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Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and President Donald Trump’s controversial close advisor, said Monday the giant USAID humanitarian agency will be “shutting down” as part of his radical – and critics say unconstitutional – drive to shrink the US government.
Musk called USAID “a criminal organisation” and declared “you’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing.”
The founder of SpaceX and Tesla – who has massive contracts with the US government and was the biggest donor to Trump’s presidential campaign – said he had cleared the unprecedented move against a major wing of US government with Trump himself.
“I went over with him in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down,” Musk said in a discussion on his X online platform.
USAID is the aid arm of US foreign policy, funding health and emergency programs in the world’s poorest regions. It is also seen as an important source of soft power for the superpower in its struggle for influence with rivals including China.
Echoing far-right Republicans, Musk used X to call the agency “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.”
President Donald Trump and his team are having discussions about merging USAID into the State Department in order to significantly reduce the size of the agency’s workforce for efficiency purposes, a senior White House official told Reuters on Monday.
The Trump administration planned to send a notification to Congress soon on Trump’s plans to revamp USAID, the official said. Trump has entrusted Elon Musk to oversee the project, the official added.
”There are discussions about merging USAID into the State Department to significantly reduce the size of the workforce for efficiency purposes and to ensure their spending is in line with the president’s agenda,” the official said.
”President Trump has entrusted Elon to oversee the efficiency of this agency,” the official said of the Tesla CEO who has become a close Trump adviser.
USAID in crosshairs
The assault on USAID comes in the context of long-running narratives on the far-right and libertarian wings of the Republican Party that the United States wastes money on foreigners while ignoring Americans.
The agency describes itself as working “to end extreme poverty and promote resilient, democratic societies while advancing our security and prosperity.”
Its budget of more than $40 billion is a small drop in overall US government annual spending of nearly $7 trillion.
Among other criticisms, which Musk has not substantiated, he claims USAID does “rogue CIA work” and even “funded bioweapon research, including Covid-19, that killed millions of people.”
Trump echoed this rhetoric, saying Sunday that USAID is “run by a bunch of radical lunatics.”
One person welcoming the apparent death knell for the aid agency was former Russian president – and ally to current ruler Vladimir Putin – Dmitry Medvedev.
“Smart move by @elonmusk, trying to plug USAID’s Deep Throat,” Medvedev posted on X.
Matthew Kavanagh, head of Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Policy & Politics, called the running down of USAID “a disaster for US foreign policy.”
With inputs from agencies