Musk's hit on USAID riles Democrats; many in GOP would absorb it into State Department

WASHINGTON — The rapid decimation of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s workforce in recent days led congressional Democrats to vent their fury Monday over billionaire Elon Musk’s attacks on the agency, while Republicans said USAID was wasting taxpayers’ money and they would be content to see it absorbed into the State Department.

Democrats said President Donald Trump had created a constitutional crisis over the agency, and late Monday afternoon the White House released a list of items it said represented “waste and abuse” at the agency.

As events unfolded rapidly, the State Department said Secretary of State Marco Rubio had been appointed by Trump as acting USAID administrator.

Democrats pinned the blame on Musk, the White House adviser and head of the Department of Government Efficiency. During an early Monday talk on X, Musk reportedly said he was acting with “the full support of the president” to shut down USAID, the government’s biggest foreign aid agency.

“We will use every power that we have in our disposal in the United States Senate,” Sen. Christopher S. Murphy D-Conn., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate State-Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, said at a rally outside USAID headquarters. “This is a constitutional crisis that we are in today. Let’s call it what it is. The people get to decide how we defend the United States of America. The people get to decide how their taxpayer money is spent. Elon Musk does not get to decide.”

Senate Republicans on Monday offered a few muted concerns about the way Musk has implemented the rapid freezes and shutdowns at USAID but most of them defended his actions and didn’t join Democrats in their worries about executive branch usurpation of Congress’ Article 1 authorities.

The decimation of USAID’s workforce has hobbled both the U.S.’s ability to respond to humanitarian disasters around the world and to undertake the evaluations and assessments that the Trump administration and Republicans say are needed before taxpayer-funded international assistance can be resumed.

Hundreds of USAID contractors were already furloughed due to Trump’s executive order last month halting nearly all foreign assistance work. Nearly all of the agency’s Washington-based workers received an email Sunday telling them not to come into the office the next day and to work remotely instead.

Both Trump and Rubio offered support for Musk and criticized the agency. The White House on Monday afternoon said USAID has been unaccountable to taxpayers as it “funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight.” It listed about 10 items, several related to diversity, equity and inclusion aid.

More than 200 USAID workers and supporters gathered outside the agency’s headquarters at the Ronald Reagan Building on Monday afternoon for an impromptu rally with roughly a dozen Democratic lawmakers. Some of those gathered held aloft hand-colored signs that read “USAID saves lives.”

“We are going to fight in every way we can, in the courts, in public opinion, with the bully pulpit, in the halls of Congress, and here at AID itself,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly of Virginia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “We are not going to let this injustice happen. Congress created this agency with the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. If you want to change it, you got to change that law. It is a matter of statute. It’s a matter for Congress to deal with, not an unelected billionaire oligarch named Elon Musk.”

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Jim Risch, R-Idaho, said he was supportive of the administration’s exploration of reorganizing USAID within the State Department..

“The greatest national security threat that Americans face is our skyrocketing national debt. We must confront this, and to do so hard choices will need to be made, and all parts of government will have to be looked at very closely,” Risch said in a statement, noting he would work “in consultation” with Rubio as the secretary begins “the process of merging USAID into State.”

U.S. foreign assistance amounts to less than 1% of the federal budget. USAID oversaw over $40 billion in combined appropriations from the State-Foreign Operations and Agriculture spending titles in fiscal 2023, according to a January Congressional Research Service analysis. The CRS noted some USAID programs are jointly managed with the State Department, making it difficult to know what the precise budget of the agency is.

At the White House, Trump broadly defended Musk’s actions.

“They’re finding tremendous amounts of really bad things, bad spending,” the president said. “And some of the things that they’ve been doing is, is just terrible ... Elon can’t do and won’t do anything without our approval. And we’ll give them the approval.”

Democrats focused their anger on Musk rather than the president.

“Just like Elon Musk did not create USAID, he doesn’t have the power to destroy it,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.

Democrats are focusing on the apparent conflicts of interest for Musk, the CEO of Tesla, Space X, and the social media company X. His ownership of companies that are major federal contractors may allow him to gain financially from Republican plans for reconciliation this year that would include more defense spending and an extension of tax breaks. Republicans are expected to justify the expenditures by cost-cutting elsewhere in the federal budget.

“My frustration with USAID goes back to my time in Congress,” Rubio said on Monday in San Salvador, El Salvador, where he was on his first foreign visit as secretary. “It’s a completely unresponsive agency. It’s supposed to respond to policy directives at the State Department and it refuses to do so. So the functions of USAID — there are a lot of functions of USAID that are going to continue, that are going to be part of American foreign policy, but it has to be aligned with American foreign policy.”

Republicans have previously floated the idea of merging the semiautonomous USAID with the State Department, but development experts have championed the current structure as providing more flexibility and impact to U.S. foreign policy implementers as well as more opportunities for American soft power around the world.

Even as Trump can use executive action to steer some USAID foreign assistance functions toward the State Department, “wholesale dissolution of the agency or formal transfer of functions provided by Congress would require legislation,” said Tess Bridgeman, a senior fellow at New York University’s School of Law’s Reiss Center on Law and Security, in a Saturday analysis for the national security news site Just Security.

House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast, R-Fla., also gave his support to the State Department absorbing USAID.

“I would be absolutely for, if that’s the path we go down, removing USAID as a separate department and having it fall under one of the other parts of the United States Department of State, because of its failure,” Mast said in a Sunday interview with CBS’ Face the Nation.

Democrats say they will use whatever power they can, including things like slow-walking the confirmation process for noncontroversial Trump nominees, to pressure the White House and Musk to back off their efforts to muscle through a reorganization of USAID.

“Since we don’t have many Republican colleagues who want to help us, we are doing everything we can with our colleagues, through the courts, to make sure that we uphold the rule of law, stop this illegal shutdown of AID, and stop the other illegal actions around the government,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.

Rubio last week issued a waiver to continue humanitarian assistance, using authority granted by Trump’s executive order. But since USAID is the main implementer of humanitarian assistance, the decision to put dozens of the agency’s senior leadership on leave and furlough hundreds of the agency’s contractors leaves in doubt whether the aid can be disbursed.