[Image via screengrab from PBS video of Musk and Trump in the Oval Office.]
The world’s richest man — Forbes places his wealth at $393.4 billion (on February 14, 2025), placing him more than $138 billion ahead of the world’s second richest man, Mark Zuckerberg at $254.8 billion — is waging a fierce campaign against USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
USAID
Funds from the world’s richest nation once flowed from the largest global aid agency to an intricate network of small, medium and large organizations that delivered aid: H.I.V. medications for more than 20 million people; nutrition supplements for starving children; support for refugees, orphaned children and women battered by violence.
— Apoorva Mandavilli, New York Times
USAID funding for FY2023 totaled $43.4 billion (source: Congressional Research Service). That’s less than 1-percent of the federal budget. USAID funding for health initiatives totaled $6.2 billion, representing 73% of U.S. bilateral health efforts (source: KKF).
USAID is an easy first target in the broader campaign to dismantle government. Foreign assistance is hardly popular and most Americans know little if anything about the work of USAID. They’re certainly not focused on babies starving, children dying of preventable diseases, and other calamities that will be brought by the unraveling of USAID.
(AP has an explainer on the agency’s activities.)
Project 2025
To understand what the Trump administration is doing right now, it’s helpful to look at the Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project launched by the Heritage Foundation. Today’s New York Times observes:
A slew of actions taken by President Trump during his first month in office bear the fingerprints of Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for overhauling the federal government. During his campaign, Mr. Trump distanced himself from the plan, saying it was largely unfamiliar to him.
But The New York Times found more than 60 major moves that Mr. Trump and his administration have made in his first 23 days, including executive orders and agency memos, that align with proposals in the blueprint.
Elon Musk, who Donald Trump has empowered via DOGE, is going well beyond the Project 2025 blueprint, however, in his assault on USAID.
Project 2025’s signature document, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, devoted Chapter 9 to USAID, with a laundry list of complaints: “The Biden Administration has deformed the agency by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism.”
That quote touches on familiar enough MAGA themes, but Project 2025 also acknowledged the value of USAID to American foreign policy and praised the first Trump administration with strategic restructuring of the agency. From Chapter 9:
USAID helps communities to lead their own development journeys by reducing the impact of conflict; preventing hunger and the spread of pandemic disease; and counteracting the drivers of violence, instability, transnational crime, and other threats. In alignment with U.S. national security interests, the agency promotes American prosperity through initiatives that expand markets for U.S. exports; encourage innovation; create a level playing field for U.S. businesses; and support more stable, resilient, and democratic societies that are less likely to act against American interests and more likely to respect family, life, and religious liberty.
The Project 2025 blueprint suggested reforms in the second Trump administration to align USAID with Trump’s foreign policy objectives; to counter China’s strength internationally; and advocated replacing Democratic strategies on climate change, DEI, gender equality, religious freedom, and global health (among other issues) with policies to achieve MAGA goals.
But that’s not what we’re getting. Elon Musk and his DOGE team are tearing the whole thing down.
Musk on USAID
“USAID is/was a radical-left political psy op“
“USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America“
“USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.“
And this boast:
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
On Thursday, Musk spoke to the Worlds Governments Summit in Dubai via videocall:
“I think we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leave a lot of them behind,” Musk said. “If we don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”
Big picture
Elon Musk is waging a cruel campaign against the work USAID does, but he has set out — enabled by Donald Trump — to reach a broader goal: to strip the personnel, culture, and other institutional assets from the U.S. government’s departments and agencies. To rob the federal government of the capacity to do its job, as Americans have every right to expect. On Thursday an estimated 200,000 probationary employees in the federal government were fired. This is part of an ongoing mass purge.
Most federal employees are employed across the country, not in Washington, DC. That’s where most firings will take place. That’s where the effects will be felt. Closer to home for most Americans than the distant work of USAID.
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