Staffers of the U.S. Agency for International Development were instructed to stay out of the agency’s Washington headquarters, and yellow police tape and officers blocked the agency's lobby on Monday, after Elon Musk announced President Donald Trump had agreed with him to shut the agency.
USAID staffers also said more than 600 additional employees had reported being locked out of the aid agency’s computer systems overnight. Those still in the system received emails saying that “at the direction of Agency leadership” the headquarters building “will be closed to Agency personnel on Monday, Feb. 3.” The agency's website vanished Saturday without explanation.
The fast-moving developments come after thousands of USAID employees already have been laid off and programs shut down in the two weeks since Trump took office. And they show the extraordinary power of Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in the Trump administration. Musk announced the closing of the agency early Monday as Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was out of the country on a trip to Central America.
Rubio told reporters in San Salvador, El Salvador, that he was now the acting administrator of USAID but had delegated his authorities to someone else. The change means that USAID is no longer an independent government agency as it had been for decades — although its new status will likely be challenged in court — and will be run out of the State Department.
Rubio said that USAID was an uncooperative and opaque agency that had failed to answer questions about its funding or operate in line with the Trump administration's policy agenda.
“And that sort of level of insubordination makes it impossible to conduct the sort of mature and serious review that I think foreign aid, writ large, should have,” said Rubio.
Congressional Democrats were also denied entry Monday to the USAID building as federal law enforcement officers blocked the doors. The congress members had blasted Musk and members of his DOGE task force for demanding and gaining access to the internal government systems despite not being an official government agency.
House Oversight Committee ranking member Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said that Democrats will fight the Trump administration's dismantling of USAID on multiple fronts.
“We are going to fight in every way we can, in the courts, in public opinion, with the bully pulpit, in the halls of Congress and here at USAID itself. We are not going to let this injustice happen," Connolly said at a press event, flanked by other House and Senate Democrats in front of USAID's headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C.
Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said that he plans to place a blanket hold on all Trump State Department nominees until the administration reverses its effort to shut down USAID.
"Until and unless this brazenly authoritarian action is reversed and USAID is functional again, I will be placing a blanket hold on all of the Trump administration’s State Department nominees. This is self-inflicted chaos of epic proportions that will have dangerous consequences all around the world," Schatz said.
Top Democrats said that if the Trump administration wants to change USAID, Congress has to pass a bill that the president has to sign into law.
“This is a corrupt abuse of power that is going on," Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said. “As my colleague said, it’s not only a gift to our adversaries, but trying to shut down the Agency for International Development by executive order is plain illegal.”
Trump said shutting down USAID “should have been done a long time ago” and was asked whether he needs Congress to approve such a measure. The president said he did not think so, and accused the Biden administration of fraud, without giving any evidence and only promising a report later on.
“They went totally crazy, what they were doing and the money they were giving to people that shouldn’t be getting it and to agencies and others that shouldn’t be getting it, it was a shame, so a tremendous fraud,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday.
The upheaval follows Trump ordering a freeze on foreign assistance, with widespread effects around the world. The moves by the U.S., the world's largest provider of humanitarian aid, have upended decades of policy that put humanitarian, development and security assistance in the center of efforts to build alliances and counter adversaries including China and Russia.
U.S. and international companies have been forced to shut down tens of thousands of programs globally, leading to furloughs, layoffs and financial crises that have left many fearing the aid community has been too damaged by the freeze to resume work even if funding resumes.
On Monday, two State Department employees who tried to get into the USAID offices said they were turned away by security guards. Later, uniformed Department of Homeland Security officers and security officers blocked the lobby of the USAID’s headquarters using yellow tape with the words “do not cross.”
The white USAID flag still flew on the empty plaza in front of the agency headquarters Monday morning. Staffers said employees earlier Monday had been able to reach other parts of the agency to clear personal belongings from their offices.
Musk, who's leading an extraordinary civilian review of the federal government with Trump's agreement, said early Monday that he had spoken with Trump about the six-decade U.S. aid and development agency and “he agreed we should shut it down.”
“It became apparent that it's not an apple with a worm it in,” Musk said in a live session on X Spaces early Monday. “What we have is just a ball of worms. You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair.”
“We’re shutting it down,” he said.
Musk, Trump and some Republican lawmakers have targeted the U.S. aid and development agency, which oversees humanitarian, development and security programs in some 120 countries, in increasingly strident terms, accusing it of promoting liberal causes.
Since Trump took office, appointees brought in from his first term such as Peter Marocco placed more than 50 senior officials on leave for investigation without public explanation, gutting the agency’s leadership. When the agency’s personnel chief announced that the allegations against them were groundless and tried to reinstate them, he was placed on leave as well.
Over the weekend, the Trump administration placed two top security chiefs at USAID on leave after they refused to turn over classified material in restricted areas to Musk’s government-inspection teams, a current and a former U.S. official said.
Musk’s DOGE earlier carried out a similar operation at the Treasury Department, gaining access to sensitive information including the Social Security and Medicare customer payment systems. The Washington Post reported that a senior Treasury official had resigned over Musk’s team accessing sensitive information.
USAID, meanwhile, has been one of the federal agencies most targeted by the Trump administration in an escalating crackdown on the federal government and many of its programs.
“It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics. And we’re getting them out,” Trump said to reporters about USAID on Sunday night.
The Trump administration freeze on foreign assistance has shut down much of USAID’s aid programs worldwide, including an HIV-AIDS program started by Republican President George W. Bush credited with saving more than 20 million lives in Africa and elsewhere. Aid contractors spoke of millions of dollars in medication and other goods now stuck in port that they were forbidden to deliver.
Other programs that would shut down provided education to schoolgirls in Afghanistan under Taliban rule and monitored an Ebola outbreak spreading in Uganda. A USAID-supported crisis monitoring program, which was credited for helping prevent repeats of the 1980s famine in Uganda that killed up to 1.2 million people, has gone offline.
