The Journal. - Inside USAID as Elon Musk and DOGE Ripped It Apart

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

President Donald Trump wants the world's richest man, Elon Musk, to shrink the federal government through the Department of Government Efficiency. And one of DOGE's first targets? USAID, the agency that focuses on foreign assistance. We talk to a USAID worker who was laid off this week and to WSJ’s Brian Schwartz about how powerful Musk and DOGE have become. Further Reading: -How Trump Gutted America’s $40 Billion Aid Agency in Two Weeks  -Trump Hints at Curbs on Musk’s Powers After Billionaire Shakes Up Washington  Further Listening: -DOGE: The Plan to Downsize the Government  -Is DEI Done?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marcy Hersh Robinson has worked as a humanitarian aid worker for more than 20 years. In that time, she's lived and worked in over 30 countries, like Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ukraine. I like to say that I am a stubborn optimist. I generally believe in the good of humans, and it feels like my responsibility as a privileged American to be able to contribute to people around the world in their darkest moments. For the last three years, Marcy's been working for USAID, the US agency that distributes foreign

assistance around the world. When did you get the sense that the new administration was looking to take sort of major actions against USAID? So it became startlingly obvious on Friday, January 24th, that this was not business as usual and that this transition from one administration to the next was unlike anything that any of my colleagues who've been in government for their entire careers had seen before. And that's because on Friday, that was when we were told about stop work orders that had been issued affecting 100% of USAID programs.

It was not made clear to us what that was or exactly how that would be implemented. We were just told that immediately all work had to stop. The following Monday, dozens of senior officials with USAID were put on leave. Many of my colleagues had expressed to me that they were feeling very anxious because they understood that any moment they would receive a stop-work order themselves. And the next day, they did. At noon on Tuesday, January 28th, hundreds of USAID contractors were laid off.

No one had any advance notice that this was coming. Everyone was crying. they were in shock. There was an announcement made sort of floor by floor of the office telling everyone who is an institutional support contractor that they needed to turn over their laptops and their phones. And as they followed that instruction, there was no person receiving their equipment. And so with a belief that one day they would be given back their phone and computer to be able to restart their work, they were putting Post-it notes with their names

on the laptops and taking photos of themselves with the numbers of their computers on the bottom to be able to like get back to this device. These contractors were sent home and their health benefits were cut off. Later, there was an order to take down the decorative pictures and art of the agency's work from the walls of its DC office. Many USAID employees spent the weekend worrying. And then Monday rolls around. Breaking overnight, workers at the US Agency for International Development, USAID, in Washington were told to stay home this morning. The main office closed.

They received an email shortly after midnight telling them, don't come in. And the same happened to everyone with my kind of contract. Except we didn't even receive an email telling us to turn in our equipment. It's just our emails, our screens just sort of went blank and we don't have access to anything any longer. How were you feeling at that time? Terrified, horrified, incredulous.

It didn't seem possible that one person could do this. And we were grasping at any bits of information that we had about who was in charge and where these decisions were coming from. What Marcy and thousands of other USAID employees were experiencing was part of a campaign promise from President Trump, a promise to profoundly reshape the federal government. And that job is being handled by a Trump ally, the world's richest person, Elon Musk, the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency. of the Department of Government Efficiency. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Kate Leimbach. It's Thursday, February 6th.

Coming up on the show, how doge gutted a federal agency. USAID, or the United States Agency for International Development, was founded in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. Congress made it an independent agency in 1998. Its mission is to provide foreign assistance and humanitarian aid around the world. Last year, it had a budget of about $40 billion and employed about 10,000 people. Marcy, like much of USAID's staff, was a contractor. She was team lead for gender, age, and social inclusion at the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance. So basically, if we have a food distribution program that is working in Ukraine, my team's

responsibility is making sure that people with disabilities, like people in wheelchairs or who have mobility constraints, for whom it is challenging to be able to pick up food and transport it back to their homes. It's our job to make sure that the food is distributed in a way that those people can still access. Or older adults who might not be able to leave their homes and that women and girls who are at increased risk of gender-based violence are able to access the protections that they need. Do you like your job?

I'm obsessed with my job. It's who I am. It's hard for me to separate me, the professional, from the rest of myself. But after Trump won the election, Marcy worried that her work to help women and other marginalized groups could be vulnerable to cuts. And I'll end all of the Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion policies across the entire federal government immediately. I knew that gender, diversity, equity and inclusion were all going to become buzzwords

that were going to be used in a very negative sense. Whereas the way that I use those words and the way that technical experts in USAID use those words is just simply to make sure that when USAID use those words, is just simply to make sure that when USAID has a food program, a water program, a health program, that everyone who needs it can access it. That women as well as men can access it. That old people and young people, that persons of different ethnic and religious backgrounds can all access the program.

