Marco Rubio Shuts Down Musk

Mr. Rubio faulted U.S.A.I.D. employees for “deciding that they’re somehow a global charity separate from the national interest or taxpayer dollars.” He added, “That sort of level of insubordination makes it impossible to conduct a sort of mature and serious review.”

Mr. Rubio’s criticism of U.S.A.I.D. was still markedly softer than that of Elon Musk, who has accused the agency of doing “criminal” work, and said overnight that he and President Trump had decided it was time to dissolve the agency.

“We’re shutting it down,” Mr. Musk said during a live chat on X, his social media platform, early Monday, later adding in a post that “we spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

This right here is what has to stop. Musk is not an elected official and funding for USAID comes from Congress. Only Congress can decide whether it’s functioning  or not functioning properly, not some tech bro. And even though it’s good news that Rubio is taking over, he’s not in a position, legally, to subsume a government agency into the Department of State. So this is a major morass of incompetence but this is Trump II, that’s the formula.

U.S.A.I.D. employees were told overnight not to report to work on Monday because its Washington, D.C., headquarters would be closed, fueling fears that the already-hobbled agency would soon be shuttered for good.

The unusual staffwide directive was emailed out around 12:45 a.m. Eastern time, shortly after Mr. Musk’s announcement.

The notice exacerbated the panic that had already taken hold among agency employees, who have been bracing for a shutdown since representatives of Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, an ad hoc task force housed on the White House grounds, entered agency headquarters last week.

Two top security officials were put on administrative leave for attempting to refuse those representatives access to internal systems, including a secure space where classified materials were housed.

By Monday, hundreds of U.S.A.I.D. employees were locked out of their email accounts, and contractors as well as regular staff discovered they could no longer access their official records, according to three employees with knowledge of the changes. In Washington, D.C., a throng of U.S.A.I.D. employees gathered outside the agency’s headquarters at the Ronald Reagan Building, a few blocks away from the White House.

The email directing employees not to show up to the agency’s headquarters was from Gavin Kliger and sent from an agency server, although Mr. Kliger is said to be an engineer on Mr. Musk’s task force. Mr. Kliger did not respond to requests for comment.

Gavin Kliger is one of the little boys in charge of your money, which we wrote about here last night. They, too, are unelected but they have no problem dismantling government agencies and putting workers out of jobs at Musk’s behest. This is unconscionable, and it is completely illegal for them to be doing so. Congress created the agency, some snotnosed brat working for a billionaire can’t undo what Congress has enacted. And as stated, what Rubio is doing isn’t legal either, but at least it will be a stop gap measure until this crisis is sorted out.

“Any effort to merge or fold USAID into the Department of State should be, and by law must be, previewed, discussed, and approved by Congress,” the Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote in a letter on Sunday to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

The senators pointed out that they had received no advance notice that Mr. Musk’s task force would be entering U.S.A.I.D., or that they were trying to shut down operations.

“That would be illegal. He cannot unilaterally close a federal agency. Another assault on the constitution,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote on social media over the weekend of the administration’s reported plans to shutter U.S.A.I.D.

This is the Trump II landscape. Musk running wild and doing things that are illegal as hell. The good news is that this is getting nipped in the bud early. Musk may not be so chipper about eliminating government agencies going forward. The fact that we’re even having these conversations shows you how up the creek we are.

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