Elon Musk at the inauguration of Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2025.Photo:Chip Somodevilla/Getty
Chip Somodevilla/Getty
The United States Agency for International Development is one of the largest aid organizations in the world, established under PresidentJohn F. Kennedyto provide a variety of foreign assistance programs in developing nations.
But on Monday, just two days after theagency’s website went darkand amid days of speculation about its future, the USAID headquarters in Washington had been shut down and employees had been instructed not to return to work, according to reports from theBBC,The Associated PressandReuters.
The email did not include further information on how long the offices would remain shut down, according to Reuters, instead noting that “further guidance will be forthcoming.”
Elon Musk.Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Gett
Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Gett
The uncertainty surrounding USAID and its employees comes shortly after Musk — who leads the new “Department of Government Efficiency” — announced on X that PresidentDonald Trumpagreed that USAID needed to be “shut down.”
“With regards to the USAID stuff, I went over it with [Trump] in detail and he agreed that we should shut it down,” Musk said in an X Spaces conversation on Monday morning, perCNN.
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The billionaire — who secured his government role after rallying for Trump during his 2024 campaign — reportedly added that he and the president discussed USAID “a few times."
The day prior, Trump slammed the agency in a message of his own, perThe Hill.
President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office on Jan. 20, 2025.Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty
Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty
The headquarters shutting down is not the government’s first major action against USAID, however. As CNN reports, citing sources, two security officials were put on leave Saturday for refusing to give Musk’s DOGE initiative access to its systems.
Sixty senior USAID staff were put on leave in the days prior after being accused of trying to skirt Trump’sexecutive orderto pause foreign aid for 90 days.
CNN’s sources claim that DOGE personnel attempted to gain access to classified information from USAID via security systems and personnel files, and that they were eventually able to access the headquarters.
Democrats in the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee later wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday that they wanted an “immediate update” on what happened, per CNN, writing that it “raises deep concerns about the protection and safeguarding of matters related to U.S. national security.”
DOGE’s Katie Millerclaimed on Xon Sunday that “no classified material was accessed without proper security clearances.”
Elsewhere in his X spaces on Monday, Musk called USAID “incredibly politically partisan” and claimed it had been supporting “radically left causes throughout the world including things that are anti-American," according to CNN.
Musk has also called it a “criminal organization” onXin response to reports about USAID officials being put on leave.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump attend a rally on Oct. 5, 2024.Justin Merriman/Bloomberg via Getty
Justin Merriman/Bloomberg via Getty
Since 1961, it has worked to “save lives, reduce poverty, strengthen democratic governance, and help people emerge from humanitarian crises and progress beyond assistance,” per its mission statement.
A former senior USAID official told CNN over the weekend that the State Department — where USAID information appears online after its own website was shut down — doesn’t “have the capacity, the expertise, the training to do that kind of work. It is a completely separate line of effort that is undertaken on the ground."
Trump’s latest move comes two weeks after he began his second White House term on Jan. 20.
Outside of his foreign aid freeze, Trump has also taken executive action that attempted to endbirthright citizenship,pardoned roughly 1,500 peoplewho were convicted of their roles in the 2021 Capitol riot, and established the unofficialDOGEagency.
source: people.com
