After Elon Musk “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” as he put it last year, he and President Trump scoffed that American humanitarian aid was, in effect, woke nonsense.

Yet in reality American humanitarian aid not only saved one life every 10 seconds but was also safeguarding the world from epidemics. So now we face a rapidly increasing outbreak of Ebola, and the Trump administration is finding that some of the things that went into the wood chipper were the very tools needed to tackle the virus.

Global health is unpredictable, and it’s not certain that the U.S. Agency for International Development would have stopped Ebola this time. But in three ways, Trump’s assault on global health has left us in a worse position to combat Ebola (although, in fairness, the administration has done one thing right).

The first failing was the destruction of U.S.A.I.D. Jeremy Konyndyk, who oversaw the response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic for the agency, noted that it used to have a major presence in Ituri, Democratic Republic of Congo, where the Ebola outbreak appears to have begun. But most of the aid to Congo was cut, and Ebola spread widely by the time anyone realized that it was present.

“I don’t think there is any way that this outbreak would have been missed for so long if all those programs were still at full strength and the U.S.A.I.D. mission team was still there,” Konyndyk told me. “And I can tell you that in my former job as head of disaster response, if my team was hearing reports of unexplained viral hemorrhagic fever clusters in Congo, that would be a four-alarm-fire-type moment. I would have immediately notified the White House.”

The United States had been the largest donor to the Democratic Republic of Congo, financing some 70 percent of humanitarian work there, according to Physicians for Human Rights — and most of that aid was shut off with no time for adjustment. Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist, posted a searing video interview in which a Congolese doctor spoke of another doctor forced by aid cuts to become a farmer, growing cassava.