USAID has endured graft charges and gross mismanagement for years, even before Donald Trump became president; now, its hour of reckoning is nigh. USAID is now on the chopping block of billionaire Elon Musk, who is leading an agency called DOGE, which is the Department of Government Efficiency. USAID has been indefinitely frozen pending internal scrutiny of its allegedly nefarious activities. In the developing world, USAID is Uncle Sam: Father Christmas, always eager to come to our rescue in an hour of need. But is he? This discussion reviews what has befallen USAID and what future portends to it.
Tech billionaire and DOGE Chair Elon Musk has been on a warpath against USAID — which is an independent U.S. agency that was established on 3rd November 1961 under the Kennedy administration to administer economic aid to foreign nations — as he leads DOGE’s mission of cutting government fat and overspending at the federal level.
A review of USAID’s recent history shows that it repeatedly has been accused of financial mismanagement and corruption long before Donald Trump’s second administration. The U.S. Agency for International Development’s fate is hanging in the balance as the second Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is working on an apparent overhaul of the agency. The agency will survive the purge but will be answerable to the State Department with her past independence irrevocably shrivelled.
Musk announced on Feb. 2, 2025, in an audio-only message on X overnight on Sunday that “we’re in the process” of “shutting down USAID” and that Trump reportedly agreed to shutter the agency. “With regard to the USAID stuff, I went over [it] with him in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down,” Musk claimed. “I actually checked with him a few times [and] said, ‘Are you sure?’” He added that Trump responded, “Yes.”
As of Monday morning, 3rd February, hundreds of USAID employees reported they were locked out of the agency’s computer system and that its headquarters in Washington, D.C., was closed on Monday. On X, Musk has railed against the organization as rife with “Marxists” and operating as a “criminal organization.” “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die,” Musk posted to X on Sunday. “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” he said in another message.
In Kenya, more than 40,000 employees were sent on unpaid leave pending the completion of the overhaul, which was expected to last from 90 days to 180 days. Kenyan employees dependent on USAID cover direct and indirect employees who work in NGOs associated with the Agency. According to recent information, USAID Tanzania has a staff of over 160 dedicated employees. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) partners with many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Tanzania. In January 2025, the US announced a 90-day suspension of foreign aid, which would impact many NGOs in Tanzania that depend on the USAID to make ends meet.
USAID has a budget of around $40bn per year, amounting to roughly 0.6% of the US federal spending, according to official figures. In a statement on its website on Tuesday, USAID said it would work with the US Department of State to arrange and pay for return travel for personnel posted outside the US within 30 days.
The measures are part of a string of cuts that Trump has enacted since returning to office last month, coordinating with Elon Musk’s unofficial Department of Government Efficiency. Earlier this week, the White House released a statement listing several projects that it called evidence of “waste and abuse,” including a $1.5m grant to an LGBTQ group in Serbia and $2.5m for electric vehicles in Vietnam.
However, critics have called the moves to close the agency an illegitimate power grab spearheaded by Musk, an unelected billionaire. Earlier this week, Trump’s top diplomat, Marco Rubio, became the acting head of USAID as part of its reported merger into the State Department. Closing USAID altogether would require an act of Congress.
Musk, the billionaire Tesla and Space X CEO, has suggested that USAID should be shut down entirely because it is “beyond repair.” Many have cautioned that closing the agency’s doors would have devastating effects on vulnerable populations worldwide. USAID’s activities range from providing prosthetic limbs to soldiers injured in Ukraine to clearing landmines and containing the spread of Ebola, managing HIV and AIDS, and containing Malaria in Africa.
Democrats in Washington DC have been particularly critical of changes to the agency, calling them “illegal” and “unconstitutional”. “[USAID is] a foreign policy tool with bipartisan origins that is critical in this dangerous global environment,” New Jersey Democratic Senator Andy Kim, who previously worked at USAID, wrote on social media. “Gutting it means gutting our ability to compete and keep America safe.”
The sins of USAID are many and may recur.
The major weakness of Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s efforts is their lack of sustainability. When Trump ran for office, the majority of those who voted for him had an economic agenda to resolve but not a cultural war to wage.
