Secretary of State Marco Rubio has empowered a top official at the State Department to run the U.S. Agency for International Development and begin reviewing all of the work done by the government agency targeted for dismantling by President Donald Trump and tech billionaire adviser Elon Musk.
Rubio tapped Pete Marocco, the director of foreign assistance at the State Department, to begin reviewing all of the work done by USAID. He also warned that certain projects or programs might be suspended or eliminated.
Marocco held several national security positions during the first Trump administration, including at USAID, where his attempts to consolidate power and slash funding drove officials to write a dissent memo that ultimately pushed him out of office, according to multiple sources who spoke with NBC News.
Marocco has worked closely with the administration’s other political appointees at USAID during the first weeks of Trump's second term, two current USAID officials with knowledge of the agency’s new leadership structure and a source familiar with USAID’s day-to-day operations said.
Other people familiar with the agency’s operations say Marocco has largely directed the downsizing of the agency from afar.
“What he’s doing now is frighteningly similar to everything he was trying to do at USAID before, but this time he’s destroying it,” said a USAID official familiar with Marocco's past actions.
“If someone in the private sector did this with no mitigation plan, their stakeholders would go ape s---,” a USAID staffer said. “He hasn’t been responsible for building anything ever. He’s very good at turning things off and questioning things and making people feel uncomfortable. He’s taken apart a lot of things.”
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on those characterizations of Marocco, who has also been tied to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
In early 2023, online sleuths who aided the FBI in cases against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters identified Marocco and his now-wife as being among the rioters who stormed the Capitol in 2021, pointing to multiple images of them on the Capitol grounds that day and CCTV video that shows the man they identified as Marocco entering the Capitol through a broken window.
Photos of the person who entered the building were a strong facial recognition match for publicly available images of Marocco, online sleuths said. Marocco, like hundreds of others whom sleuths identified as people who entered the Capitol, was not charged before Trump pardoned all Jan. 6 defendants.
Marocco did not respond to a request for comment. Reached by D Magazine last year, he did not deny that he entered the Capitol, but he referred to “smear tactics and desperate personal attacks.”
USAID has already largely been run out of the State Department since Inauguration Day, multiple sources said.
Rubio had sent a letter informing the relevant congressional committee chairs and ranking members of the Trump administration’s plans to reorganize USAID, four sources familiar with the letter’s delivery said.
In the letter, Rubio told the lawmakers that he is initiating “consultations” with them about how foreign aid is distributed around the world through the program.
“USAID has numerous conflicting, overlapping, and duplicative functions that is shares with the Department of State. Additionally, USAID’s systems and processes are not well synthesized, integrated, or coordinated and often result in discord in the foreign policy and foreign relations of the United States,” Rubio wrote. “This undermines the President’s abilities to carry out foreign relations.”
Marocco’s review could lead to the “suspension or elimination of programs, projects or activities; closing or suspending missions or post; closing, reorganizing, downsizing, or renaming establishments, organizations, bureaus, centers, or offices; reducing the size of the workforce at such entities and contracting out or privatizing functions or activities performed by Federal employees,” Rubio added.
Trump administration officials are actively considering placing USAID under the State Department’s authority, more than a dozen current and former officials and sources familiar with the discussions have said. As of Monday, USAID’s website no longer loads on the web, resulting in a message that its server IP address cannot be found.
USAID employees based out of the nation's capital were ordered overnight not to come into the office Monday and to work from home.
"At the direction of Agency leadership, the USAID headquarters at the Ronald Reagan building in Washington, D.C. will be closed to Agency personnel on Monday, February 3, 2025," said an email sent to staff members overnight, according to a copy obtained by NBC News.
The message said agency personnel who normally work at USAID's headquarters "will work remotely tomorrow" except for people who perform essential on-site and building maintenance duties. "Further guidance will be forthcoming," it said.
The email gave no reason for the work-from-home directive. Musk, who has been closely advising Trump after he was tapped to lead his Department of Government Efficiency, said in the early hours Monday that he and Trump were in the process of shutting down USAID.
USAID, which President John F. Kennedy established in 1961, and has been the U.S. government's main international humanitarian and development arm.
According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, more than 10,000 people work at the agency, about two-thirds of them overseas. In recent years, USAID has "provided significant humanitarian, development, and economic support to Ukraine and countries affected by Russia’s war in Ukraine, as well as humanitarian assistance in Gaza and elsewhere," the report says.
Musk has been leading Trump's effort to cut the federal government's bureaucracy, running the Department of Government Efficiency, which is not an official agency.
On Saturday, USAID's director of security and his deputy were put on administrative leave after they tried to block people working with DOGE from accessing USAID's secure systems.
“No one feels safe to go anywhere near the Ronald Reagan Building,” a USAID official told NBC News. “We just had Elon Musk call us a criminal organization. Our security chief was escorted out. We know we are being surveilled by DOGE.”
Musk said in his announcement Monday that Trump supported his move to work to shut USAID down.
“With regard to the USAID stuff, I went over [it] with him in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down,” Musk said. “I actually checked with him a few times [and] said, ‘Are you sure?’” He added that Trump responded, “Yes.”
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