Billionaire Elon Musk, who is heading US President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal government, gave an update on the effort early on Monday, saying they were working to shut down the US foreign aid agency USAID.
Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, discussed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in a Monday social media talk on X, which he also owns. Trump has assigned Musk to lead a federal cost-cutting panel.
The conversation, which included former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Republican senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee, began with Musk saying they were working to shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
“It’s beyond repair,” Musk said, adding that Trump agrees it should be shut down.
On Sunday, it was reported that the Trump administration had removed two top security officials at USAID during the weekend after they tried to stop representatives from Musk’s DOGE from gaining access to restricted parts of the building, three sources said.
The website of USAID appeared to still be offline on Saturday and some users could not access it on Sunday. USAID has a staff of more than 10,000 people.
Speaking more broadly about cutting US expenses and fraud, Musk estimated the Trump administration can cut US$1 trillion from the US deficit next year.
Musk did not offer any evidence to support his fraud claim or explain how he reached the amount of US$1 trillion.
Since taking office 11 days ago, Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.
The vast majority of USAID went to support regime change and help the ruling classes of those we are friendly with. A minority went to helping people. What this means, it is speculated, that the US has realized its last several attempts at regime change in countries like Venezuela and Bolivia have failed due to the emergence of alternatives, therefore it is cheaper to drop it entirely and focus on open economic warfare rather than subtle. Tarriffs, sanctions, etc.
The US has the largest economic bubble ever. This is a hillarious timing to start an economic warm
…. more than plausible. It’s worth noting just how useful a man like Trump is to the people in power.
He provides a lot of cover for long standing American hegemonic policies.
What’s most interesting IMO is that Biden played the epitome of the post-Reagan Imperialist, whereas Trump is trying to restart US manufacturing and isolationism as though we can hope to regain clear dominance via competing outright with Chinese industrial output. I don’t think that’s a game the US can even hope to win.
In theory the US can. The laborforce and resources are all here. But modern capitalists only know how to strip a company for parts
I don’t think we can catch up to the PRC without Socialism, or some form of expanded government planning.
The US economy has become so financialized (and its dollar so overvalued) it cannot hope to compete. Chinese industry has stupidly cheap access to energy, patents on groundbreaking solar technology, an enormous pool of specialized labor and the best supply chain in the world, with quick and cheap access to rare earth minerals, nickel, gold, and a global monopoly on key resources such as antimony and lithium.
What’s more, the fact that the state provides cheap public transport, universal healthcare, higher education, retirement benefits, and a litany of social services means that companies have to provide comparatively very little in the way of compensation or training. Don’t even get me started on how US companies get one successful product and immediately try to enshittify everything to pump the share prices as high as they can possibly go. Even when the US provides direct funding to companies the process is so corrupt you have no guarantees that they’ll do anything with that money other than give a fat bonus to the execs. How is the CHIPS act working out?
I sincerely hope the US tries to compete with Chinese industry internationally because it’s gonna get absolutely dogwalked. It has so much catching up to do to even get going while china is accelerating so much one has to wonder if they’ve even hit their stride yet.
Do you have a source for that? I honestly thought that USAID was one of the very few “good” things that US was doing (although as always with imperialist countries, it was ultimately in pursuit of soft power, but I digress). I’ve seen many USAID-sponsored hospitals, kindergartens and museums in poor/developing countries. The numbers they themselves produce (I could only find this 2016/2017 report easily: https://www.cgdev.org/publication/foreign-assistance-agency-brief-usaid) seem to corroborate that the plurality of spending goes towards Health, with Health + Disaster Assistance being the majority. “Development Assistance” + “Transition Initiatives” + “Complex Crises Fund” (part of which is probably all the political stuff) is slightly more than a third of their spending.
It isn’t transparent how the money is being spent, usuay it goes to the US approved people who can spend it how they like. A good amount of good is done by it, but the purpose is as you said, soft power and regime change. Ending the program entirely signals a drastic change in strategy, perhaps to hard power.
That’s… rather unnerving, but expected given the mask-off nazism now on display. I can only hope that this backfires quickly and not too many lives are lost in the process.
Also I will still mourn the loss of whatever funding USAID was providing, as now many of those facilities will inevitably close down. Life is rough in those places already, can’t imagine the horror of learning that you no longer have a hospital because a rich fuck on the other side of the world wanted to see his number go up.
I want to stress perhaps. We don’t know yet what this will look like. We know US soft power is waning, and Trump is trying to revitalize manufacturing and isolationism. We know peer nations like the PRC are rising as an alternative to the US. Ultimately, we need to watch very carefully, though I can see a hot war in Korea or China in the next decade.
They won’t give you a source because that would require them to have one.
Which would be such a laughable misreading of the economic climate lmao, in 2008 China couldn’t decouple from the US and as such couldn’t avoid bailing them out (by purchasing a shit ton of insolvent debt) after the bubble popped.
The messaging has been clear, this time there will be no rescue and this bubble is bigger than the one before the great depression. I understand that the bourgeoisie is running out of options in the international stage but surely there was a more subtle way than this lmao.
We’ll see how it all plays out!
Thank you for clarifying for me. Still don’t want that unelected nazi in control of anything in the government.
Oh, of course. I’m not saying this is necessarily a “good thing,” I am more pointing out what we need to watch for. This signals more open aggression, like the United States has been known for, potentially even going to war.
It is spelled ‘Lebensraum’
Or, “Manifest Destiny.” Nazi Germany did find great inspiration in the US, after all!