The ongoing dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) happened so quickly that one fired staffer had to be rehired to process the time sheets of other employees, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is now in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency, otherwise known as DOGE, an outside advisory panel in charge of conducting massive cuts to the federal government.
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk boasted in a social media post. “USAID is a criminal organization,” he baselessly declared.
President Donald Trump and his administration, with Musk’s help, have mostly dismantled the $40 billion foreign assistance agency in under two weeks, upending the lives of its 10,000 employees as well as the thousands of people in outside groups that work alongside it.
The aid organization is widely seen as a way for the U.S. to not only help other countries, but to boost American influence and cultivate valuable relationships around the world that can help to forestall conflicts, including wars, and nurture business ties. Critics warn that American rivals, like China and Russia, will eagerly move into the breach to grow their own global influence.
As of Monday, the agency’s main building was closed, and its website had been taken down. All of the USAID facilities in the nation’s capital were closed on Tuesday, and the agency was getting ready to put almost all of the final 1,400 employees on administrative leave, two officials told The Journal.
Later on Tuesday, it was announced that almost all of USAID’s employees would be put on paid leave beginning Saturday morning. Staffers working across the world were ordered to come home within 30 days.
The message was put on the revived USAID site, ending with the words: “Thank you for your service.”
The Trump administration appears to be testing the waters for how to dismantle an agency that has been in place for decades without much legal and political pushback. A number of outside groups have complained that they cannot get paid for work that’s already been done. The small number of staffers who are still working are forwarding past-due invoices, according to The Journal, trying to follow an order from the president while still adhering to federal contracting requirements.
USAID global health program contractor Stefanie Leigh Plant, 40, told the paper that she was fired in an email and that her health insurance was taken away just three days later.
“That’s when the incredulity began setting in,” she told The Journal.
Established in 1961 to support work to control disease outbreaks and battle child mortality, USAID has been a separate agency from the State Department for decades, partly to avoid the appearance that aid was connected to diplomacy.
Musk targeted the agency in an attempt to cut trillions from the budget. The Trump administration is now working to move what’s left of the agency into the State Department. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is currently the agency’s acting administrator.
The White House said in a statement Monday that for decades, USAID has been “unaccountable to taxpayers as it funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight.”
Appearing on Fox News on Monday, Rubio said: “This is not about getting rid of foreign aid.”
“There are things we do through USAID that we should continue to do that make sense,” he added.
A judge who has issued an injunction against the Trump administration’s separate funding freeze across the board affecting multiple federal agencies said in her ruling earlier this week that funding can be reviewed first before a wholesale freeze affects millions of people.
In the case of the USAID, the decision to suspend assistance without any warning will have a “significant impact,” George Ingram, a former senior USAID official, told NBC News last week. It will “do serious damage to the trust that the U.S. has built up over the years.”
