Washington, March 10: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday the Trump administration had finished its six-week purge of programmes of the six-decade-old US Agency for International Development, and said he would move the 18% of aid and development programmes that survived under the State Department.
Rubio made the announcement in a post on X. It marked one of his relatively few public comments on what has been a historic shift away from US foreign aid and development, executed by Trump political appointees at State and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency teams.
Rubio in the post thanked DOGE and “our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform” in foreign aid.
President Donald Trump on Jan 20 issued an executive order directing a freeze of foreign assistance funding and a review of all of the tens of billions of dollars of US aid and development work abroad. Trump charged that much of foreign assistance was wasteful and advanced a liberal agenda.
Rubio’s social media post Monday said that review was now “officially ending,” with some 5,200 of USAID’s 6,200 programmes eliminated. Those programmes “spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Rubio wrote.
“In consultation with Congress, we intend for the remaining 18% of programs we are keeping… to be administered more effectively under the State Department,” he said. Democratic lawmakers and others call the shutdown of congressionally-funded programmes illegal, saying such a move requires Congress’ approval.
The State Department in one of multiple lawsuits it is battling over its rapid shutdown of USAID had said earlier this month it was killing more than 90% of USAID programmes. Rubio gave no explanation for why his number was lower, and no details of what programmes were spared or how the State Department would run them.
The dismantling of USAID that followed Trump’s order upended decades of policy that humanitarian and development aid abroad advanced US national security by stabilising regions and economies, strengthening alliances and building goodwill.
In the weeks after Trump’s order, one of his appointees and transition team members, Pete Marocco, and Musk pulled USAID staff around the world off the job through forced leaves and firings, shut down USAID payments overnight and terminated aid and development contracts by the thousands.
Contractors and staffers running efforts ranging from epidemic control to famine prevention to job and democracy training stopped work. Aid groups and other USAID partners laid off tens of thousands of their workers in the US and abroad.
Lawsuits brought by some of the nonprofit groups and businesses that had partnered with USAID say the form-letter contract terminations purge eliminated even programmes that Rubio had said he wanted to save, violated the contract terms and stifled aid groups and businesses of billions of dollars. (AP)
