Berliner Tageblatt - Musk says Trump 'shutting down' US aid agency

Employees at the US Agency for International Development, which runs aid programs in about 120 countries, were instructed by email not to go to their offices Monday. Some 600 staffers found themselves locked out of their computer systems, ABC News reported.

Musk called USAID "a criminal organization" and declared "you've got to basically get rid of the whole thing."

The founder of SpaceX and Tesla -- who has massive contracts with the US government and was the biggest donor to Trump's presidential campaign -- said he had cleared the unprecedented move against a major wing of US government with Trump himself.

"I went over with him in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down," Musk said in a discussion on his X online platform.

USAID is the aid arm of US foreign policy, funding health and emergency programs in the world's poorest regions. It is also seen as an important source of soft power for the superpower in its struggle for influence with rivals including China.

Echoing far-right Republicans, Musk used X to call the agency "a viper's next of radical-left marxists who hate America."

- Unconstitutional? -

Democrats, who hold the minority in Congress, are sounding alarm over what they say is an unconstitutional power grab by Trump and Musk.

Congress has authority over the US budget but Musk -- whose so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is not even a formal government agency -- says he can decide how money is used.

Because Musk is neither a federal employee nor a government official, it remains unclear to whom he or his informal agency are accountable -- other than to Trump.

The pace and intensity of Musk's operation, which is using employees brought from his own companies, has caught opponents off guard.

In one especially tense episode, Musk's team insisted on gaining access to the Treasury's highly sensitive payment system, which is used for dispatching trillions of dollars a year across the entire government. It also contains the personal data on swaths of Americans.

Unable to prevent this, the top civil servant at the Treasury Department, David Lebryk, left his job Friday, US media reported.

"I can think of no good reason why political operators who have demonstrated a blatant disregard for the law would need access to these sensitive, mission-critical systems," Democratic Senator Ron Wyden wrote in a letter to Trump's new Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent.

- USAID in crosshairs -

The assault on USAID comes in the context of long-running narratives on the far-right and libertarian wings of the Republican Party that the United States wastes money on foreigners while ignoring Americans.

The agency describes itself as working "to end extreme poverty and promote resilient, democratic societies while advancing our security and prosperity."

Its budget of more than $40 billion is a small drop in overall US government annual spending of nearly $7 trillion.

Among other criticisms, which Musk has not substantiated, he claims USAID does "rogue CIA work" and even "funded bioweapon research, including Covid-19, that killed millions of people."

Trump echoed this rhetoric, saying Sunday that USAID is "run by a bunch of radical lunatics."

One person welcoming the apparent death knell for the aid agency was former Russian president -- and ally to current ruler Vladimir Putin -- Dmitry Medvedev.

"Smart move by @elonmusk, trying to plug USAID's Deep Throat," Medvedev posted on X.

Matthew Kavanagh, head of Georgetown University's Center for Global Health Policy & Politics, called the running down of USAID "a disaster for US foreign policy."

J.Fankhauser--BTB