WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday that he also has been tapped as acting administrator of the embattled US Agency for International Development, while federal cost-cutter-in-chief Elon Musk works to “shut it down.”
Rubio — who has been busy jetting around Central and South America working on President Trump’s foreign agenda — said he has appointed an aide to help oversee the humanitarian and disaster-relief agency for him.
“I’m the acting director of USAID; I’ve delegated that authority to someone,” Rubio, 53, told reporters at an aircraft maintenance facility in El Salvador.
“This is not about ending the programs that USAID does, per se,” he insisted. “There are things that it does that are good, and there are things that it does that we have strong questions about.”
“This is not about ending the programs that USAID does, per se,” he insisted. “There are things that it does that are good, and there are things that it does that we have strong questions about.”
“My frustration with USAID goes back to my time in Congress. It’s a completely unresponsive agency,” Rubio said, citing decades of efforts to reform the agency.
The “level of insubordination makes it possible to conduct a sort of mature and serious review that I think foreign aid writ large should have,” he said.
Rubio later revealed in a letter to Congress that he had chosen Foreign Assistance Director Peter Marocco, a former defense and State Department official during the first Trump administration, to serve as deputy administrator of USAID to “review” and reorganize the agency.
“USAID has numerous conflicting, overlapping, and duplicative functions that it shares with the Department of State,” the cabinet official wrote to the top Republicans and Democrats of the House and Senate committees tasked with foreign relations and appropriations.
“The Department of State and other pertinent entities will be consulting with Congress and the appropriate committees to reorganize and absorb certain bureaus, offices, and missions of USAID,” Rubio also informed the lawmakers.
He added that “USAID may move, reorganize, and integrate certain missions, bureaus, and offices into the Department of State, and the remainder of the Agency may be abolished consistent with applicable law.”
Jason Gray had been serving as the agency’s acting administrator before Musk and members of the Department of Government Efficiency infiltrated its headquarters in Washington, DC, last weekend, yanked down its website and reportedly drafted a memo ordering its employees to stay home Monday.
The DOGE team worked through the weekend to audit USAID grants and other spending, with Musk calling the agency “a viper’s nest of radical left marxists” and describing its foreign aid efforts as “not an apple with a worm” but “just a ball of worms.
“You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair,” the tech billionaire said on an X Spaces livestream Monday morning.
DOGE engineers got into a row with top officials at the Ronald Reagan Building on Saturday evening while trying to access classified material at USAID, a kerfuffle that resulted in two top security officials at the agency being placed on leave.
USAID’s Trump-appointed chief of staff, Matt Hopson, resigned amid the controversy over the agency. At least 600 employees have since been locked out of accessing their computer systems as well.
Rubio — asked about the more than $40 billion in funding the agency oversees every year for good-governance, humanitarian aid, health-care initiatives and more — conceded “there are things that USAID, that we do through USAID, that we should continue to do, and we will continue to do.”
But among the most controversial spending at the agency uncovered by congressional Republicans and federal watchdogs was its $854,384 in grant money funneled to research labs in Wuhan, China, between 2014 and 2021.
That funding greenlighted risky, so-called “gain-of-function” experiments on bat coronaviruses in the city that became the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, National Institutes of Health and other federal officials have admitted.
“USAID is involved in programs that run counter to what we’re trying to do in our national strategy with that country or with that region — that cannot continue,” Rubio said Monday, describing it as a largely “global charity” that needs to be audited.
“These are taxpayer dollars, and so I’m very troubled by these reports that they’ve been unwilling to cooperate with people who are asking simple questions about what does this program do, who gets the money, who are our contractors, who’s funded,” he explained.
Musk and Trump have also faulted the agency for doling out taxpayer money to left-wing causes abroad.
Trump, 78, told reporters Sunday night that the USAID has “been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out.”
The president confirmed Monday that Musk cannot take any federal actions with his nongovernmental group without the “approval” of the White House.
Reps for the State Department did not immediately respond to a Post request for comment.
