US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has revealed he has taken over as acting director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the sprawling government bureau charged with delivering humanitarian assistance across the world.
Speaking from El Salvador on Monday, Rubio described USAID as a “completely unresponsive agency”.
He also accused its officials of “insubordination” for failing to answer questions about spending and priorities from the administration of President Donald Trump.
“In many cases, USAID is involved in programmes that run counter to what we’re trying to do with our national strategy,” Rubio said.
“It’s been 20 or 30 years that people have tried to reform it.”
Monday’s announcement comes after billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s close adviser, called USAID “a criminal organization” and said the president agreed it should be “shut down”.
A senior White House official also told the news agency Reuters that Trump was considering merging the agency with the State Department to “significantly reduce the size of the workforce for efficiency purposes and to ensure their spending is in line with the president’s agenda”.
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The official said Musk would oversee that efficiency drive: The billionaire currently leads the Department of Government Efficiency, a Trump-founded nongovernmental panel.
Trump also weighed in on Monday in characteristically caustic terms, saying USAID was a “good concept” but had been overtaken by “radical left lunatics”.
‘Humanitarian disaster’
The announcement comes amid a wider freeze on foreign aid under the Trump administration, which has vowed to overhaul US assistance abroad.
Under Trump’s executive order, billions of dollars in aid have been frozen pending a 90-day review. Thousands of contractors have been laid off, with providers across the world pausing services as they await the review.
While a handful of programmes have been granted waivers, humanitarian groups have warned that the funding freeze impacts an array of services, from clearing landmines in war zones to providing preventative healthcare for infectious diseases.
That, in turn, could put lives in immediate danger, they add.
On Sunday, the nonprofit Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned that “the rapid dismantling” of the US humanitarian aid system “will cause an unmitigated humanitarian disaster affecting millions of the world’s most vulnerable people”.
United Nations spokesperson Stephane Dujarric reiterated on Monday that the freeze would have an “immediate impact on life-saving activities”.
US funding accounted for 42 percent of all humanitarian funding tracked by the UN last year. In 2023, the US issued an estimated $68bn in foreign assistance, over 60 percent of which flowed through USAID.
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Questions of control
The Trump administration’s control over the agency remained unclear on Monday.
The passage of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 required the government to create an agency to oversee foreign humanitarian aid. USAID was organised as a result.
When USAID was first formed, the US was in the midst of the Cold War, and President John Kennedy used the programme to counter Russian influence abroad.
Proponents of the agency argue that USAID and other aid programmes serve the same purpose in the 21st century, offering a counterbalance to expanding Chinese influence abroad.
Democrats have also argued that the president lacks the authority to fully dissolve the agency, which they maintain is meant to remain autonomous. Several lawmakers held an impromptu protest in defence of USAID in Washington, DC, on Monday.
“We’re here today to shine a light on a crime that is unfolding before our eyes and support our tremendous US civil servants at USAID,” Representative Don Beyer of Virginia said at an outdoor speech.
He accused Musk of leading an effort to “ransack a critical agency of the US government” and harass its employees.
“This is a case of the very worst among us attacking the very best of us,” Beyer said. “USAID has been an invaluable pillar of US foreign policy and projecting American power overseas. Its elimination only helps our adversaries.”
On Monday, USAID employees were instructed that the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC, would be closed for the day.
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US media reported over the weekend that two top USAID officials had been put on administrative leave for trying to block individuals from the Department of Government Efficiency from accessing secure areas of the agency’s headquarters.
In response to the potential merging of USAID with the State Department, several Democrats in the Senate issued a letter saying such a restructure must be “previewed, discussed, and approved by Congress”.
The senators also warned that any unauthorised access of USAID headquarters “raises deep concerns about the protection and safeguarding of matters related to US national security”.
