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Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday that he is now the acting director of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which the Trump administration is trying to shut down as an independent agency.
The announcement came just hours after staff members said they were told not to enter USAID’s D.C. headquarters.
Rubio told reporters in El Salvador that he now leads the agency, though he’s delegated authority to another individual. The agency has been the focus of criticism from President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who urged for it to be shut down.
“Our goal was to go in and align our foreign aid to the national interest,” Rubio said. “But if you go to mission after mission, and embassy and after embassy, around the world, you will often find that in many cases USAID is involved in programs that run counter to what we’re trying to do in our national strategy with that country.”
He added, “That cannot continue.”
The action from the Trump administration to try to close down USAID was made without consultation from Congress.
The agency was established by Congress in 1961 and signed into law by President John F. Kennedy.
Democrats gather outside USAID headquarters Monday
Democratic lawmakers on Monday gathered outside USAID headquarters in D.C., where they blasted the effort as illegal.
“It’s a matter for Congress to deal with, not an unelected, billionaire oligarch named Elon Musk,” said Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly, of Virginia, to cheers at a news conference.
He and Democrats, including several from the Washington area, vowed to fight the shutdown of the agency in the courts.
“We will do everything in our power in the Senate and the House to stop this outrage,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.
Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., said the action by the Trump administration puts thousands of children around the world at risk of starvation, disease and death by cutting off foreign assistance.
“This is a case of the very worst among us attacking the very best of us,” Beyer said, praising the work of USAID workers.
Thousands of USAID employees have been laid off and programs have been shut down in the two weeks since Trump took office, showing the extraordinary power of Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, in the Trump administration.
Trump, a Republican, has also ordered a freeze on foreign assistance that has had widespread effects on programs around the world.
The moves by the U.S., the world’s largest provider of humanitarian aid, have upended decades of policy that put humanitarian, development and security assistance at the center of efforts to build alliances and counter adversaries including China and Russia.
Locked out of the office
Two State Department employees who tried to gain access to the USAID offices on Monday said they were turned away by security guards, who told them the offices were open but people could not go in.
Contractors also found themselves without access.
“We’re shocked. We’re angry,” said one man, who was placed on temporary furlough on Friday. He said while they expected changes with the new administration, this was a worst-case scenario.
“We had a lot of scenarios that we were planning for, and this was the one that we were least expecting,” he said.
The man attended a protest outside the USAID office on Monday but despite the promise from some lawmakers to fight the move, he isn’t optimistic.
“I don’t know that I trust anything at this point. It seems like administration is kind of going doing what they’re doing, and no one can really stop them at this point,” he said.
He said the goal of he and his colleagues was to make lives better for people around the globe.
“I think it’s going to be a less secure world without (USAID) doing the work that it was doing,” he said.
Uniformed Department of Homeland Security officers and security officers blocked the lobby of the USAID’s headquarters using yellow tape with the words “do not cross.”
“It became apparent that it’s not an apple with a worm it in,” Musk said in a live session on X Spaces early Monday about USAID. “What we have is just a ball of worms. You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair.”
“We’re shutting it down,” he said.
Musk, Trump and some Republican lawmakers targeted the U.S. Aid and Development Agency, which oversees humanitarian, development and security programs in some 120 countries, in increasingly strident terms, accusing it of promoting liberal causes.
Over the weekend, the Trump administration placed two top security chiefs at USAID on leave after they refused to turn over classified material in restricted areas to Musk’s government-inspection teams, a current and a former U.S. official said.
USAID has been one of the federal agencies most targeted by the Trump administration in an escalating crackdown on the federal government and many of its programs. “It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics. And we’re getting them out,” Trump said to reporters about USAID on Sunday night.
WTOP’s Mike Murillo and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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