White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that Reuters’s sources were “wrong,” that Trump had signed off on the idea, that DOGE and OPM had given the White House advance notice of the email’s release, and that the “White House was not caught off guard.”

Elon Musk on Wednesday acknowledged that the U.S. DOGE Service “accidentally canceled” efforts by the U.S. Agency for International Development to prevent the spread of Ebola — but the billionaire entrepreneur insisted that the initiative was quickly restored.