What does USAID do? What to know about the foreign aid agency that Elon Musk is trying to dismantle

Over the weekend, Elon Musk took to X with a series of tweets claiming that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was a “criminal organization” that needed to “die.” By this morning, the agency’s doors were closed to employees, logos, and photos of its aid work were stripped from the building’s walls, and its website and social media accounts were gone.

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk tweeted on Monday. The tech billionaire is also the head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which has been given increasingly wide-reaching power just over a month into the Trump administration’s second term.

The apparent dismantling of USAID comes after hundreds of its employees and contractors were fired or furloughed last week. On Saturday, five sources told NBC News that USAID’s director of security and his deputy were placed on administrative leave after attempting to stop DOGE employees from accessing secure USAID systems.

Multiple U.S. legislators have warned that changes to the structure of USAID should not be under the executive branch’s jurisdiction alone. Still, Musk appears to be moving ahead with attempting to shut down the agency.

“With regard to the USAID stuff, I went over [it] with [Trump] in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down,” Musk said in a video posted to X this weekend.

So what is USAID, and what could a shutdown of the agency mean? Here’s what you need to know:

What is USAID?

USAID was created in 1961 as America’s first single agency charged with spearheading foreign economic assistance, bringing together several existing programs under one umbrella. The agency’s stated purpose is to “[administer] aid to foreign countries to promote social and economic development.”

According to an archived USAID webpage, President John F. Kennedy said of the agency at the time of its creation, “There is no escaping our obligations: our moral obligations as a wise leader and good neighbor in the interdependent community of free nations—our economic obligations as the wealthiest people in a world of largely poor people, as a nation no longer dependent upon the loans from abroad that once helped us develop our own economy—and our political obligations as the single largest counter to the adversaries of freedom.”

What does USAID do?

Over more than six decades of operations, USAID has taken a number of different approaches to administering foreign aid.

In the 1970s, the agency focused on a “basic human needs approach,” mainly working to provide resources like food and nutrition, health assistance, and education. In the 1980s, it pivoted to larger programs focused on stabilizing foreign financial systems and currencies (in 1989, USAID played a “lead role in planning and implementing programs following the fall of the Berlin Wall,” according to the archived web page.)

In 2023, USAID managed over $40 billion of appropriations provided to around 130 countries, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS). Of that amount, $16.8 billion went toward governance, while $10.5 billion went to humanitarian aid and $7 billion to health efforts. Per the CRS, the top 10 recipients of USAID funds in 2023 were Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Syria.

“Reflecting USAID’s poverty reduction mandate, 70 of the 77 World Bank-determined low- and lower-middle income countries received USAID assistance in FY2023,” the CRS report notes. “USAID programmed 40% of its funds in Europe and Eurasia in FY2023, the majority of which were for Ukraine.”

Why is this attempted shutdown happening?

DOGE’s purported mission has been to take an “entrepreneurial approach” to government by slashing “excess regulations, [cutting] wasteful expenditures, and [restructuring] Federal Agencies.”

Musk is framing the attempted shutdown of USAID as part of that individualistic mission, calling the agency a “scam” and a “grift.” This morning, Musk reposted a tweet stating, “Stop giving $ to countries that hate us.”

Meanwhile, experts are warning that killing USAID could have immediate effects on the U.S.’s ability to deliver foreign aid, and that rebuilding the agency from the ground up would require a massive effort.

“It’s a national security tool kit that has been developed over 60 years,” Jeremy Konyndyk, president of the aid group Refugees International, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “And if it’s destroyed, it cannot be easily rebuilt.”