What happened
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday he was now acting director of the U.S. Agency for International Development and told Congress he might fold parts of it into the State Department and eliminate the rest, a move Democrats said was illegal without congressional assent. Operatives working for Elon Musk had already taken control of the independent agency, which disburses most U.S. foreign aid, and locked employees out of its headquarters and computer systems. Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said they would block all State Department nominations until the Trump administration dropped its efforts to eliminate USAID.
Who said what
“What’s happening to USAID is against the law,” Schatz said at a protest outside the agency headquarters. “It’s flatly illegal, and it is dangerous to Americans at home and abroad.”
Musk said Wednesday he had spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper” and that President Donald Trump agreed the agency should die. Those claims were “met with widespread skepticism,” Politico said, but the “ultimate legality of Trump’s move to shutter or reorganize USAID will depend on what the Supreme Court does” as it tackles his broader efforts to wrest Congress’ constitutional power to direct federal spending and pass binding legislation.
Trump has given Musk “vast power over the bureaucracy that regulates his companies and awards them contracts,” and he “operates with little if any accountability or oversight,” The New York Times said. “We don’t have a fourth branch of government called Elon Musk,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said.
What next?
USAID employees were told to work remotely again Tuesday, Reuters said. Trump is “preparing an executive order aimed at eventually closing the Education Department and, in the short term, dismantling it from within,” The Washington Post said. Musk operatives have already “gained access to multiple sensitive internal systems” there, including personal information on federal student loan borrowers.