The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is being gutted by tech billionaire Elon Musk’s cost-cutting operation in a shocking operation that launched over the weekend.
In the wake of President Trump’s executive order freezing foreign assistance, USAID’s website has been taken offline, hundreds of contractors have been laid off and employees are being locked out of their accounts one-by-one without notice. Musk said shortly after midnight Monday that Trump “agreed” to shut down USAID, which for more than 60 years has administered billions of dollars of humanitarian and development assistance around the world.
“We are terrified,” said one USAID employee, who was granted anonymity for fear of retribution. The employee said they woke up without access to internal systems, including their email, with “zero communication.”
Personal services contractors, who lack the legal protections of government employees and make up around half of the agency’s workforce, started getting shut out of systems on Sunday, according to two USAID employees. They also said some direct hires were being impacted.
One described seeing their colleagues’ Google Chat images crossed out one-by-one Sunday evening, indicating their account was deactivated.
Shortly after midnight, USAID employees received an email reviewed by The Hill that said their headquarters at the Ronald Reagan building would be closed Monday and instructing them to work remotely.
Another USAID employee said their colleagues were being blocked from entering a second USAID offce in southwest D.C., by men who identified themselves as part of the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE). They later stepped aside, the employee added.
Musk, who leads DOGE, went on a tirade Sunday against the agency.
“USAID is a ball of worms. There is no apple. And when there is no apple you just need to get rid of the whole thing. That’s why it’s got to go. It’s beyond repair,” Musk said shortly after midnight Monday on an X Space.
He later posted, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
This comes after two top security officials at USAID were reportedly placed on leave Saturday night after denying DOGE employees access to internal systems.
Steven Cheung, the White House director of communications, said Sunday that reports that DOGE employees attempted to access secure spaces were “FAKE NEWS” and “not even remotely true at all” in a post on X.
“This is how unserious and untrustworthy the media is,” Cheung wrote.
Spokespersons for the White House and USAID did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Hill.
USAID ‘guinea pig’ for cost-cutting ambitions
The Trump administration has stated its aims to slash federal spending, with Musk vowing to cut the federal budget by $2 trillion.
USAID appears to be first on the chopping block, despite being less than 1 percent of the federal budget. One USAID employee described the agency as a “guinea pig” for DOGE’s grander ambitions.
Established in 1961, USAID had a budget of $40 billion in 2023 — less than the nearly $70.9 billion that Lockheed Martin, the government’s largest contractor, received from that year, according to federal contracting data. The agency employs more than 10,000 people, two-thirds of which were overseas, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service.
USAID provides humanitarian and development assistance abroad, primarily by funding thousands of nongovernmental organizations, contractors, universities and foreign governments. One employee describe their work as “the easiest soft power you can use.”
But several USAID employees said they haven’t been allowed to speak to partners including UNICEF, the World Food Program and others since Trump issued the stop-work order.
“I had to ghost my partners because I was too afraid to say anything,” a USAID employee said.
Another said, “I’ve gone through the stages of grief probably 10 times,” even before this weekend.
The stop-work order sent shock waves and confusion rippling through the aid community.
“It’s really chilling. It’s really demoralizing. It’s really depressing for those people that now are not only jobless, but have no connection to, you know, who they work for and with,” one aid worker said.
Many partners are now going line by line through their programs with USAID to determine who and what may be impacted. USAID employees described disruptions to programs aimed at alleviating child malnutrition, providing disaster relief to internally displaced persons and strengthening water, sanitation and hygiene efforts.
“The payment system being down means that development organization and implementing partners are now not being paid for work that they’ve already conducted, let’s say, in December. And so the smaller organizations, of course, in particular, are in a big bind, because they can’t be functioning like that any further,” the aid worker added.
In the wake of Trump’s foreign assistance freeze, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced waivers for life-saving efforts, including emergency food aid and medicine and medical services.
Reuters reported Friday that the Trump administration may move to strip USAID of its independence and fold it into the State Department, which would be a massive and legally dubious shakeup of foreign aid efforts from Washington.
A ‘constitutional crisis’
Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, expressed support for stripping USAID of its independence during an interview on Face the Nation Sunday.
He said he would “absolutely be for — if that’s the path we go down — removing USAID as a separate department and having it fall under one of the other parts of United States Department of State because of its failure.”
Democrats on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee pushed back on the president’s ability to unilaterally make that happen.
“[A]ny effort to merge or fold USAID into the Department of State should be, and by law must be, previewed, discussed, and approved by Congress,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Rubio on Sunday. “Congress has also made clear that any attempt to reorganize or redesign USAID requires advance consultation with, and notification to, Congress.”
Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), who previously worked at USAID, took to X to make the case that dismantling the agency goes against U.S. national security interests.
“Their vindictive way of trying to shut down USAID sends signals all over the world that we are a nation at war with itself. It tells authoritarian adversaries that America is distracted and divided. It tells other nations we don’t care about them as China and others try to woo them to their side,” Kim wrote.
Even some right-leaning scholars have expressed concern with the administration’s actions. Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said what’s happening at USAID is “absolutely a constitutional crisis.”
“The president has zero legal authority to ‘shut down,’ defund, or otherwise cripple a $50 billion agency,” Riedl wrote in a post on X. “Audit it, identify unnecessary expenditures, draft reform or rescission proposals, and then go to Congress to PASS A LAW.”
