Two weeks into the Trump Administration Elon Musk has already gained access to Treasury Department payments and threatened to shut down USAID. Bloomberg's Max Chafkin and Kurt Wagner break down Musk's methods and motivations.
President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk have launched a full-frontal assault on the United States Agency for International Development. Pending a review, he’s ordered a pause to all US foreign aid — with some exceptions — and Musk has threatened to shut down the independent government agency entirely, arguing that it’s not aligned with American interests. Dozens of senior USAID leaders have been placed on administrative leave and employees have been locked out of the agency’s headquarters in Washington.
The US is the largest provider of official foreign assistance in the world, spending an estimated $70 billion altogether in fiscal year 2022, the most recent year for which data are available. USAID administers most of that money as the agency responsible for humanitarian and development assistance, which came to roughly $43 billion in fiscal year 2023. The agency was created in 1961, and its independent status was established by Congress in 1998. USAID takes policy direction from the State Department, while being separate from it, and its administrator reports to the secretary of state. With roughly 10,000 employees, most of whom work outside the US, it operates largely by disbursing funds to contractors, nonprofits, international organizations and foreign governments.
The agency has long been viewed as a vehicle for expressing American goodwill to the world — with packages of USAID-labeled food aid serving as tokens of benevolence from the richest nation to some of the poorest. But it’s also an instrument of US foreign policy, aiming funds at countries in strategic geographies and preventing humanitarian crises from spiraling into national security risks. At its creation, President John F. Kennedy told lawmakers that the “economic collapse of those free but less-developed nations which now stand poised between sustained growth and economic chaos would be disastrous to our national security, harmful to our comparative prosperity and offensive to our conscience.”
USAID funded projects in some 130 countries in fiscal year 2023, the last year for which complete data is available. The top 10 recipients in descending order were Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan and Syria.
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