Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio joked that the upcoming Labor Day will be the most meaningful of his life “as someone with four jobs.”
Rubio, who until Friday has had more job titles than anyone in the Trump administration, was also serving as the acting archivist for the National Archives and Records Administration Trump’s interim national security adviser, and acting administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Now the “secretary of everything” is handing control of USAID to White House budget director Russell Vought, who is trying to claw back nearly $5 billion from the embattled global aid agency in a process that congressional watchdogs have already warned is illegal.
“Since January, we’ve saved the taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. And with a small set of core programs moved over to the State Department, USAID is officially in close out mode,” Rubio said Friday.
“Russ is now at the helm to oversee the closeout of an agency that long ago went off the rails,” he added.
Vought — among the architects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for the Trump administration — is also juggling multiple job titles, including acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, another federal agency that is struggling to function after Trump’s upheaval.
On Friday, Vought’s budget office announced Trump’s plans to cancel roughly $5 billion in foreign aid through a process known as a “pocket rescission,” an effort to reclaim money that was already approved by Congress.
The government’s internal watchdog had stressed earlier this month that pocket rescissions illegally undermine the congressional power of the purse and unconstitutionally erode the nation’s core system of checks and balances.
The White House now wants to cancel $5 billion in what it calls “woke and weaponized foreign aid money that violates the President’s America First priorities.”
Members of Congress blasted the announcement, warning that Trump’s actions could trigger a government shutdown as lawmakers prepare for the end of the fiscal year on September 30.
“Article I of the Constitution makes clear that Congress has the responsibility for the power of the purse,” Republican Sen. Susan Collins, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement.
“Any effort to rescind appropriated funds without congressional approval is a clear violation of the law,” she added.
“Russell Vought would like us all to believe that making this rescissions request just weeks away from the end of the fiscal year provides some sort of get-out-of-jail free card for this administration to simply not spend investments Congress has made,” said Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the committee.
“It emphatically does not,” she said in a statement. “Legal experts have made clear this scheme is illegal and so have my Republican colleagues.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump and congressional Republicans don’t have a plan to avoid a “painful and entirely unnecessary shutdown” as lawmakers stare down the clock.
USAID, which was among the world’s largest aid programs with hundreds of life-saving missions in dozens of countries, has already endured a virtual collapse within the first eight months of the Trump administration.
Hours after entering office, Trump issued an executive order imposing a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid distribution, then placed virtually all USAID staff on administrative leave while folding what remains of the dismantled agency into the State Department.
On July 1, Rubio said the agency would “officially cease to implement foreign assistance.”
Elon Musk, who assumed control of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency with a mandate to slash budgets across the federal government, said he wanted the agency to be fed into a “wood chipper.”
A recent study in The Lancet estimated Trump’s cuts could contribute to the deaths of 14 million million people by 2030, including as many as 5 million children under the age of 5.
On August 13, a federal appeals court ruled that the administration could continue withholding billions of dollars in foreign aid, dealing a major blow to relief groups and potentially teeing up a critical Supreme Court test to the president’s attempts to control funding approved by Congress.
