‘Zero accountability’: Will anyone stop Trump and Musk from shutting down USAID?

By Michaela Walters (with Emily, Jon & Lewis)

Trump's takeover of foreign aid agency USAID, led by Elon Musk, has sparked concerns over democratic oversight as billions in humanitarian spending is frozen and employees are locked out of offices.

Read time: 5 minutes

In brief:

• Donald Trump has implemented a 90-day freeze on USAID spending, with Elon Musk taking control of the agency's headquarters, locking out employees and revoking access.
• The Trump administration claims USAID wastes money on projects like DEI initiatives in Serbia and arts programs abroad, though these represent a tiny fraction of USAID's $44 billion annual budget which primarily helps desperate countries with disease, poverty and stability.
• Musk’s intervention lacks democratic oversight and may be a test case for targeting other government agencies, The News Agents say.

What’s the story?

“$100 million dollars on condoms to Hamas, and many other things that are even more ridiculous.”

That’s where Donald Trump claims, falsely, US taxpayers money is going.

The President’s comments follow a 90 day freeze on USAID (United States Agency for International Development) spending, the agency which distributed approximately $44 billion in the last fiscal year in civilian foreign aid to 70 of the world’s most desperate countries.

The spending freeze was implemented as soon as Trump took office on 20 January, but escalated on the weekend when the secretary of state Mark Rubio declared himself acting head of the company. USAID employees said they had been locked out of its Washington DC office as they were asked to stay at home with revoked access to email accounts.

Trump’s new right-hand man Elon Musk, who is leading the charge against the independent agency, has taken control of its headquarters, reportedly working around the clock, even bringing beds into the office, as he and his staff aim to crack down on overseas spending at what he refers to as the “criminal organisation”.

“Musk and his lieutenants have done exactly what they did with Twitter when he took over,” Lewis Goodall explains.

“He's gone in at the weekend when no one else is there, he's gained access to classified material, he's taken away security passes from the civil servants who work there, and in the process, gained sensitive details about millions of Americans.

“He can take control of the payment system that manages the flow of trillions of dollars of government spending.”

What is USAID and what was it spending money on?

USAID is an independent agency that was started in 1961 by John F Kennedy to help coordinate foreign assistance in countries which are suffering from disease, starvation and poverty.

In 2023 the countries that received most aid via the agency, which has always had bipartisan support, included Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Somalia, Syria and Afghanistan.

“The agency was started in the belief that America's security was pretty much tied to the prosperity to the stability of other poorer countries,” Emily Maitlis explains.

“If they're doing better, we will be safer.”

But now it has become a top priority for Elon Musk, who was selected personally by Trump to run Dodge (department of government efficiency), the new team in charge of identifying waste and cutting government spending.

And if Karoline Leavitt’s claims are anything to go by, there was a lot of waste at USAID.

The new press secretary for the Trump administration reeled off a list of costs she said the US taxpayer was contributing towards thanks to USAID’s spending.

The list included; “$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia's workplaces, $70,000 for a production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.”

“I don't know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don't want my dollars going towards this crap” she said in a press conference.

But how much truth is there in these spending claims? Well, there’s a small “nugget,” Emily says.

“Yes, America is spending some money on Serbia's workplaces. Yes, they are giving money to the arts in Ireland. When they talk about a transgender opera in Colombia, I think they mean there is a transgender character in it. So, of course, you can find elements, tiny elements, that are ringing true.”

But, Emily says, if Dodge wanted to find wasteful spending that American voters don’t want their money going towards, they should have compiled a spreadsheet and said ‘yes to this, no to that’.

But “they’ve literally frozen everything for 90 days,” she says.

“There are projects like prison guards looking after ISIS prisoners who have now had to leave their jobs because they don't know what to do for the next three months and they're not getting paid.”

Unpacking Trump's 'condoms for Hamas' lie

What’s The News Agents’ take?

A clamp down on federal waste is a “massive winner”, Lewis says, adding; “But ultimately, these things in a democracy have to be done with democratic accountability at its center.‘

But that is not the case here.

“Doge has no oversight whatsoever by any democratic means. There has been no Senate confirmation of Elon Musk to do this, Trump has appointed him,” Jon Sopel points out.

“They are doing whatever the hell they like with zero accountability whatsoever as part of American democracy.”

Trump, Emily believes, has bigger plans in mind and is simply starting with the easier targets - many American voters won’t complain about their taxes no longer being spent in Colombia.

“My sense is he's waiting to see if anyone stops him. He's waiting to see if Congress puts up the guard rails. He's waiting to see if the Supreme Court stops him, because if they don't stop him on this, he'll go on to the Department of Education,” and so on.

“But if nobody stops this, where does it go?” she asks. “That’s what’s at stake here.”

Lewis agrees, adding that the ‘move fast, break things’ culture of Silicon Valley works fine in government when it’s applied to things that most voters don’t really care about, but as Musk tries to cut $2 trillion out of a $6 trillion federal budget, he will have to get to grips with the fact that the what the US spends most of its money on is not USAID.

“In the grand scheme of things. It's less than 1% of total spending,” Lewis notes.

If Trump and Musk really want to clamp down on government spending, they’ll have to take a look at entitlement benefits, healthcare benefits and the like, and “good luck with that,” Lewis says.

“As soon as people don't have their social security benefits, as soon as they start losing access to health care, as soon as senior citizens there start to have problems with Medicaid, then you're in trouble.

“And I think that's where this is going. It's a political liability for Trump in the long term.”

Thinking about the moral implications of the weekend’s events, Lewis adds; “There is something particularly galling about the world's richest man, literally going into the USAID office and stopping all money flowing to the world's poorest people.”

Listen to the latest episode of The News Agents.

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