Elon Musk Says Trump ‘Agreed’ to Shut Down USAID: Website Down, Staff Told to Stay Home

💭 Musk Blasts as ‘Criminal,’ Trump Calls Leaders ‘Radical Lunatics’

Elon Musk early on Monday said he had spoken with President Donald Trump who “agreed” with him that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) should be shut down, just hours after the president attacked the aid agency’s leadership by calling them “a bunch of radical lunatics.”

Stay at home and don’t bother to come into the office. That was the message to staffers of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Monday who were instructed to stay out of the agency’s Washington headquarters.

The advice came via a notice distributed to them, AP reports, after Elon Musk announced President Donald Trump had agreed with him to shut the agency down.

According to AP, USAID staffers said they “also tracked more than 600 employees who reported being locked out of the agency’s computer systems overnight.”

Those still in the system received emails declaring, “at the direction of Agency leadership” the headquarters building “will be closed to Agency personnel on Monday, Feb. 3.”

The shutdown came in the wake of Musk, who’s leading a civilian review of the federal government with the Republican president’s agreement, revealing early Monday he had spoken with Trump about the six-decade agency and “he agreed we should shut it down.”

Musk, Trump and some Republican lawmakers have targeted USAID, which oversees humanitarian, development and security programs in some 120 countries, accusing it of losing its way.

USAID, whose website vanished Saturday without explanation, has been one of the federal agencies most targeted by the Trump administration as it tackles waste within the federal government and many of its programs.

Musk attacked the agency by calling it a “criminal organization” on Sunday as Trump decried it as “run by radical lunatics” and said he was considering its future.

Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, offered a foreign perspective.

He said on social media “Most governments don’t want USAID funds flowing into their countries because they understand where much of that money actually ends up.

“While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.

“At best, maybe 10% of the money reaches real projects that help people in need (there are such cases), but the rest is used to fuel dissent, finance protests, and undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda.”

Trump placed an unprecedented 90-day freeze on foreign assistance on his first day in office Jan. 20.

Spending for USAID is determined by Congress. Its budget for the 2023 fiscal year was about $40bn, according to a report last month from the Congressional Research Service.

As of 2016, USAID reported it had 10,235 employees on its U.S. taxpayer-funded payroll.

USAID was established in 1961 and has long been the primary federal agency for providing foreign aid.

USAID is/was one of the largest official aid agencies in the world and accounts for more than half of all U.S. foreign assistance – the highest in the world in absolute dollar terms.