The destruction of USAID

It's part of Musk’s coup.

Elon Musk, the richest man in the world is determined to shut down the world’s largest aid agency. He’s doing so despite the fact that he has not been elected to any position in the US government. This is a coup.

Employees of USAID received an email telling them that at 11:59 pm on 7 February 2025, “all USAID direct hire personnel will be placed on administrative leave globally,” apart from people responsible for mission-critical functions.

On 7 February 2025, a court order paused the plans to put more than 90% of USAID staff on paid leave — but only for one week.

Trump’s Executive Order on “Reevaluating and Realigning” US foreign aid puts in place a 90-day pause in US aid, “for assessment of programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy”.

The (totally predictable) result is complete chaos.

Musk is doing to USAID what he did to Twitter. Musk sacked about 75% of the staff at Twitter. The company is worth almost 80% less than when he bought it. And Twitter has become a stinking cesspit of racism, sexism, abuse, and misinformation.

None of which bothers Musk. He just gets richer and richer.

Well, until he started meddling in politics, that is. He’s lost US$90 billion of his wealth in less than two months.

On 28 January 2025, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, announced a waiver for “lifesaving humanitarian assistance”. The USAID’s Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance is responsible for delivering food, water, shelter, emergency healthcare, sanitation and hygiene, and critical nutrition services.

But BHA staff were notified that they were on paid leave. They lost access to USAID email and information technology systems.

On 10 February 2025, the USAID Office of Inspector General issued an Advisory Notice on the current state of USAID-funded humanitarian assistance. The report states that,

recent widespread staffing reductions across the Agency, particularly within BHA, coupled with uncertainty about the scope of foreign assistance waivers and permissible communications with implementers, has degraded USAID’s ability to distribute and safeguard taxpayer-funded humanitarian assistance.

The report states that almost US$500 million of food assistance is at risk of spoilage, unanticipated storage needs, and diversion.

A “viper’s nest”

Musk calls USAID “evil”, “criminal”, and a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America”.

Donald Trump approves:

“He’s done a great job. Look at all the fraud he’s found in this USAID. It’s a disaster, what the people, radical left lunatics. They have things that nobody would even believe. The whole thing with the US$100 million spent on you know what. With money going to all sorts of groups that shouldn’t deserve to get any money. I’d like to see what the kick-backs are.”

Musk talks about “feeding USAID to the woodchipper” and says that Trump agrees that “we should shut it down”.

Musk’s attempt to shut down USAID are blatantly illegal and unconstitutional. USAID was established under Executive Order by John F. Kennedy in 1961. But in 1998, Congress passed a law that codified USAID as an independent agency. As such, only an act of Congress can abolish it.

In 2023, USAID spent US$44 billion. That’s about 0.6% of US government spending.

in 2023, USAID spent more than US$16 billion in Ukraine.

One possible explanation for Musk’s hatred of USAID could be the result of USAID’s funding of Musk’s SpaceX Starlink satellite terminals in Ukraine.

In May 2024, USAID’s inspector general announced an investigation of USAID’s oversight of the Starlink services in Ukraine. In 2022, Musk had ordered his engineers not to turn on the Starlink network near the Crimean coast to disrupt a Ukranian submarine drone attack on Russia’s naval fleet in Sevastopol.

USAID spent about US$12 billion a year on healthcare. This included HIV-related programmes, containing the spread of Ebola in Africa, and tuberculosis and malaria programmes.

Ntobeko Ntusi, president of the South African Medical Research Council writes that,

In the past few days, many HIV clinics across South Africa told their shocked clients that they had to discontinue services. The disruption of drugs will undoubtedly cost lives.

There is, of course, plenty to criticise. USAID is a form of humanitarian imperialism. USAID’s administrator from May 2021 to January 2025, Samantha Power, describes USAID as “America’s foreign policy ground game”.

As Ntusi notes,

US foreign policy has always been linked to the idea of US superiority and self-interest. US aid is no different and has promoted a culture of white saviorism, dependence by the global south and paternalism — rather than partnership and allyship.

Independent journalism?

Meanwhile, more than US$260 million of USAID funding goes to media and journalism each year. USAID claims that it supports “independent journalism” and “free media organizations” without asking how media can possibly “independent” when it’s funded by the US government.

In December 2024, an investigation by Mediapart, Drop Site News, Il Fatto Quotidiano, Reporters United, and NDR revealed that the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project received the majority of its funding from the US government, with the largest donor being USAID.

