The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is riddled with almost unprecedented levels of corruption, and should be shut down, President Donald Trump has said.
In one of the first executive orders after his inauguration, Trump suspended all US foreign aid, pending a three-month review, amid a wider push to cut government spending.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio subsequently halted a number of projects assigned to USAID, Washington’s main agency for administering funding to political projects abroad.
Elon Musk, leading the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which is evaluating federal agencies’ spending, has branded USAID a “criminal organization.”
“USAID is driving the radical left crazy, and there is nothing they can do about it because the way in which the money has been spent, so much of it fraudulently, is totally unexplainable,” Trump wrote on his media site Truth Social on Friday.
“The corruption is at levels rarely seen before. Close it down!” he said.
The day before, the US president claimed that the agency had funneled billions of taxpayer dollars into media companies to foster positive media coverage of Democrats.
USAID stole billions of dollars, “much of it going to the fake news media as a ‘payoff’ for creating good stories about the Democrats. The left-wing ‘rag,’ known as ‘Politico,’ seems to have received $8,000,000,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday.
The decision reportedly followed findings by Musk’s team that millions of taxpayer dollars were being spent on Politico Pro subscriptions. Subsequently, the White House directed the General Services Administration to terminate all media contracts funded by USAID, Axios wrote on Thursday, citing an internal email the outlet obtained as saying.
Politico has denied receiving direct funding from the government, explaining that their premium subscriptions service was being used by some US agencies.
According to Reuters, the administration plans to retain fewer than 300 of USAID’s over 10,000 employees. This significant reduction has prompted a lawsuit from a major government workers’ union, challenging the legality of the cuts. The American Federation of Government Employees and the American Foreign Service Association sued Trump, Rubio, as well as the Treasury and State departments, branding the crackdown on USAID “unconstitutional and illegal.”