Chicago (Special to Informed Comment, Feature) – Too lazy to bother with the laborious process of democracy, President Trump bestowed power onto the maniacal zealot Elon Musk and turned him loose to gut the US government, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — the decades-old agency in charge of distributing American foreign aid around the world.
Trump handed Musk the keys to the American kingdom through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — a made-up agency established by executive fiat with no legal power. Musk’s DOGE team of young, tech-bro lackeys — coders and engineers — have infiltrated and cyber-seized, like a computer virus, the infrastructure of the administrative agencies that empower the federal government to function. Trump has encouraged the tech lord and his DOGE geeks — the digital equivalent of the January 6 mob — to assault his own government as if it were a foreign power.
Unaccountable to Congress or the American people, Musk’s incel army is engaged in a lawless, dangerous power grab — gaining access to the public’s highly sensitive personal data, trying to force federal employees to resign while locking them out of their offices and computer systems. With a pitiless and mindless velocity, Musk has orchestrated the dismantling of USAID.
Trump’s choice of messenger is perverse. With a net worth of $414 billion, Musk has shuttered an esteemed agency that devotes its comparatively modest $42 billion annual budget to alleviating poverty, combating hunger, providing shelter, fighting disease, and expanding education around the world. Further, USAID’s budget is less than one per cent of the federal government’s. This is not a budget fight, but an ideological terror attack.
In a series of posts on X — the social platform he owns, Musk bragged about feeding USAID to “the wood chipper” and claimed — without evidence — that the agency was a “criminal” enterprise. He crowed about “dismantling the radical-left shadow government,” calling it “a viper‘s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” As a white-supremacist South African, his hatred for the agency may arise from USAID’s support for the efforts of Black South Africans during and after apartheid.
Last Sunday night, Trump told reporters that USAID had been “run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out.” He signed a brutally uncompassionate executive order freezing foreign assistance for three months.
More than destroying USAID, the objective of the demonic duo is to inflict world-wide cruelty, cause chaos, enable corruption, purge the federal workforce, and ultimately transform an eviscerated American government into a Trump-worshipping, MAGA-Regime. This ideological imposition is abetted by an apparatchik cabinet, a Vichy-style Republican Party, a vanquished Democratic Party, and an extremist Supreme Court.
Musk already owned a dangerous amount of power due to his defense and other government contracts but craves a “techno-fascist fantasy” of ultimate power. So Musk helped Trump buy the presidency. He invested $260m in the campaign, thumped his chest at rallies and generated a pro-Trump propaganda blitz on X. His investment paid off. In what looks like a kickback scheme, narcissistically tyrannical Trump tolerates megalomaniacal Musk as co-president.
After Musk and his team of Elon-bots commandeered the USAID’s operations in Washington, shuttering its headquarters and sacking or suspending 94 percent of its staff, USAID’s vast aid machinery shuddered to a halt. The impact of its termination has been swift and brutal with food and life-saving medicines left in warehouses and critical supplies blocked as vital programs closed and workers were laid off. Children were left without food and battling malnutrition as chaotic scenes were reported in scores of countries. Aid organizations warned of escalating disease and famine along with disastrous repercussions in stopped medical-trial programs, including malaria treatment for young children in Mozambique and cholera treatment in Bangladesh.
“An earthquake of magnitude 7.0 could not have caused more carnage,” said Gordon Brown, UN’s special envoy for global education and UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010. “Recent floods in Asia and droughts in Africa have been catastrophic, yet they have inflicted less damage and affected fewer people than the sudden withdrawal of billions of dollars of US aid from the world’s most volatile hotspots and its most vulnerable people.”
Trump has pushed out a steady stream of propaganda and lies to justify DOGE’s illegal, unconstitutional assault. He posted on Un-Truth Social that USAID is one of several agencies where “Billions of dollars have been stolen,” including as a “Payoff” to the “Fake News Media” for promoting Democrats.
The White House press secretary spread the absurd tale of fifty million dollars that the agency supposedly earmarked for condoms to be sent to the Gaza Strip. By the time Trump later repeated the lie, he had elevated the nonexistent bequest of condoms to a hundred million dollars. Days later, the USAID Website, with the report proving that there were no condoms for Gaza, had been taken offline.
By midweek, the Website was back up but stripped of all content except a curt message informing readers that “all USAID direct hire personnel” were being placed on “administrative leave globally,” effective at midnight last Friday. USAID staff members were given 30 days to pack their bags and come home, causing turmoil for thousands. Of over 10,000 USAID employees worldwide, barely 300 will be retained.
Public domain. Picryl.
From Thailand to Ukraine, the slashes in money and personnel had an immediate impact. Drug deliveries to fight the current mpox and Ebola outbreaks in Africa have ended, and even initiatives targeting trafficking of drugs like fentanyl have been suspended. Landmine-clearing work in Asia was halted, support for war veterans and independent media in Ukraine stopped as well as assistance for Rohingya refugees on the border of Bangladesh.
“We already see the shutdown’s cost,” Atul Gawande, a surgeon who led global health programs for USAID wrote. “Kids with drug-resistant TB, turned away from clinics, are not just dying — they’re spreading the disease. People around the world with HIV, denied their medicine, will soon start transmitting virus. The damage is global.” Gawande added that one one veteran US foreign service officer told him: “Our government is attacking us. This is worse than any dictatorship where I’ve worked.”
