USAID officials put on leave as Elon Musk says time for agency to ‘die’

Elon Musk has declared that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) should “die” amid reports that two top security officials at the aid agency were put on leave for refusing his representatives access to classified materials.

Musk, who was appointed by US President Donald Trump to lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), on Monday branded USAID a “criminal organisation” after security officials reportedly denied members of his cost-cutting task force access to restricted areas of the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC.

“Time for it to die,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X.

USAID’s director of security, John Voorhees, and his deputy, Brian McGill, were placed on leave after denying DOGE personnel entry to secure areas over their lack of security clearances, multiple US media outlets reported, citing unnamed officials.

The representatives of DOGE, which was created in an executive order by Trump but is not a government department, were ultimately able to access areas with classified information following the confrontation, which was first reported by CNN, according to multiple reports.

“This is how unserious and untrustworthy the media is,” Cheung said in a post on X.

However, Katie Miller, who serves in DOGE, appeared to acknowledge the task force’s attempted entry, writing on X that “no classified material was accessed without proper security clearances”.

The incident has added to concerns that Trump, who has placed a freeze on nearly all foreign aid, is planning to radically curtail, or even outright dismantle, USAID.

On Saturday, the USAID website went offline while a barebones page for the agency appeared on the website of the Department of State, fuelling speculation it would be subsumed into the government agency tasked with managing foreign policy.

“President Trump spent two weeks harassing and laying off USAID employees, and now his team is trying to gut the agency altogether,” Chris Coons, a Democratic senator for the state of Delaware, said on X.

“These are patriotic Americans who promote our leadership around the world. They make us safer. Trump makes us less safe.”

Jeremy Konyndyk, who served as director of USAID’s Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance between 2013 and 2017, said that eliminating USAID without an act of Congress would be unlawful and a breach of the separation of powers enshrined in the US Constitution.

Democratic lawmakers also raised alarm about the scale of Musk’s influence over the government despite him not holding elected office.

Musk’s clash with USAID comes after The New York Times and The Associated Press news agency reported over the weekend that DOGE had gained access to the federal payment system, which holds sensitive personal information about millions of Americans.

“This is a five alarm fire. The people elected Donald Trump to be President – not Elon Musk,” New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on X.

“Having an unelected billionaire, with his own foreign debts and motives, raiding US classified information is a grave threat to national security. This should not be a partisan issue.”

On Sunday, Trump told reporters that his administration would get the “radical lunatics” out of USAID before making a decision on its future.

Trump later singled out aid to South Africa, pledging to cut off “all future funding” in response to land confiscations and what he said was the poor treatment of “certain classes of people”.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa last week signed a controversial law that allows the confiscation of white farmers’ land without compensation in certain cases.

The US allocated nearly $440m in assistance to South Africa in 2023, according to US government data.

The US is by far the world’s largest source of foreign assistance, although less than 1 percent of its spending goes to aid and some other countries give more as a proportion of their budgets.

Washington gave out $72bn in foreign aid across nearly 180 countries in 2023, with more than half of it disbursed through USAID.