The Scramble to Save Rural Health Care From DOGE

April 22, 2025

saline bag hanging from rack

(The Atlantic) – Can an Alabama health clinic survive Musk’s “chainsaw for bureaucracy”?

People called the clinic Cahaba, which was short for Cahaba Medical Care, a larger system that was managing to get doctors into some of the poorest, sickest, least-served parts of the state, and whose leaders were now worried that years of painstaking work were about to be undone.

The reason wasn’t only because so many patients relied on Medicaid, which was currently being targeted by the Trump administration for $880 billion in cuts. Cahaba’s clinics also depended upon an array of more obscure federal grants of the sort that President Donald Trump’s adviser Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency had been summarily deleting before fully understanding the lives that would be upended in the real world. (Read More)