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After 60 years of business, the United States Organization for International Development (USAID) was terminated by US President Donald Trump.
The closure was part of the administration’s crackdown on the federal government and was one of the main targets of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that sought to eliminate “vain” government spending.
In 1961, the US Congress passed the Foreign Aid Act, and then President John F. Kennedy merged other agencies into new federal organizations and established the USAID as an independent agency through executive orders.
The long-standing mission has been to partner with the state to end extreme poverty and promote a resilient and democratic society. But the Trump administration has said it will “seldom show” the agency’s 60-year work.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had ordered USAID and its remaining programs to be absorbed by the State Department by Tuesday.
“Along with creating NGO industrial facilities that span Globes at taxpayer’s expense, USAID has barely been shown since the end of the Cold War,” Rubio said in a social media post Tuesday.
With only a small portion of the 13,000 staff and agency contractors who ran USAID, he said the administration is putting effort into pushing as much money as possible before going offline to a small slice of programs around the world that survived a purge of foreign aid.
“Today is over,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a social media post Tuesday. Rubio vowed, without American taxpayers “paying taxes to fund failed governments on far-away lands.”
Trump moved to dismantle the agency within weeks of taking office for his second tenure as president. He and Musk denounced almost as evidence that they promoted fraud, waste, and left-wing and liberal agendas.
Supporters say that USAID has fundamentally improved health systems and humanitarian networks around the world, promoted democracy, saved lives, thwarted the refugee crisis and war, and boosted its people from poverty in the way it built Washington’s markets and trading partners.
The Trump administration’s new slim aid system will cut bureaucracy, respond more quickly to the crisis, support diplomats with a decline in the number of local bureaucracy, and emphasize US trade rather than aid.
Requested for comment on USAID’s last day as an independent agency, the State Department said this week it would introduce its foreign aid successor, America First.
“The new process ensures that there is adequate monitoring and that all taxes spent will help advance the national interest,” the department said.
Additional sources •AP
