Billionaire Elon Musk, who is heading US President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal government, gave an update on the effort early on Monday, saying they were working to shut down the US foreign aid agency USAID.
Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, discussed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in a Monday social media talk on X, which he also owns. Trump has assigned Musk to lead a federal cost-cutting panel.
The conversation, which included former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Republican senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee, began with Musk saying they were working to shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
“It’s beyond repair,” Musk said, adding that Trump agrees it should be shut down.
On Sunday, it was reported that the Trump administration had removed two top security officials at USAID during the weekend after they tried to stop representatives from Musk’s DOGE from gaining access to restricted parts of the building, three sources said.
The website of USAID appeared to still be offline on Saturday and some users could not access it on Sunday. USAID has a staff of more than 10,000 people.
Speaking more broadly about cutting US expenses and fraud, Musk estimated the Trump administration can cut US$1 trillion from the US deficit next year.
Musk did not offer any evidence to support his fraud claim or explain how he reached the amount of US$1 trillion.
Since taking office 11 days ago, Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.
Do you have a source for that? I honestly thought that USAID was one of the very few "good" things that US was doing (although as always with imperialist countries, it was ultimately in pursuit of soft power, but I digress). I've seen many USAID-sponsored hospitals, kindergartens and museums in poor/developing countries. The numbers they themselves produce (I could only find this 2016/2017 report easily: https://www.cgdev.org/publication/foreign-assistance-agency-brief-usaid) seem to corroborate that the plurality of spending goes towards Health, with Health + Disaster Assistance being the majority. "Development Assistance" + "Transition Initiatives" + "Complex Crises Fund" (part of which is probably all the political stuff) is slightly more than a third of their spending.
They won't give you a source because that would require them to have one.
It isn't transparent how the money is being spent, usuay it goes to the US approved people who can spend it how they like. A good amount of good is done by it, but the purpose is as you said, soft power and regime change. Ending the program entirely signals a drastic change in strategy, perhaps to hard power.
That's... rather unnerving, but expected given the mask-off nazism now on display. I can only hope that this backfires quickly and not too many lives are lost in the process.
Also I will still mourn the loss of whatever funding USAID was providing, as now many of those facilities will inevitably close down. Life is rough in those places already, can't imagine the horror of learning that you no longer have a hospital because a rich fuck on the other side of the world wanted to see his number go up.
I want to stress perhaps. We don't know yet what this will look like. We know US soft power is waning, and Trump is trying to revitalize manufacturing and isolationism. We know peer nations like the PRC are rising as an alternative to the US. Ultimately, we need to watch very carefully, though I can see a hot war in Korea or China in the next decade.