Trump and Musk take aim at a surprising target: a humanitarian agency with long bipartisan support

WASHINGTON — After taking office, President Trump and his most powerful ally, billionaire Elon Musk, outlined a long list of federal offices and programs they wanted to drastically scale back or outright kill.

Few anticipated that their first big target would be a humanitarian aid agency that accounts for a smallfraction of the federal budget and has been long supported by members of both parties.

The Agency for International Development, or USAID, supports a wide range of programs in countries around the world, from disaster relief to public health. With a budget of $42.4 billion in 2023, less than 1 percent of overall federal expenditures that fiscal year, it funds initiatives that have long been supported domestically as an inexpensive but effective form of soft US power.

Less than two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, however,Musk —empowered by the president to lead the ad hoc “Department of Government Efficiency” federal spending reduction project — said it was “time” for USAID to “die.” On Monday, employees at the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters were told to stay home by a young Musk aide.

By the afternoon, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was named acting head of the agency, putting its future very much in doubt, while congressional Democrats rallied opposition outside the building along with USAID employees and their supporters.

Lawmakers and international aid advocates struggled to make sense not only of the breakneck dismantling of the agency but also why Trump and Musk had chosen to target it so quickly and dramatically.

Andrew S. Natsios, a professor at Texas A&M University who served as USAID administrator under President George W. Bush, said he believes the agency got on Trump’s radar when transition team members saw photographs in its offices highlighting work done on climate change, gay rights, and other progressive causes during the Biden administration.

“They walked in and they said, ‘This is the most woke agency in the federal government,’ and that enraged them all. They ordered all the photographs to be taken down,” Natsios said, citing someone involved with the transition. That helped give Trump and Musk a misleading view of the other vital work done by USAID and led them to try to eliminate it rather than make some changes, Natsios said.

“They don’t even know what the agency does,” he said, calling Musk’s description of it as “viper’s nest of radical left Marxists” ridiculous. “The most pro-business, pro-free market of all multilateral and bilateral aid agencies in the world is USAID.”

Representative Gabe Amo, a Rhode Island Democrat who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he had many conversations over the weekend with people who are “shocked by all this.”

“I would say I’m not surprised given the turn that we’ve seen, what MAGA foreign policy represents,” Amo said. “But mostly I’m disappointed, because the best of America is reflected in these programs.”

The misgivings that Musk and allies have expressed about USAID are not much different than their critiques of other arms of the federal government. They have posted to social media examples of past agency expenditures supportive of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or amplified line items that appear strange or wasteful out of context, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did on Monday by pulling out of her pocket a list of allegedly offensive spending.

Despite a history of bipartisan support,USAID has been a target of the right wing in recent years. Last year, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia filed an amendment toan appropriations bill todefund the agency, which failed by a wide margin. The Trump administration’s first attempt to impose a blanket freeze on discretionary federal spending last week included virtually all forms of foreign aid, though exceptions have been made.

But last weekUSAID emerged as a top target for Musk and Republicans, with efforts accelerating in recent days. Appearing with Musk in an audio conversation posted on X early Monday morning, Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, said she zeroed in on USAID because of concerns about how it was spending humanitarian funding in Ukraine.

She said USAID staffers resisted her oversight, leading her to launch an investigation that found misuse of funding. In a May 2024 letter to the agency’s inspector general, Ernst said the agency had listed on social media some of the projects it funded in Ukraine, including, “‘bankrolling a fashion festival for Ukrainian streetwear brands,’ a trade-mission to Bordeaux, France, for ‘young Ukrainian animator talents,, and a designer of ’astonishing yet functional interior objects,’ including a $12,000 coffee table.”

“We love to feel good about helping starving children in ‘name your country,’ but it’s not going there. It’s going to pay rent in Paris. It’s going to support somebody’s fancy dinner to entertain whoever,” Ernst, who founded the Senate’s DOGE caucus, told Musk in the event on X Spaces.

“There are probably some arguments to be made about what could be important work that falls under USAID. But the fact of the matter is … it has been overshadowed by these bad actors,” she said. “So if there are truly good pro-American programs, then let’s move them to the State Department.”

Musk responded that USAID wasn’t worth saving.

”As we dug into USAID, it became apparent that what we have is not an apple with a worm in it, but we have actually just a bowl of worms,” Musk said. “And when there is no apple, you’ve just got to basically get rid of the whole thing. That’s why it’s got to go. It’s beyond repair.”

Though spending to supportUkraine amid Russia’s invasion haddramatically increased agency spending since 2022, the bulk of funds spent by USAID have typically gone toward addressing hunger and famine and diseases including AIDS and malaria. During the COVID pandemic, the agency played a crucial role supporting global vaccine distribution.

“A lot of those dollars come back to the US economy,” said Maryam Z. Deloffre, an associate professor of international affairs at George Washington University, who added that US foreign assistance has a history of “very broad bipartisan support.”

“A lot of the food assistance that we send is coming from US farmers so it’s a sort of subsidy for our own agricultural industry,” she said, noting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio exempted emergency food assistance from last week’s broad order from Trump to freeze the vast majority of grants and foreign aid.

Democrats said only Congress, which created USAID as an independent agency, has the authority to eliminate it, and on Monday lawmakers slammed Trump’s move as illegal.

“We live in the United States of America, and as much as Elon Musk and Donald Trump want, this is not a dictatorship, and we will not allow it to become one ever,” Representative Jim McGovern, a Worcester Democrat said at a news conference outside USAID headquarters on Monday afternoon.

Greene, a Georgia Republican and strong Trump ally, acknowledged Congress was unlikely to vote to shut down USAID. “I hope USAID is completely eliminated because Congress would never get rid of it on their own,” she posted on X.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump said he didn’t think it would take an act of Congress to eliminate an independent agency created by law.

Proponents of foreign aid remained hopeful that many Republican lawmakers might still register their concerns.

“Without naming names, I would say many of them do believe that the work of USAID is vital,” said Amo. “I know that members like me will be seeking out those Republicans to say, ‘You’ve got to speak to your team. You seriously need to assess the impacts and the consequences of your decisions and actions, whether or not they’re proactive, reactive, whether or not it’s loud or silent.’ They’ve got to do something.”

Globe correspondent Kendall Wright contributed to this report.