That makes the work effective and cost efficient. For years, Trump allies have taken issue with foreign aid generally and USAID specifically. Many Republican critics have long said that USAID wastes money and promotes a liberal agenda. Marcy saw the writing on the wall. She decided to resign, and her last day was set to be later this month. But the speed at which the Trump administration acted surprised her.

USAID's programs were quickly shut down, and almost all foreign aid put on pause. Marcy says recipients of USAID funding were scrambling for answers. I was receiving frantic messages from partners saying that they didn't understand what was happening and could I provide guidance, but we were not permitted to communicate at all externally with those partners. So I couldn't respond back to them to tell them how they should act. But they were extremely concerned because as you can imagine, the work that we do has life or death implications. How so?

When you just shut off the valves of humanitarian assistance, imagine what is shutting off is a line of children waiting for tuberculosis vaccines and so suddenly the entire line of children has to go home because the vaccines can't be given any longer. Imagine a hospital neonatal ward full of newborn babies that need urgent care and doctors, midwives, and nurses having to walk off the jobs because they're not permitted to work any longer. Malnourished children in Sudan and in Gaza no longer being able to access the life-saving foods that can keep them from the brink of death.

This was what we were faced with. — This set off a scramble among aid agencies to seek exceptions to the stop work orders. The U.S. government has granted a few exceptions to allow emergency assistance through. Trump administration officials have said their goal is to ensure that foreign aid benefits the U.S. and American taxpayers. What does this feel like?

It's hard to put into words how it feels because the implications of this are so vast that it's hard for me to wrap my brain fully around it. I feel ill for my close colleagues who in this moment of losing their livelihoods were not thinking of themselves and how they will pay rent and how they will buy groceries for themselves and their families. They were thinking about our program beneficiaries and they were thinking about the children who need malaria treatments and were not able to do anything. We're just powerless. USAID workers like Marcy have been trying to figure out who to raise their concerns to and where these directives were coming from. Prior to this past weekend, it had seemed to me that the decisions being made about USAID

were coming from the political appointees working within USAID and the State Department. It wasn't until the weekend that we first learned that Elon Musk and Doge were involved in this. What Doge and Elon Musk are doing goes well beyond USAID. We'll get to that after the break. On the day he was sworn in as president, Trump signed an executive order creating the Department of Government Efficiency, DOJ. And Elon Musk is heading up the effort.

Your money is being wasted and the Department of Government Efficiency is going to fix that. He's having his DOJ team go into federal agencies, setting up shop, and they are getting access to various information on this concept of cutting, in their view, wasteful spending, trying to kind of track down anything they would and the president would deem as waste. And it's had been a whirlwind in D.C. as we've gone through this. That's our colleague Brian Schwartz, who covers economic policy. Everything that Elon Musk is doing, he has been authorized by the president. Elon can't do and won't do anything without our approval.

And we'll give him the approval where appropriate. We're not appropriate. We won't. He has been given maximum authority as basically a temporary employee of the US government to go into these agencies and make either, through his own authority, cuts himself or bringing back the cuts to the White House, and then they execute those said cuts

at a level that I've never seen before at all. Doge's first target was USAID. Musk called the agency evil and a criminal organization, and said it was time for it to die. As we dug into USAID, it became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it, but we have actually just a ball of worms. He's no fan of it. He's been absolutely upfront about it,

as clear as day on social media. He does not think that in its current organization should not be the way it is under Trump, that it has to change. And so he's been very upfront about his view about USAID. Since Congress created USAID, the president and Doge can't just get rid of it. So they came up with a workaround. Instead of USAID being an independent agency, the plan is to move it under the State Department.

They're just moving around the edges of that saying, USAID will be around, it'll just be under a different form as we probe what's going on here and do a fact-finding mission. And that's how Congress, the Republicans of Congress will be able to kind of shrug and go, they have the authority to do this, they haven't gone any further. So we're not going to step in. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he would work with Congress regarding USAID's future. USAID is just the beginning.

Doge's mandate is broad, and Musk's team has been looking at other ways to shrink the federal government. Recently, an email was sent to some federal employees with an offer to take a buyout and resign. More than 40,000 federal workers have taken the offer so far, according to people familiar with the matter. Doge members have also been trying to get access to as much data about government spending as they can, including in one particularly controversial case with the Treasury Department. Musk's team went to Treasury Secretary Scott Besant.

