USAID’s Shutdown: Trump and Musk’s Nuclear Strike on the Deep State

The main foreign aid agency, whose budget is bigger than the CIA and the State Department combined, has served for decades as a global Democrat slush fund.

by Rod D. Martin
February 5, 2025

President Trump and Elon Musk just took a wrecking ball to one of the Deep State’s most entrenched piggy banks: USAID. For decades, this so-called “aid” agency — with a budget larger than the CIA and the State Department combined — has been little more than a money laundering operation for the global left, using American taxpayer dollars to fund radical activism, prop up corrupt regimes, and interfere in U.S. elections.

Now, thanks to Trump and Musk, that game is over. The DOGE team shut down the agency this week. Here’s its website as of late last night:

(One is tempted to ask, “Where do all the CIA people go to get their last paycheck? Direct Deposit from USAID? Or their NGO affiliates? So much confusion….)

USAID wasn’t just bloated and corrupt—it was an unaccountable shadow government, responsive to no one except the Democrat elite. Under Biden, it was run by none other than Obama’s UN Ambassador Samantha Power, who turned it into a global enforcement arm for the Democrats’ ideological agenda.

And what did that look like in practice? For starters, try $200 million funneled to the Wuhan labs that we now know “leaked” COVID, including China’s Military Medical Academy.

Ask yourself why U.S. taxpayers — through an agency that’s supposed to be doing hunger relief — were underwriting Communist bio-weapons research. The answer isn’t pretty.

DEI Nonsense, Woke Propaganda, and Support for Terrorists

The Trump White House has now laid out in detail just how USAID spent your money. Spoiler: it wasn’t on helping the poor.

Here are just a few of the more galling examples. More are coming:

• $1.5 million to promote “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” in Serbian workplaces. Because obviously, that’s a pressing humanitarian need.

• $70,000 for a DEI musical in Ireland. Even if this were a valid use of taxpayer funds, why is foreign aid going to a First World country?

• $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia.

• $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru. Again—why?

• $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala. We are literally funding foreign genital mutilations.

• $9 million to fund Syrian terrorists.

• $644 million for a “community stabilization program” in Iraq that actually funded Sunni insurgents and ISIS terrorists.

• Unknown amounts “diverted” to Hamas in its terror war against Israel.

• Unknown amounts to forcibly sterilize 300,000 native women in Peru.

• Millions to EcoHealth Alliance for “gain-of-function” (bioweapons) research — the same outfit that worked with Wuhan.

What does any of this have to do with relieving poverty? How is any of this humanitarian? And these are just a few representative examples: we may never know the full extent of this giant slush fund’s largesse for leftist causes and coups. Because while USAID is ostensibly an arm of the State Department advancing U.S. foreign policy, it’s actually an Intelligence Community front and a “community organizing” piggy bank.

Domestic Election Interference

USAID’s corruption didn’t stop at funding foreign radicalism—it actively worked against Americans, too. For just one example, in 2019, the agency dumped $20 million into bribing journalists to smear Rudy Giuliani and drive Trump’s impeachment.

This is immediately after the conclusion of the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” investigation, in which we were solemnly told that election interference is tantamount to war.

This is how the Deep State operates: using taxpayer dollars to destroy its political enemies while keeping its own racket going. And it is a racket: a protection racket, which is why no one in Washington has ever taken it on. Musk called USAID what it is: “a criminal organization” engaged in “rogue CIA work.”

Indeed, just this morning we learn that USAID funds were massively propping up Politico, the leftwing news site that spent the last decade trying to destroy Donald Trump and his supporters. With no USAID funds, they just missed their first payroll ever.

This is criminal. People need to go to jail.

So of course when his team tried to access USAID’s offices they were blocked. That didn’t last long.

Now, USAID headquarters is locked down. Staffers are locked out of their systems. The website has gone dark, except for the statement above. Three layers of top brass? Fired immediately. All non-essential personnel gone as of Friday (and DOGE, with Marco Rubio, decides who stays).

