The U.S. Agency for International Development (“USAID”) has operated for years as a rogue organization inside the federal government’s executive branch, sporting an annual budget of over $23 billion and managing over $40 billion in combined appropriations. Those days are finally over. President Trump has ordered a temporary freeze on most of USAID’s activities and operations and has taken other executive actions to allow a thorough analysis of where all that money is going.

Implementing an executive order issued by President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he has taken over as acting administrator of USAID. The State Department has assumed direct control of this atrociously run executive branch agency, which has abused its so-called “independent establishment” status by veering sharply leftward against the national interests of the United States. Secretary Rubio has provided written notice of the Trump administration’s plans for its changes to USAID’s organizational structure and programs to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate and House committees on foreign affairs and relevant appropriations.

Work arrangements with USAID contractors are being terminated or put on hold. Non-essential contractors are being discharged. Many of USAID’s 10,000+ direct hire employees are being placed on paid administrative leave.

USAID is a cesspool of waste, inefficiency, and abuse. Thanks to Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), stones are being turned over to expose the rot underneath. Why, for example, are American taxpayers funding $1.5 million to “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities,” and $2 million for “LGBT activism” in Guatemala? Why are more than $1 million dollars going to Bangladesh to pay for “gender diversity,” $70,000 to pay for a DEI Musical in Ireland, and $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Columbia? None of these wasteful projects do anything to advance America’s national interest.

Some nonprofit organizations and United Nations agencies that received money from USAID have undermined America’s national security. For example, USAID funding has been used to support hundreds of thousands of migrants making their way to the U.S.-Mexican border to cross into the U.S. illegally, including from Venezuela.

Even more ominously, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been doled out by USAID for a non-profit linked to designated terrorist organizations. And USAID funneled millions of dollars to EcoHealth Alliance, which helped to fund gain-of-function virus research at the infamous Chinese Wuhan lab – the most likely source of the coronavirus that killed more than seven million people worldwide.

DOGE has uncovered these scandalous expenditures by unaccountable bureaucrats and more. But instead of wanting to be good stewards of the American people’s money, congressional Democrats are outraged that their pet progressive, left-wing projects are in jeopardy.

Democrats are exclaiming that President Trump’s directive regarding the reorganization and downsizing of USAID has created a “constitutional crisis.” Some have accused the president of staging a “coup.”

Democrat Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland complained that this “illegal, unconstitutional interference with congressional power is threatening lives all over the world,” adding that it is “a killer: in terms of all of the efforts to shut down global viruses.” Rep. Raskin appears to think that putting a stop to projects like funding the leaky Chinese virology lab engaging in gain-of-function virus research that was the likely source of the killer coronavirus is itself the “killer.”

In addition to targeting President Trump, the progressive Democrat resisters are demonizing Elon Musk as an unelected plutocrat presiding over a “shadow government” running amok. In their fevered imagination, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats doling out taxpayers’ money to looney – sometimes dangerous – projects are serving the American people. But these resisters pillory the nation’s foremost business entrepreneur whom President Trump called upon to use his cost-cutting expertise in helping the president root out government fraud, waste, and inefficiency, as he promised to do during the campaign.