Coming alongside Trump’s ignorantly preposterous war-crime proposal for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, his expressed desire to annex Canada, re-take the Panama Canal and seize Greenland, the cannibalizing of USAID sends a clear message that aggression, cruelty, and coercion will now fully replace soft power. In a matter of days, the unbalanced billionaires have destroyed decades of work building up goodwill around the world. The evisceration of USAID reveals the transactional nihilism at the heart of Trump’s foreign policy, which recognizes no positive value for the United States in world affairs except for empire-building.
USAID cannot be abolished, moved, or consolidated without authorization from Congress, according to a paper published by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. Republican lawmakers have simply yawned as Musk and his allies deactivated USAID.
Despite the requirement of congressional approval, spineless Secretary of State Marco Rubio — formerly a passionate supporter of USAID — announced that he was now assuming the role of USAID administrator. Demonstrating his fealty to Trump, he delegated USAID’s day-to-day governance to Pete Marocco, a former Trump official who reportedly stormed Capitol on January 6. Marocco told AID Workers: “You are not to enter USAID premises.”
This demand was contradicted by a federal judge in Washington who ordered a short pause on the effort to put thousands of USAID employees on leave. A lawsuit argues that the gutting of USAID is unconstitutional. “What we’re seeing is an unlawful seizure of this agency by the Trump administration in a plain violation of basic constitutional principles,” said Robin Thurston, the legal director for Democracy Forward. “The humanitarian consequences of defendants’ actions have already been catastrophic.”
Aside from USAID, DOGE targets include everything from the Department of Education and the government weather-forecasting service to the U.S. aviation system. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers have been told they could be fired imminently. Two million Federal employees were given a deadline of last Thursday at midnight to accept Musk’s buyout bribe of seven months’ pay to resign ahead of promised mass firings. A federal judge delayed this move to hear arguments on a suit brought by the Government employees’ union who said that, aside from causing chaos, the workers are protected by civil service laws and the “buyout” is illegal.
Some angry Democrats as well as remnants of the resistance and liberal media pundits have howled their disapproval of Musk’s termination of agencies and subversion of the Constitution. Protests have been growing with demonstrations in every state last Wednesday. They called attention to Musk’s conflicts of interests resulting from his numerous government contracts, and the illegal and unconstitutional nature of the mad-DOGE onslaught.
When Democratic lawmakers tried to enter buildings that housed USAID, EPA, the Treasury Department and The Education Department, they were denied entry by armed federal officers in a striking display of the literal shackles imposed on congressional authority.
Traitorous Republicans have blocked the Senate oversight committee from subpoenaing Musk. Docile House speaker Mike Johnson said the media was “overreacting” to Musk’s government take-over and called it a “welcome development.” North Carolina senator Thom Tillis, commenting on Musk’s government offensive, demonstrated that he had lost his reverence for the founding fathers: “That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense but nobody should bellyache about that.” The GOP-controlled Congress is supine, submissive and subordinate. They’ve abrogated their constitutional power to the despotic Trump and his puppet master Musk.
Democrats, seemingly unprepared for what is happening, mostly look like helpless bystanders to the obliteration of the government. The Republican strategy was available months ago in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda that Trump and Musk are following. Dumping a ton of salt into Democratic wounds, the Senate confirmed, despite an all-night Democratic filibuster, the nomination of the despicable Russell Vought — an author of Project 2025 — to be Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Vought has made little secret of the pain he is hoping to inflict on government agencies. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said at a conference in 2023, “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work. . . . We want to put them in trauma.”
Certainly, the decimation of USAID is traumatic for both the agency workers and the recipients of aid. While a measured, humane compassionate debate about the way the US distributes humanitarian aid would be useful and democratic, Trump and Musk are not humane, compassionate, or democratic. The instant retraction of much of the world’s food and health-care infrastructure will create damage that cannot be undone. Many people will die, or be so severely harmed and malnourished that it causes irreversible suffering.
Irreversible suffering or not, a plurality of American voters chose the hate-spewing, anti-democratic, xenophobic Trump for president, so apparently they are getting what they wanted. In a survey released last week, most respondents backed cuts to foreign aid. Selfish, they get no obvious benefits from foreign aid other than the rewards of virtue and, at least, the appearance of benevolence. Even Obama strategist David Axelrod undercut liberal opposition to terminating aid as politically impotent. He warned that Democrats are “falling into a trap” in defending USAID. “When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”
Resistance is advancing in the courts rather than in Congress or the streets. Including the one in support of USAID, more than 40 lawsuits have been filed in recent days by state attorneys general, unions and nonprofits. They seek to construct a legal bulwark in the federal courts against the blitzkrieg that has sabotaged the Constitution. I am not optimistic. While the executive branch is entrusted with the capacity for swift decisive action, the judiciary is glacially slow. While irreparable damage has been inflicted in three weeks, the ascent of cases through the trial courts, to the appellate courts and to the Supreme Court will take months.
Further, the courts have been captured and corrupted by MAGA loyalists: lower courts are seeded with federal judges more loyal to the white-supremacist movement than they are to the law. The Supreme Court is stacked with justices that are hostile to civil rights and that gave Trump kingly immunity. Barbarians are at the gate and summoning the court to tell them they’re trespassing is unlikely to halt their malign advance.
Ultimately the courts have no enforcement mechanism — no army, no police force, no power to impose their will. The President is supposed to enforce the court’s orders. But Trump will not enforce a court order against Musk. Having pardoned violent insurrectionists, it is obvious Trump will pardon anyone who is prosecuted. Further, a court cannot undo the global damage that has already been done by erasing USAID. Entrusted with power, two fascists are using that power to crush democracy such that it cannot be rescued in future elections. Only a radical shift in public opinion or a mass insurgency, sparked by a likely disaster caused by this corrupt diabolical two-headed monster, will stop this nightmare.
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