OCCRP works with dozens of newspapers on major data leaks and investigations, including the Panama Papers, Pandora Papers, Suisse Secrets, Narco Files and more.

In 2021, USAID’s Samantha Power described the OCCRP as a “partner” of USAID:

“We have partners, the Organized Crime and Corruption Project is a major partner in reporting on the Pandora Papers and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists coordinated that. This OCCRP network, you couldn't do that just with the free market alone right? 600 journalists involved in the Pandora Papers effort. 75 from that OCCRP network and spending years going through three terabytes of documents. We have to think structurally about what are the means to support those public goods.”

OCCRP’s reporting is excellent. But it rarely focusses on the US government.

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UPDATE — 27 June 2025: Journalist Mark Lee Hunter wrote a long article about the Mediapart reporting on OCCRP on 2 June 2025. Hunter points out that OCCRP did not make a secret of its funding from the US government. In some years most of OCCRP’s funding came from the US government, in other years more came from other sources.

Between 2015 and 2024, OCCRP carried out 111 investigations of US entities and individuals.

On 3 December 2025, Mary Vought, Vice President for Communications at the Heritage Foundation retweeted the story about OCCRP. “Looks like a great place” for Elon Musk to start cutting Federal programmes, she wrote.

“After Donald Trump shut down USAID, OCCRP laid off 43 of its 200-odd employees”, Hunter writes.

Smashing USAID led to a “nightmare” for investigative media worldwide, particularly in Ukraine, reported the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN). It was also a disaster for climate journalists, gender journalists, and democracy advocates (to say nothing of those who relied on USAID for lifesaving food and medicines).

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As the director of a South American media outlet points out to Mediapart, the OCCRP “makes the US seem virtuous and allows them to set the agenda of what is defined as corruption”.

USAID and carbon trading

REDD-Monitor has on several occasions highlighted the role USAID plays in promoting carbon trading:

• In 2014, then-secretary of state, John Kerry, announced that USAID would give US$138.8 million to a private corporation (incorporated in the tax haven of Luxembourg) called Althelia Climate Fund. Under the deal USAID guaranteed 50% of the loans that Althelia made to REDD project developers.

• USAID funded the development of the Luangwa Community Forests Project in Zambia. That project was started by a company called BioCarbon Partners (incorporated in the tax haven of Mauritius). The project sells carbon offsets to the Italian oil and gas corporation Eni, which claims, as a result, to deliver “carbon neutral” fossil fuels.

• In 2021, USAID put out a statement together with the governments of Peru, Germany, Norway, and the UK stating that it was strengthening a partnership to preserve the Amazon rainforest. But none of the countries were promising any new payments.

• In Colombia, USAID helped greenwash a coal mining company called Prodeco, a subsidiary of Anglo-Swiss mining giant Glencore, with the help of Conservation International and carbon offsets from a REDD project. From 2011 to 2015, USAID ran a US$32 million programme in Colombia called BioREDD+.

• USAID also funds the Stand for Trees website that sells carbon offsets from 15 REDD projects. Among the projects Stand for Trees supports is the Southern Cardamom REDD+ Project in Cambodia that has seen evictions, violence, and burning of people’s homes in the name of conservation.

There are many other examples of problematic USAID funding. Funding of fortress conservation at the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example.

And following Joe Biden’s visit to Brazil in November 2024, the White House announced a series of rainforest initiatives, many of which involve carbon trading, and several of which included USAID funding.

USAID’s interests were perfectly aligned with the US government’s interests, which were to give the impression of doing something about the climate crisis, while in reality doing nothing to implement the structural societal and economic changes that are necessary.

Under the Trump / Musk regime, that has, of course, changed. The current US government is determined to accelerate the climate crisis. E&E News writes that Trump may attempt to “remake USAID to promote fossil fuels”. Project 2025, the far-right manifesto for Trump, includes a chapter on USAID written by Max Primorac of the Heritage Foundation.

Primorac writes that,

USAID should cease its war on fossil fuels in the developing world and support the responsible management of oil and gas reserves as the quickest way to end wrenching poverty and the need for open-ended foreign aid.

Obviously, there are problems with USAID. These have been written about and discussed for decades. An overhaul of how USAID operates is long overdue. However, shutting down USAID overnight is insane and will lead to large numbers of people dying.

Neither Musk nor Trump appear to care. They should, however, be held responsible.