Tech billionaire Elon Musk said Monday that he and President Donald Trump were in the process of shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development, escalating their war on the federal bureaucracy and defying the constitutional power of Congress to determine how money is spent.
Musk, the head of Trump’s government efficiency initiative, announced the shutdown in the middle of the night in an audio-only appearance on his social media site X.
“We’re shutting it down,” he said. At another point, he said “we’re in the process” of “shutting down USAID.”
Musk did not say what legal authority he believed the White House has to shut down a federal agency without congressional approval, or how quickly the administration planned to act. He said the idea had “the full support of the president” and that he had spoken with Trump on the matter several times.
“With regard to the USAID stuff, I went over [it] with him in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down,” he said. “I actually checked with him a few times [and] said, ‘Are you sure?’” he said. He said that Trump responded, “Yes.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Musk’s announcement early Monday.
Trump on Sunday said that Musk “is doing a good job,” and criticized USAID as “run by a bunch of radical lunatics,” though he did not go so far as to say he planned to shut down the agency, with or without congressional agreement.
Trump administration officials have discussed placing USAID under the authority of the State Department, according to more than a dozen current and former officials and sources familiar with the discussions, NBC News has reported, a move that Democratic lawmakers and legal experts have argued would violate a law adopted by Congress establishing the agency.
Trump has said that he is freezing virtually all U.S. foreign assistance pending a 90-day review.
Congress annually appropriates money for USAID to spend, primarily for foreign aid and internationally focused charities. Its budget for the 2023 fiscal year was about $40 billion, according to a report last month from the Congressional Research Service. That’s a tiny fraction of the overall federal discretionaryspending of $1.7 trillion.
Then-President John F. Kennedy created USAID by executive order in 1961 after Congress passed a reorganization of foreign assistance.