Rubio made the announcement hours after billionaire Elon Musk said President Donald Trump had agreed to dismantle the agency, whose website and social media accounts were deactivated this weekend.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday that he has been appointed acting director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which until now was an independent agency. Rubio said that the level of "insubordination" within the agency "makes it impossible to carry out any kind of serious review."
He made the announcement during an official trip to El Salvador, where he charged that USAID suffers from an endemic problem of refusing to align its projects with U.S. foreign policy interests. "Every dollar we spend, every program we fund must be aligned with the U.S. national interest, and USAID has a history of ignoring that and deciding that somehow they are a global charity separate from the national interest," he said.
"But if you go from mission to mission and embassy to embassy around the world, you will often find that, in many cases, USAID is involved in programs that go against what we are trying to do in our national strategy," he added. Rubio also expressed "great concern" about reports that agency employees are "refusing to cooperate" with people linked to the new government of Donald Trump.
"We are going to close it"
Rubio made the announcement hours after billionaire Elon Musk said that President Donald Trump had agreed to dismantle the agency, whose website and social media accounts were deactivated this weekend. "We're going to shut it down," Musk said early Monday morning, adding that Trump agreed with the decision.
On Monday, USAID workers in Washington were ordered to stay home and the agency's offices in the US capital were sealed off. Rubio, who supported foreign aid as a senator, said that "USAID's functions will continue," although he did not take a position on the future of the agency, which for the moment remains under the umbrella of the State Department.
As one of his first moves after returning to the White House on January 20, Trump froze U.S. aid to other countries for three months while the government reviews whether the spending is in U.S. interests. USAID, an independent agency created by an act of Congress, has a budget of $42.8 billion for humanitarian aid and development assistance around the world and employs about 10,000 people.
