There are two things very wrong with Elon Musk and his quasi-official DOGE shutting down the United States Agency for International Development, appropriately called USAID: 1) Musk has no authority (and neither does President Trump) to abolish a congressional established government entity and 2) foreign aid, which is what USAID does, is a cost-effective investment that helps America’s international economic and security posture.
Musk claims that USAID is gone and has been folded into the State Department. Brand new Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims now to be acting head of the agency; is this technically true? Who knows.
Under what authority, exactly, is Musk operating when his staff kicks USAID workers off their systems and tries to close the doors? This is an extraordinarily basic question that has not been answered in any level of detail or depth, and no, simply saying the president wants him to do it is not sufficient to take actions like forcing staff to give his DOGE staffers access to classified information that they are not legally permitted to see.
In fact, the president himself also lacks the authority to shut down a U.S. government department that was created by Congress, and to refuse to spend money that Congress has already appropriated for its functions. We are once again forced to remind everyone, including the GOP members of Congress who are apparently happy to stand by and watch their own authority be usurped and consolidated, that the president is not a king.
USAID is a bad target. We get that many American voters are ambivalent or downright hostile to the idea of sending funds abroad. But beyond some of our moral responsibilities as a nation of great power and influence, this isn’t just charity for its own sake. Going back decades, foreign aid has been a terrific investment; we would not have been able to count on economically robust, stable and, importantly, friendly Europe and Japan without the breadth of the Marshall Plan and other rebuilding efforts.
The Marshall Plan’s formal name was the Economic Cooperation Administration, which in 1951 begat the Mutual Security Agency, which in 1953 begat the Foreign Operations Administration, which in 1955 begat the International Cooperation Administration, which in 1961 by act of Congress begat USAID. And in 2025 came Musk.
The agency’s programs haven’t always been perfectly executed, but its efforts on alleviating poverty, disaster relief, disease prevention, climate mitigation and democracy promotion, among other things, have helped keep nations around the world more stable and provided runway for them to get on more solid footing, eventually needing less international assistance. The reverse of this isn’t the U.S. saving some money in a world that remains just as stable. The absence of these investments will drive global poverty, social fraying and political instability, which is a cocktail that never turns out well for anyone, including the global community of which, for all Donald Trump’s hand-wringing, we remain a part.
Unless Musk’s rampaging is brought to a halt, we will have a situation of both more global instability — which, we’ll remind them, drives the migration they so seem to hate — and nations like China swooping in and taking up the mantle, soaking up the goodwill and pushing their own vision of government. That’s a bad deal.