Trump has Closed USAID. The Agency is Accused of Mismanagement, Losing Funds, and Corruption.

The Trump Administration has permanently shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Elon Musk, who leads DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), reported that President Trump “agreed we should shut it down.” USAID has been long-believed to be a corrupt federal agency, where enormous sums of money disappear and can never be found.

“It became apparent that it’s not an apple with a worm it in,” Musk said. “What we have is just a ball of worms. You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair.”

Musk, in a post on X, said where USAID would be going: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

The USAID name is removed from the building that housed the former agency.

Musk’s DOGE was created by Mr. Trump to review the federal government’s many agencies and look for inefficiency, waste, and fraud. Musk, who owns X (formerly Twitter), Space X, and Tesla, is known for routing-out inefficiencies in his companies.

On Sunday night, Mr. Trump said that USAID “has been run by a bunch of radical lunatics. We’re getting them out, and then we’ll make a decision.” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday that shutting down USAID “should have been done a long time ago.”

“They went totally crazy, what they were doing and the money they were giving to people that shouldn’t be getting it and to agencies and others that shouldn’t be getting it, it was a shame, so a tremendous fraud.”

It appears that, likely, USAID’s functions will be folded into the State Department, where those activities, to the extent that they remain viable, will be under the leadership of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his designees.

AmericanVantagePoint.com previously reported on the problems at USAID. Our previous articles have dealt with the Administration’s assertions that USAID officials were trying to “circumvent” Mr. Trump’s clear Executive Orders to halt its activities. The top leadership of the agency was already placed on Administrative Leave, and more recently, its top security officials were sent home for denying DOGE access to their facilities and systems. This has been a fast-moving story since Donald Trump, on his Inauguration Day, ordered all foreign aid suspended immediately until the new administration could determine whether the spending and distributions served America’s interests and policies. Our previous coverage, “U.S. Ends (temporarily) Most Foreign Aid. USAID Officials Placed on Leave for Insubordination,” is linked.

On Monday, USAID staffers were not permitted to enter the agency’s headquarters in Washington. The plug was pulled on USAID’s website, which went offline over the weekend. But then the website came alive again, only to tell USAID’s employees that they all placed on leave (likely pending termination).

USAID was established by President John F. Kennedy, in an Executive Order in 1961, as an independent agency to provide foreign assistance. Before being shuttered, it had grown to have an annual budget of over $50 billion and it employed over 10,000 workers.

The investigation into where USAID spent its money is only in its infancy. There will be a lot more forthcoming, and there are hints on X that a “bombshell” report is coming soon, but as of this time, as published in a fact sheet from the White House, here are some of the abuses found:

• $1.5 million to “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities”
• $70,000 for production of a “DEI musical” in Ireland
• $2.5 million for electric vehicles for Vietnam
• $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia
• $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru
• $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala
• $6 million to fund tourism in Egypt
• Hundreds of thousands of dollars for a non-profit linked to designated terrorist organizations — even AFTER an inspector general launched an investigation
• Millions to EcoHealth Alliance — which was involved in research at the Wuhan lab
• “Hundreds of thousands of meals that went to al Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria”
• Funding to print “personalized” contraceptives birth control devices in developing countries
• Hundreds of millions of dollars to fund “irrigation canals, farming equipment, and even fertilizer used to support the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan,” benefiting the Taliban

The White House factsheet said USAID had funneled “massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight.”

But on social media, there was far more discussion of the asserted wrongdoing of USAID. We are reporting a few of these allegations, but we are not asserting that they have legitimacy. Perhaps they do; perhaps they don’t. Every one of them is presently unsubstantiated, but that does not mean it is false. It means, take it with a grain of salt. If support does not materialize, dismiss it from consideration. But in any case these allegations are interesting to consider, and if true, this is a true scandal:

• USAID served as the hidden financial arm of the CIA, doing its bidding while giving it cover.
  
• USAID financed the opposition to President Jair Bolsonaro (a Trump ally) in Brazil, supporting the socialist Lula da Silva and thus plunging Brazil into tyranny.
  
• USAID financed the election of far left-wing prosecutors in the U.S., allowing George Soros to serve as the public face of the donations.
  
• USAID had a very strong relationship with Soros, and while it appeared that he was financing many left-wing groups and causes, it was actually USAID money that was behind most of these.
• USAID funneled $53 million to EcoHealth Alliance, which used these U.S. taxpayer funds to support gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab—research that likely led to the creation of COVID-19.
• USAID was Secretly Funding The BBC To Run Anti-Trump/Musk Reporting.
• USAID had plans to fund organizations that would manufacture a basis for trump’s Impeachment.
• There are many more. The authoritative listing is just now being compiled as DOGE auditors pour through the formerly undisclosed records.

As would be expected, Democrats have stated that dissolving USAID is illegal. Shutting down the agency would be “illegal and against our national interests,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote on X. A group of Senate and House Democrats were blocked from entering USAID’s headquarters on Monday. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) called the shut-down an “illegal power grab” and “a corrupt abuse of power.”

“If you want to change it, you have to change that law,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia at a press conference with fellow Democrats outside the USAID headquarters . “It is a matter for Congress to deal with — not an unelected, billionaire oligarch named Elon Musk.”

Elon Musk responded on X, “The corrupt politicians ‘protesting’ outside the USAID building are the ones getting money from USAID.”

Joe Rogan discusses what has been discovered about USAID spending with Bret Weinstein:

Read a listing of USAID’s “most egregious” expenditures as compiled by Blaze Media.