The Musk-Trump regime seems set on destroying many parts of the government by firing employees or putting them on administrative leave, and shutting down various agencies, even if doing so breaks the law. Another way they are doing that is by simply cutting off funding to agencies they dislike.

It is illegal for the Trump administration to unilaterally dissolve an agency created by Congress, according to legal scholars, government experts and the congressional research facility.

“For all intents and purposes you are dismantling an agency created by Congress, and that’s a violation of the law,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown Law. “It can’t stand unchallenged, in my view.”

And while a president has broad discretion to make changes to programs and reduce the workforce, the Impoundment Control Act prevents him from withholding money appropriated by Congress, the experts said.

“If it turns out that the president can eliminate or defund an agency on a whim, then ultimately Congress is stripped of all power over the budget,” said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “That would create a precedent that destroys the separation of powers.”

It will be the courts that decide if and to what extent Trump’s takeover of USAID violated federal law.

Many legal experts in and outside of government believe this was the administration’s plan all along: drag out Trump’s most aggressive and controversial policy decisions in court for so long that by the time any permanent judgment comes down, favorable or not, USAID will be nothing but a memory.

“They don’t seem to care what the statutes say,” said Kevin Owen, an attorney who represents both management and federal workers in employment disputes. “The plan from the employment perspective was to fire them all and make them sue. If the administration loses the court cases, so be it. The damage is done.”

Of the many agencies that have been targeted in this slash-and-burn campaign of destruction, USAID (US Agency for International Development) has been the earliest and most viciously attacked target. Its offices have been shuttered and workers locked out and its name removed from its building, its workers oversees have been summarily abandoned, its website has been shut down, and it is being moved to being under the control of the state department, thus ending its independent existence,

David Price, who observed how USAID operated up close when he was living and working as an anthropologist in rural Egypt studying ancient and modern irrigation systems, writes that this particular target is puzzling because USAID, like another target the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), have for the longest time been used by the US to exercise soft power and as a front for covert and subversive activities in other countries. He quotes Father George Cotter, a Maryknoll Catholic Priest, who said in 1981 that “USAID is the CIA’s little sister.”

Among the flurry of Trump’s crazed executive orders causing angst in America and worldwide is his clumsy attempt to shutter the U.S. Department of State’s Agency for International Development (USAID). While much of the press’ critique of this move focuses on USAID’s humanitarian efforts to improve global health and sanitation, modernize agriculture, and provide access to birth control, USAID’s reach goes far beyond these programs. There are many other projects and motivations closely linked to empire and corporate profiteering that are at the heart of USAID’s dual-use history. It is USAID’s historical roles linked to empire, dependency, and imperialism that raise essential questions about what Trump is trying to accomplish.

To be clear, I oppose Trump’s efforts to unilaterally close USAID because it is a totalitarian overreach of presidential powers using one of the world’s wealthiest men to violate Congress’s constitutional powers. However, because I have studied the history of USAID and understand how it often works hand in glove (at times, hand in iron fist) with US military and intelligence agencies, I am less than enthusiastic about the agency itself. Because the breadth of USAID programs ranges from literacy programs and water purification projects to more troubling counterinsurgency projects, making even general statements about USAID are very problematic. I know that there is a lot of pressure from the American liberal left to stifle critiques of USAID right now, but this feels a lot like the same pressures we feel every time the US starts another war. The left is told that this is not the time to speak out, that we need to remain silent and support the troops—which is another way of saying there’s never a good time to speak out.

It is unclear what Trump understands about all this, just as what motivates him beyond his desire to break as much of the current non-military government apparatus as possible. But it is USAID’s long historical links to US military and intelligence operations abroad that makes Trump’s lashing out at USAID so curious.

In 1994, when Newt Gingrich hyped his “Contract With America,” he and other Republicans claiming to want a balanced budget (which they soon ignored with tax cuts & ballooning military spending) promised they would cut foreign aid at USAID.
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Whatever these old school Republican’s intentions, they certainly didn’t follow through with claims of decimating foreign aid, and I have to believe that one of the reasons was because of USAID’s long historical support roles in supporting US military and intelligence operations. Only time will tell whether Trump figures this out—he might simply not care, as his destructive mission may well override such desires to maintain a branch of government that has been so useful in bringing soft power to play in theatres where the brutality of hard power’s impact is not practical or has reached its limits.

While the humanitarian face of USAID has long been an essential public distraction from the other roles it has played, over the past half-century, there have been plenty of revelations of different roles played by the agency, including collaborations with the CIA to interfere in foreign elections and infiltrate foreign labor unions to oust class conscious union leadership, work with management and state actors to crush labor militancy, undermining militant labor leaders.

The NED has also been used as a front for the CIA but that has not prevented Musk from putting it in his crosshairs too.

This mention of the National Endowment for Democracy has a resonance in the present, as last week Elon Musk tweeted on X that “NED is a SCAM,” which, while this is a difficult point to argue against given the historical uses of this Reagan era program, it remains unclear exactly what scam Musk is planning. Does the Trump-Musk presidency envision a world without traditional forms of soft power where the art of the deal and brute force are the only tools in the empire’s toolbox or is something else afoot?

Price writes that the programs administered by USAID were not ‘aid’ as we might understand it in the form of grants and gifts but were often in the form of loans that required the recipient countries to buy expensive American products and services that led to a cycle of debt and dependency for those countries while creating profits for US companies.

There is no confusing Trump’s rabid effort to destroy USAID with any radical leftist critique of the agency’s role in fobbing off the promises of Rostowian development dreams. Trump favors an expanded American empire, but maybe he isn’t smart enough to try and use the sort of soft power and debt leveraging that other presidents banked on.
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We don’t know much about Musk and Trump’s motivations for trying to eviscerate USAID. Perhaps it is a declaration that Trump has no intention of using the facades provided by soft power manipulation of poorer nations, that brute force is the only tool in his toolbox. Perhaps, but we also cannot reject the possibility that Trump simply intends to cut out the middleman and directly contract the empire’s counterinsurgent projects with the famed mercenary profiteer, Erik Prince, or some other private contractor to create more opportunities to profit from American foreign policy, while eliminating programs with the highest probability of helping people in underdeveloped countries. A perfect neoliberal hat trick: privatizing a governmental service, attacking the public good while lining the pockets of your rich friends.

Kevin Drum tries to make sense of why USAID has been singled out for especially vicious treatment.

What accounted for Trump’s specific fury toward USAID? Most likely, he was influenced by Elon Musk, who has been raging against the agency on Twitter, calling it a “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America”¹ and later declaring, “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” Yesterday, Musk acolytes stormed into USAID headquarters demanding access to security systems and personnel files. They were turned back, but eventually got in after a couple of top security officials were put on leave.

Whew. But why is Musk so exercised about USAID? This is where things get murky, but it turns out Musk is a big fan of a guy named Mike Benz, a far-right provocateur, white supremacist, and all-around conspiracy crank who has recently reinvented himself as an anti-censorship activist. For unclear reasons, this has led him to become America’s premier critic of USAID, which he views as a spider controlling the entire web of America’s foreign policy, from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA. Benz posts endlessly about this and Musk is an avid follower.

This is how things go in the federal government these days. A crank decides to become obsessed with USAID; Elon Musk takes the bait; and Donald Trump then joins him in a mission of destruction. And all over nothing.

Maybe that is the reason. Or maybe there is another one that is yet hidden. Who knows in these chaotic days? But it does seem strange that two agencies that play key roles in the exercise of US soft power around the world have been targeted for destruction by Musk-Trump.