Critics of USAID tend to be conservatives who feel their country is being dismantled by what they have identified as “wokeness.” Conservatives in the US have linked progressives to the fountain of all the ills the US is facing right now. Wokeness is also linked to the rejection of God and the embrace of paganism cloaked as secularism.
The moral and cultural war that is being fought in the US is now looking at how the government is run, which becomes almost everything. How taxes are being disbursed and used has assumed new attention. Both sides of the political aisle have no dispute when the USAID prop up NGOs in adversaries such as Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela and elsewhere to topple them.
Through USAID, the Ukrainian legitimate government led by then-President Viktor Yushchenko was removed by the Orange Revolution. The Orange Revolution was a series of protests that led to political upheaval in Ukraine from late November 2004 to January 2005. The Orange Revolution that led to the ouster of the Ukrainian democratic government was fully funded by USAID through a variety of NGOs inside and outside Ukraine. It was the Orange Revolution that provoked Russia to annex Crimea and later started a major war against Ukraine to protect Russian-speaking Ukrainians against a genocide that was being unleashed on them.
USAID transgender activism across the world has angered conservatives who feel the US taxes should not be used to fund activities that they regard as sinful. USAID bankrolled millions of books targeting the transformation of teens into transsexuals in the developing world.
USAID is also being accused of funding funds to international terrorists such as Pakistan-based Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation (FIF), a front for Hafiz Saeed-led Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). USAID funded the FIF and LeT, which led to multiple terror attacks in India despite it being banned by the US government.
Mahmoud Al Hafyan, 53, a Syrian national, was charged in a 12-count indictment, unsealed in U.S. District Court, alleging major fraud against the United States for illegally diverting more than $9 million in U.S.-funded humanitarian aid intended for Syrian civilians to armed combatant groups, including the Al-Nusrah Front (ANF), which is a designated foreign terrorist organization affiliated with al-Qaida in Iraq. The money originated from the USAID.
According to the indictment, Al Hafyan, aka Abu Abdo Al-Homsi, was the head of a non-governmental organization (NGO-1) in the NGO’s regional office in Syria. Al Hafyan managed 160 NGO-1 employees. Syria at that time had been involved in a civil war since 2011 that resulted in a humanitarian crisis. Through USAID, the U.S. Government spent more than $12 billion until 2020 to aid Syrian civilians affected by the war. USAID-funded humanitarian assistance programs were administered by United Nations agencies and non-governmental organizations. The funding, in this case, was intended for food and medical supplies.
USAID awarded $122 million to NGO-1 between January 2015 through November 2018. That money was intended for food kits for conflict-affected Syrian refugees. Along with at least two co-conspirators, Al Hafyan directed food kits valued at millions of dollars to commanders leading ANF. ANF’s primary objective was the overthrow of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. ANF was notorious for the atrocities it committed and publicly took responsibility for conducting mass executions of civilians, suicide bombings, and kidnappings.
Al Hafyan sold the kits on the black market to the ANF commanders for his personal benefit. Al Hafyan and his co-conspirators falsified beneficiary logs and inflated the number of food kits received by war-affected families in the Syrian villages of Boweiti, Lof, Mazraat-Shoukh, and Salamin to fraudulently make it appear that NGO-1 was dispersing the kits according to NGO-1’s guidelines. The case represented one of the most significant diversions of USAID-funded humanitarian aid that USAID-OIG had investigated.
The Trump administration is armed to the teeth with these allegations of gross misconduct allegedly committed by the USAID. It is no wonder the general public attitude is lacklustre and aloof towards the agency. With the public opinion against USAID, the reforms will be carried out while the Trump administration is in office. However, once out of office, depending on which political party gains power, some reforms will be reversed. Democrats, once in power, will pick up where they left: agitating for a cultural war in areas of transgender activism and disrupting foreign governments they deem hostile to the US. USAID will be their paw to achieve those insidious aims.
Notwithstanding which political party is in power, USAID is a necessary evil to protect the US power abroad and advance her imperial interests. Therefore, though Musk seeks the strangulation of USAID, ultimately, USAID will survive both Trump and Musk albeit with clipped wings and less funding.
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