Trump demands US aid agency closure despite tumult

Trump demands US aid agency closure despite tumult

US President Donald Trump says he wants to close USAID and the Education Department

President Donald Trump on Friday called for USAID to be shuttered, escalating his unprecedented campaign to dismantle the humanitarian agency.

"THE CORRUPTION IS AT LEVELS RARELY SEEN BEFORE. CLOSE IT DOWN!" Trump wrote on his Truth Social app as part of a drive that has triggered chaos in the agency's global network and allegations of weakening American influence.

In the three weeks since he began his new term, Trump has launched a crusade led by his top donor and world's richest man, Elon Musk, to downsize or dismantle swaths of the US government.

The most concentrated fire has been on the United States Agency for International Development, the primary organization for distributing US humanitarian aid around the world.

The Trump administration has already frozen foreign aid and ordered thousands of foreign-based staff to return to the United States, with reported impacts on the ground steadily growing.

On Thursday, a union official confirmed reports that the current USAID headcount of 10,000 employees would be reduced to around only 300.

Labor unions are challenging the legality of the onslaught, including a separate government-wide offer of buyouts by Musk's team.

Democrats in Congress say it would be unconstitutional for Trump -- who has also expressed intent to close the Department of Education -- to shut down government agencies without the legislature's greenlight.

- Aid workers vilified -

The United States' current budget allocates about $58 billion for international assistance.

However while Washington is the biggest aid donor in the world, the money has only amounted to between 0.7 and 1.4 percent of total US government spending in the last quarter century, according to the Pew Research Center.

USAID runs health and emergency programs in around 120 countries, including the world's poorest regions.

It is seen as a vital source of soft power for the United States in its struggle for influence with rivals including China, where Musk has extensive business interests.

Samantha Power, the former USAID chief under president Joe Biden, dubbed the agency "America's superpower" in a scathing New York Times opinion piece Friday.

"We are witnessing one of the worst and most costly foreign policy blunders in US history," said Power, also a former UN ambassador.

Unless the dismantling is halted, Power wrote, "future generations will marvel that it wasn't China's actions that eroded US standing and global security" but rather "an American president and the billionaire he unleashed to shoot first and aim later."

Hard-right Republicans and libertarians have long questioned the need for USAID and criticized what they say is wasteful spending abroad.

Those criticisms have been supercharged since Trump's return with the administration demonizing USAID employees and claiming -- without evidence -- that the aid agency is rife with fraud.

"USAID IS DRIVING THE RADICAL LEFT CRAZY," Trump wrote in his post. "SO MUCH OF IT FRAUDULENTLY, IS TOTALLY UNEXPLAINABLE. THE CORRUPTION IS AT LEVELS RARELY SEEN BEFORE."

- Racist social media posts -

Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have rampaged mostly unhindered through agencies that most Americans have for decades taken for granted or ignored.

While Democrats have struggled to find footing to halt the moves, court challenges are slowly taking shape.

An attempt by Trump to overturn the consitutional guarantee to birthright citizenship has been blocked by a judge and on Thursday another federal judge paused the federal worker buyouts program, pending arguments on Monday.

Musk, the South African-born CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, ran into controversy last week with reports he and his team were accessing highly sensitive Treasury Department data and systems.

Pressed in court, Treasury leadership agreed to only allow two people on Musk's team to have "read-only" access. Shortly after, however, one of them resigned after it emerged that he had advocated racism and eugenics on social media.

On Friday, Musk flagged support for the 25-year-old employee by asking his followers on X to vote on whether the DOGE staffer who made "inappropriate statements" should be reinstated.

The staffer, according to posts uncovered by the Wall Street Journal, said just last year that he was "racist before it was cool," and called to "normalize Indian Hate."

Vice President JD Vance, whose wife is Indian-American, weighed in Friday saying he does not think "stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life," while criticizing the reporter for trying to "destroy people."

"So I say bring him back."

sms/des/dw

Originally published as Trump demands US aid agency closure despite tumult