This isn’t some bureaucratic shuffle — this is a purge. It’s decades overdue.

Constitutional Overreach and the REINS Act

Just ask Iowa Senator Joni Ernst. She tried to investigate USAID years ago but was met with obstruction and outright threats.

Senator Mike Lee put it bluntly: USAID was never constitutional. It violated federalism, ignored oversight, and acted like a sovereign entity. And isn’t that exactly what the Supreme Court’s reversal of Chevron was all about?

Chevron Attacked the Very Idea of America

That’s why Lee and others are pushing for the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act, which would force any executive rule with major economic impact to be approved by Congress. In other words, it would put an end to unelected bureaucrats like the USAID cartel setting policy in total defiance of the people.

Rank Insubordination—and Rubio’s Crackdown

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, now acting USAID administrator, had planned to reform the agency. But after seeing the outright insubordination from USAID staff, that plan is out the window.

Instead of accepting the agency’s reform, USAID employees openly protested their own government, defying orders and literally insisting they answer to no one.

Rubio called it what it was: “rank insubordination.” The faceless bureaucracy at USAID doesn’t think they work for the elected President. They think they work for themselves (and certain highly placed Democrats).

But as Rubio said, that’s not the law. It’s certainly not constitutional. And these rogue Deep Staters have finally met a President they cannot threaten into submission.

The Truth About Classification and Security Clearances

Democrats have screamed about DOGE’s access to classified information. Critics have claimed (whined, really) that Musk’s team lacks clearance.

But here’s the truth: the President has ABSOLUTE power over classification. Every single clearance rule comes from executive orders dating back to the 1950s (the most recent is Obama’s EO 13526), and the elected President has complete power to decide what is and isn’t classified and who does and doesn’t have clearance. He doesn’t even have to sign anything: a verbal order is enough.

The idea that Musk and DOGE “can’t access classified information” is a joke. DOGE, operating within the Executive Office of the President, has all the clearance it needs because Trump says so. And that’s before you even consider that Elon’s team comes largely from SpaceX, which holds major military contracts requiring top-level security clearances.

Oh, and one more thing: Trump signed an Executive Order on January 20 granting high-level clearance to EOP personnel. The Enemedia was too busy freaking out about the end of DEI, the Pentagon’s transgender agenda, and Greenland and Panama to notice.

But it’s the law.

Here’s the real question: why do “humanitarian aid programs” require so much classification in the first place?

Draining the Swamp: Trump’s Bureaucracy Purge

Chucky Schumer is terrified. He’s already whining, “If DOGE can shut down USAID, next it might be the IRS or the intelligence agencies!” To which every sane American says: YES, PLEASE.

And in fact this is just the beginning. Trump has launched a buyout program to incentivize bureaucrats to quit before he fires them. He’s also forcing remote federal workers back into the office, killing the racket that’s let them hide behind their laptops while working second jobs on government time. Those who don’t comply? Gone.

He’s also cleaning house at DOJ, FBI, and the intelligence agencies, cutting out officials who turned federal law enforcement into a political weapon. Because let’s be clear: without equal justice there is no justice. Government becomes nothing but a mob protection racket. And that’s exactly what we watched Democrats make it.

Oh, and as long as we’re talking about foreign aid, the President announced yesterday that he’s withdrawing the United States from the evil UN Human Rights Council and defunding UNRWA, the fake refugee agency that actually funnels cash and supplies to Hamas.

This is a full-scale Deep State purge. And it’s exactly what Trump promised.

The Future of Foreign Aid: A Hard Reset

USAID is dead, though there may yet be kicking and screaming. But legitimate humanitarian aid efforts — things like famine relief — will continue. Rubio is clear: they’re all coming in-house at the State Department, where they should’ve been all along. It is absurd that so much taxpayer money should be utterly unaccountable to official American foreign policy, especially for so long.

Foreign aid must serve America’s interests, not globalist schemes, not radical activism, and certainly not Democrat payoffs. The USAID racket is over, and one of the main Deep State piggy banks has been shattered.

The only question left is: are you tired of winning yet?

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