CDC,
06:26at NIH through these grants, were collecting data. And that data was going to be useful next year and
06:34five years from now and 10 years from now. That is how you determine what you need to do in order to
06:40improve medical outcomes, right? It is only by studying data from the last year and five years
06:47and 10 years and 20 years that we see trends and we say, oh, we shouldn't do the IVF procedure this way.
06:53We should do it this other way. It's safer. And if you're not collecting all that information,
06:57it's going to stifle our ability to advance science down the road and actually make medicine
07:04better for people. And so these folks doing this core research is often like, yeah, you were doing
07:09research. I don't really exactly know what you do. You weren't like directly working with patients.
07:14So it's probably not that vital. No, because the folks who are doing that core research and working
07:18with those core data sets, they're using the data. They are analyzing the data, creating the data,
07:25synthesizing the data, housing the data that every medical professional in the country uses. And so
07:30the disruption to this core system, it hurts now. It's going to hurt worse in a month. It's going to
07:36hurt worse in a year. It's really going to have ripple effects that we can only begin to think about.
07:41One of the questions I've been asking my sources is, is there a private sector solution who can step
07:47in, right? As Forbes reporters, we both know the amount of philanthropic dollars that exist
07:55out there. I'm curious, Emily, what have you heard from your stories? Is there a billionaire or a
08:00foundation who could step in and emergency fund some of the programs that you looked at that have been
08:06cut? I know there are people trying to figure out what to do next. When you lay off huge trenches of
08:15very passionate, very highly educated, wicked smart people who are trying to advance science,
08:26those people are going to band together. They're going to say, what do we do? They're going to try
08:30to figure out the way to keep doing the work that they love no matter what. And so I think time will
08:39tell what those folks choose to do and where they choose to put their efforts, but they're not done.
08:45That's the one bit of hope here. I want to pivot a little bit because the story that you published
08:50today looks at this issue through the lens of Elon Musk, who, as you note, is a father to an estimated
08:5714 children. You write, Musk has said he thinks civilization is going to crumble if women don't
09:02have more babies. He has offered his sperm to acquaintances and blamed birth control for
09:07decreasing pregnancy rates. Quote, it should be considered a national emergency to have kids,
09:12he wrote last summer. So as important as it is to look at the programs that have been cut and the
09:17effect to women, you do frame it through Elon Musk. Why was it important to use this framing?
09:23Because I think a lot of people listen to Elon Musk on this stuff. And I think a lot of men
09:28listen to Elon Musk when he talks about this stuff and birth rates are falling. Okay. You want to do
09:35something about that? Maybe not this. And, and so I think, um, it's important to meet people where
09:40they're at. And there are a lot of people who do think that the birth rate is a really important
09:44issue. And there are a lot of people beyond Elon Musk who think that, and I think it's worth engaging
09:48with those people to say, Hey, if, if we want to make pregnancy more successful for more people,
09:55and we want to make sure that children have the healthcare funding that they need so that when
09:59people do have children, those children have better outcomes. Like that seems like something
10:04that should transcend partisanship. It's, it's not partisan. It's not about anything except making
10:09sure that people can have the families that they want to have.
10:13Before we started recording, I was asking you if there's an aspect to all of these cuts that the
10:17public is missing. And you talked about the term woman. Can you share now that we are recording
10:23with our audience, what you told me about how some of these cuts were made?
10:28Yeah. So I, I can't speak to specific programs that were cut. We don't know exactly why programs
10:34were cut, but there has been a lot of reporting that, um, in order to cut programs that they thought
10:40were affiliated with DEI. The administration went through and basically control F grants for words
10:48like black, Brown, BIPOC, underserved, and woman or women, right? The problem is in medicine,
10:59there is medicine that is just for women. Breast cancer only affects women. Ovarian cancer only affects
11:06women. There are all sorts of conditions that have, that come up in pregnancy that only affect
11:11women. Preeclampsia being an example. You can't write a grant to study preeclampsia and not mention
11:18the word woman or women. But if the administration was just looking for anything that had the word
11:23woman in it, then you're essentially stopping women's health and women's health research from
11:28happening. And I don't think anybody actually wants to do that.
11:31I just think in some ways, um, Musk has taken, moved fast and break things, uh, and brought it
11:38to the government. And if Doge had gone a little more slowly and used a scalpel, they might have
11:45been able to get at the things that, that they actually wanted to get out without doing so much
11:51harm. And hey, black women have specific medical needs too, right? And so if you start excluding
11:59black from every grant, you are going to stop black women's healthcare, Hispanic women have distinct
12:04needs, right? In medicine, we can't, we can't say that everyone has to be treated the same all the
12:11time, or we're just leaving valuable science on the table. We know that people's bodies work
12:18differently and we want to try to help everybody be healthy. And that should be the goal. And, and
12:24the story I wrote today, um, the, the program largely served black women in New York city,
12:32black women in New York city are more than nine times as likely to die in childbirth than white
12:38women in New York city. To treat everybody the same erases that disparity. And that does a disservice
12:44to everybody. If we want everybody to be healthy, then we need to take each person, each human as
12:49they are with whatever protected characteristics they might have. That's a nuance to the DEI thesis
12:56as a whole, that is getting lost in all of this, I would argue, but I do wonder, you, you mentioned
13:02Elon Musk is taking a Silicon Valley move fast and break things approach to the federal government.
13:08And I've heard other sources describe this as, well, they're waiting to see where the greatest
13:13outcry is. And if enough people are angry enough, they'll rehire some of these folks or, or walk it
13:19back. Part A of my question is, what do you think of that opinion? And part B is, have we seen enough
13:25outrage? I don't think we've seen enough outrage. I think people are still even understanding what this
13:31means. Um, I also think gauging outrage is a very bad way to go about cutting things. If you cut things
13:39first, you're losing talent, you're losing some of the best scientists in the country, are they want to
13:45going to want to come back if you say, Oh, actually your job still exists. I wouldn't necessarily, I would
13:52look for a stable job, I would look for someone who values me, and I would look for someone who's not going to
13:56do the same thing again, two weeks later. I think the amount of thrash, the amount of instability in the
14:04administration right now, is causing a massive leech of talent away from the administration. Even
14:10people who aren't laid off, people are leaving because they don't want to be a part of this. And
14:15and because they don't think it's working or salvageable or as attractive a job as a place that
14:21has a more stable approach to science. So you posted this story today, have there been any early
14:30reactions from readers or your sources that are worth sharing or that you'll be thinking about
14:36going forward? I think people are sad and I'm sad. It's a sad story. Um, it's an incredible story of
14:43community resilience, but it's also, we should not need to be resilient in this way. Um, and I hope that
14:49we don't have to be resilient in this way as much as folks have had to recently. We should not have to
14:55be resilient in this way. I think on that note, on that somber note, but maybe perhaps hopeful fuel
15:01for those who wish to move forward. I will leave it there. Emily Baker White, thank you so much for
15:07joining us and talking about your very important story for folks who want to read it. Please go to
15:11Forbes.com. Thank you so much. Thank you.