They went to him and they said, we have a proposal for you. Here is how we want to gain access to the Treasury payment systems. The Treasury's payment system is one of the main financial arteries of the U.S. government. The government uses it to pay its bills, stuff like Social Security payments and tax refunds. And in it is a lot of sensitive information about people, like Social Security numbers. Long story short, Treasury Secretary Besson said, great, let's do it. And the concept of this proposal, from what we're told, was you will gain access to these payment systems, but only, and this is from the Besant world we're hearing this

from, on a read-only mode. Which means, means in theory they are only allowed to open up the computers at the Treasury Department or anywhere else that has Treasury access and read through the Treasury payment systems and what they say. And this in no way indicates that Musk wants to do to the Treasury Department what Doge has done with USAID and is looking to do with other agencies. That's right. This is a different animal. This is this is a different set of themes. He wants to have access, his Doge, I'll put it this way, wants to have access because they want to be able to monitor what's going on. And then in some thing we're hearing about they're gonna come up with some sort of report to bring a guest to the Treasury Secretary of what issues they found with the payment system. We have not heard of ever,

through different presidents around here, one issue with the payment systems, ever. One of the concerns with Doge being in the Treasury system is whether or not Doge will attempt to interfere with the system directly, something the Treasury Department has said won't happen. A coalition of labor unions filed a lawsuit trying to stop Doge from accessing this portal. And today a judge signed off on a temporary agreement to limit the sharing of sensitive Treasury data. So what is the external reaction to Musk and Doge? Democrats on the Hill are going nuts.

I mean, they're going bananas. They're saying that Elon Musk is kind of a shadow president. Elon Musk, you didn't create USAID. The United States Congress did for the American people. Right. And just like Elon Musk did not create USAID, he doesn't have the power to destroy it. They're arguing that he's taken over the federal government, that it's illegal what he's doing. And so it's a real divide on party lines in Congress about what to do with him.

And by the way, just a note, the Democrats aren't going to do anything to stop him. They're not the majority. And neither are the center of the House. So there is not much they can do to try to stop him. Democratic lawmakers have also raised concerns that Musk's many business interests, from Tesla to SpaceX, create a conflict of interest. Trump has said if there is a conflict, he wouldn't let Musk get near it White House press secretary Caroline Levitt added that Musk will self-determine if there is a conflict of interest with Doge

The reason this is kind of an issue for people is because this is a billionaire one of the wealthiest if not the wealthiest person in the country and maybe in the world and It's from that lens that people on the Hill, particularly Democrats, are saying, wait a minute here, this isn't some cabinet person. This isn't even a member of your senior staff. This is some guy that you've just created this position for and you're giving him pretty much a long rope to go do whatever you want around here.

And is this a vision that is also held by the Republican Party? I don't see the GOP having a problem with this. Remember, the Republican Party for a while have been trying to figure out how to make the cuts they've envisioned to many of the agencies Elon Musk is targeting for years. So the Republicans in the White House,

people within the White House we've heard from, you know, look at Elon Musk basically as their button, the guy who's going to go around and do things and break things that they've wanted to do for years. And if there's any political fallout, guess what? They could just defer to him and shrug the shoulders and go, yeah, I mean, we're authorizing him, so good enough. Elon gets the heat. Elon gets the heat.

Elon doesn't care ifan gets the heat. Elan gets the heat. Elan doesn't care if he gets the heat. He feels clearly that he's got the authorization from the man and he's got the White House behind him. So where does Doge go from here? Okay. I think by the end of the month, by the end of February, we are going to know that Doge will have some form of access to every agency across the federal government.

That's my bet. I'll come on your podcast again and we'll talk about it if I'm wrong. And we're going to see a lot of changes. Education department, that's coming, I think. Other things that we're hearing about, it's coming. I hear it. Listen, this stuff that I'm hearing from, this isn't coming from Musk haters. I just went to every one of those. These are people who are close with Elon, who know him, and know what's going on. And when they come to me, they're not talking about this in like some

sort of confession. They're talking about it in the sense of they're almost jubilant about this. But along the path of carrying out Doge's mission are people like Marcy, whose work is being upended. I have been among those criticizing USAID in the past, right? It is a sprawling government bureaucracy. There's no question that there has been room for improvements to make the work more efficient, but obviously this is not the process by which to make those kinds of needed changes. It's maddening to me that the lies that are being told about USAID are being allowed to

stand by members of Congress who know better. We are a group of people who are driven to make the world a better place. We are public servants. We have given everything to do this work. And we feel just utterly abandoned in this moment. What do you say to other people on the federal payroll? I would say that they should get themselves ready in every way that they possibly can because it's clear that the gloves are off and the regular rules of business do not apply?

Today, The Wall Street Journal reported that the White House is preparing an executive order that would fire thousands of workers at the Department of Health and Human Services. The order could come as soon as next week. That's all for today, Thursday, February 6th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Rebecca Ballhouse, Annie Linsky, Joel Shechtman, and Alexander Ward. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.