The Agency for International Development (USAID) went down on Saturday after Trump’s First Day of the Presidential Referencing Referendum on World War II
The weekend has been difficult for the US Agency for International Development. On Saturday sometime after 3 a.m., its website went down, according to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit group that tracks web pages.
He wrote that ” it needs to die.” AP reported that workers at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were denied access to confidential documents at USAID on Saturday and that the Trump Administration subsequently put on leave the two USAID security officials who refused to grant access.
Online information about USAID, which is responsible for funding aid projects around the world and managed more than $40 billion in federal spending in 2023, is available at a new page that is part of the State Department’s website. That page was captured for the first time on Jan. 27, according to the Internet Archive.
There are seven items in the section, each of which has a different amount of information on the original USAID.gov website.
A press release is the first item that appears on the State page.
President Trump temporarily stopped foreign assistance on the first day of his presidency because he thought it was destructive to world peace.
The move appears amid questions about the fate of the aid agency, with concerns in the aid community that USAID may be folded into the State Department or eliminated altogether.
The Administration of International Development and the Trump-Mosk Takeover: Elon, Senator Connolly, and the Secretary of State
“They just took everything down because they didn’t have a plan or reason for it,” Konyndyk said. He said that they were trying to do it behind the scenes, so that they don’t have to “defend” what they were doing in public.
Konyndyk said that the consequences of a diminished or erased US Agency for International Development would be dire.
After the stop work order, the web shutdown came in the wake of the layoffs of hundreds of USAID employees. More than 400 contractors in the agency’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance and hundreds more in the Global Health Bureau were laid off by the Trump administration after just two weeks in office.
He has branded it a criminal organization. He said he and Trump tried to shut the agency down, without addressing their legal authority to do so. Several Democratic lawmakers spoke out against Musk’s attempt to wind down the agency and said only Congress is able to make such a declaration, vowing to fight the attempted takeover and calling it a constitutional crisis. “Elon, if you want to run AID, get nominated by Trump and go to the Senate, and good luck in getting confirmed,” says Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA).
The legality of attempting to change the status of the agency is connected to where it came from. The foreign assistance act mandated the creation of an independent agency with a focus on development, after President Kennedy signed an executive order. The agency was formally established by Congress as an independent agency in 1998.
Konyndyk said that it cannot just be undone by an executive order. “To actually disestablish the agency and dissolve it into the State Department will take an act of Congress.”
He stated that there are things that the US Agency for International Development should continue to do. They need to be in alignment with the national interest and foreign policy of the United States.
The Secretary of State says he is now the acting director of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Billions of dollars in federal aid is managed by the agency. It was thrown into turmoil a week ago, as the Trump administration halted nearly all its programs and took down its website.
The senator said that the entity created through federal statute can’t be changed and can only be removed by Congress.
Rubio, the Treasury Department, and the Department of Government Efficiency: Musk’s alleged proxies in the past few weeks of Trump’s presidency
Speaking to reporters in El Salvador on Monday, Rubio accused the agency of not cooperating with requests for information on how it spent taxpayer dollars.
Career civil servants at the Office of Personnel Management soon found themselves locked out of the agency’s computer system that maintains federal employees’ personal data, Reuters reported on Sunday. Unnamed agency officials linked the action to Musk’s aides.
Musk spent much of the weekend lashing out about purported “illegal payments” to charities and accusing, without evidence, career Treasury officials of “breaking the law every hour of every day by approving payments that are fraudulent or do not match the funding laws passed by Congress.” (The department’s job is to facilitate vast numbers of payments vetted by other agencies.)
In the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have reportedly gained access to core parts of the American government’s payment systems, including systems that affect Social Security and Medicare benefits — as federal workers and government officials struggle to respond.
is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She covered tech policy for 5 years at CNBC and wrote about antitrust, privacy, and moderation reform.
The OPM’s McLaurine Pinover didn’t elaborate on the reports accuracy but said it wasn’t accurate. Representatives for the Treasury Department, US Digital Service, and the US Agency for International Development were unresponsive to requests for comment about the recent reporting.
It’s not entirely clear who the alleged Musk proxies are, but Wired reports that at least several of the engineers aiding his government takeover are just barely out of college.
Trump has made few comments on Musk’s actions. Speaking with reporters on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews on Sunday, Fox News reports, the president said Musk was “doing a good job,” though he added that, “sometimes we won’t agree with it and will not go where he wants to go, but I think he’s doing a great job. He’s a smart guy, very smart, and he’s very much into cutting the budget of our federal government.”
Musk is seeking access to government systems while running several companies that have different government policies and grievances against other companies. Over the weekend, X expanded its antitrust lawsuit over an advertiser boycott to include Lego, Nestlé, and Pinterest.
The Treasury Secretary was questioned about Musk’s reported access to the Treasury payments system. And protests outside federal buildings have begun popping up, including one on Sunday where DC Media Group reports protesters sought to block access to OPM.
Some anonymous users who identified themselves as government workers on the popular discussion website said they planned to keep plugging away. One user wrote in a thread that he will continue to do his job. “Use your headphones and remain unbothered,” says another. There is another option which says, head down eyes and ears open.