USAID staffers told to stay out of DC headquarters after Musk said Trump agreed to shut it down: ‘Just a ball of worms’
WASHINGTON — USAID workers received an email Monday telling them to stay out of the agency’s DC headquarters — as Elon Musk and the White House moved to “shut it down” and reorganize it under the State Department.
Staffers with the US Agency for International Development were ordered “at the direction of Agency leadership” to “work remotely,” except for “personnel with essential on-site and building maintenance functions individually contracted by senior leadership,” according to an agency-wide email reviewed by The Post.
“Further guidance will be forthcoming,” the missive said.
The email appeared to have been drafted by Gavin Kliger, an engineer at Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which has been charged with trimming federal spending from the agency’s roughly $40 billion budget as well as other Executive Branch departments.
The US is the largest funder of foreign aid internationally, including through the USAID, and Republicans have routinely slammed the agency’s work, particularly for having been wasteful of taxpayers’ money and unnecessarily promoting a left-wing agenda abroad.
Last month, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast called out several controversial DEI expenditures, which ended up being halted by a 90-day foreign-funding pause imposed after Trump took office.
For example, Mast (R-Fla.) faulted the Biden administration for approving $1.5 million in US funding for employment and entrepreneurial opportunities to the Serbian pro-LGBT Grupa Izadji, which translates as “Group Come Out.”
The Foreign Affairs Committee chairman also slammed other USAID grants — including $2.5 million for electric vehicles in Vietnam, $47,000 for “a trasgender opera in Colombia” and $32,000 for the production of a Peruvian “transgender comic book,” the Daily Mail first reported.
The questionable funding was on top of the millions of dollars doled out to Chinese research labs in Wuhan, where the virus causing COVID-19 emerged more than five years ago.
Millions more in funding was sent for relief in the Gaza Strip — even while being marked at “high-risk” of falling into the hands of Hamas terrorists by the agency’s own watchdog.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Monday afternoon that the agency had a?“level of insubordination [that] makes it impossible to conduct a sort of mature and serious review that I think foreign aid writ large should have.”
He also revealed in a letter to congressional lawmakers that Foreign Assistance Director Peter Marocco would serve as deputy administrator of USAID to “review” and reorganize the agency into the State Department.
Trump, 78, told reporters Sunday night that the USAID had “been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out.”
Musk said hours later on an X Spaces event that the president had “agreed” with the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX founder that “we should shut it down.
“It became apparent that it’s not an apple with a worm,” Musk told listeners on the livestream Monday morning. “What we have is just a ball of worms. You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair.”
The largest share of USAID’s $43.4 billion budget in fiscal year 2023 went toward foreign governance assistance ($16.8 billion), followed by humanitarian aid ($10.5 billion), health care initiatives ($7 billion), administrative efforts ($3.5 billion) and agriculture, education and infrastructure projects ($3.1 billion), according to a Congressional Research Service report issued in January.
The top 10 of the 130 or so nations that received US taxpayer funds that year were Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan and Syria, the report shows.
Trump’s funding freeze on foreign assistance has since shut down many of USAID’s aid programs worldwide — compelling thousands of layoffs by nongovernmental groups — but the agency’s near-closure has also barred access to security apps critical for some agency staff abroad in conflict zones.
Other websites have popped up tracking the thousands of job losses associated with the stop-work order imposed by the Trump administration last week — as well as an interactive map showing which nations will be adversely affected.
Congressional Democrats held a press conference outside USAID headquarters Monday, protesting alongside other critics that the shuttering of the agency was unconstitutional.
“This is what the beginning of dictatorship looks like,” claimed far-left “Squad” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). “What Trump and Elon and all of their cronies are trying to do, is take away the constitutional power of Congress.”
Musk and DOGE cost-cutters had apparently butted heads in-person with USAID officials over the weekend.
Two USAID security officials were placed on leave Saturday after refusing to let the DOGE team access classified material in restricted areas at the agency’s headquarters in the Ronald Reagan Building near the White House.
The agency’s chief of staff, Matt Hopson, who had just been appointed by the second Trump administration, subsequently resigned, though it’s unclear if his departure was in response to the apparently unlawful incident.
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In 1961, President John F. Kennedy created USAID by an executive order to provide humanitarian, developmental and security assistance, prompting some critics of the agency to point out Trump could simply revoke the order.
Musk has even alleged that the agency is a “criminal organization” and “viper’s nest of radical left marxists who hate America,” as he and other critics have accused it of footing the bill for highly dubious causes.
“Did you know that USAID, using YOUR tax dollars, funded bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people?” he posted Sunday on X, highlighting $53 million that USAID contributed to the since-debarred nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance between 2004 and 2022.
According to a June 2023 Government Accountability Office report, USAID approved $854,384 in grants to the University of California, Davis, which funneled the money on to EcoHealth Alliance for research on bat coronaviruses at Wuhan University and the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology — both of which are located in the city where the COVID-19 pandemic erupted more than five years ago.
EcoHealth Alliance used the funding to experiment with biological samples from around 1,500 people exposed to bats and other animals and “test, clone and sequence” from “samples that test positive for viruses such as coronaviruses or influenza viruses.”
Officials at the National Institutes of Health later conceded that tests conducted by the Manhattan-based nonprofit with the Chinese research team constituted so-called “gain-of-function” research, which increases the infectiousness of viruses, and made at least one viral strand at least 10,000 times more infectious.
Researchers at the Chinese lab were also among the first to contract SARS-CoV-2.
The Department of Health and Human Services halted grants to EcoHealth last year — and barred it last month from receiving any federal funding for the next five years.
Asked by Sen. Rand Paul last year whether she was aware her agency funded gain-of-function research, then-USAID Administrator Samantha Power said there was “no evidence” of the funding going out the door.
Paul (R-Ky.) in an interview with The Post last week revealed that he had sought information from Power about USAID’s involvement for months afterward — but faced strong “resistance.
“I don’t think she ever fully understood,” he said, “or she did and was just resisting it because she knew she’d get a black eye for funding gain-of-function research.”
Earlier in the weekend, Musk and DOGE workers also accessed sensitive information about Social Security and Medicare payments at the Treasury Department, prompting another senior official to resign, according to the Washington Post.