It was the day of President Trump’s inauguration, and the U.S. Agency for International Development’s new director looked like he might pass out, as the color drained from his face.
Jason Gray, U.S.A.I.D.’s chief information officer, who had been at the agency for only two years, had just learned he would be in charge, effective immediately. Mr. Gray wasn’t supposed to be the boss. The outgoing Biden administration had selected somebody with more foreign aid experience to manage U.S.A.I.D. until the new president chose, and Congress approved, a permanent administrator. But Mr. Trump’s team, apparently eager to reverse any decisions by the former president, told Mr. Gray to take the helm instead.
Inside the agency’s offices, Mr. Gray’s colleagues gathered around, trying to buck him up.
Yes, the job would be challenging under Mr. Trump, whose “America First” politics weren’t exactly sympathetic to sending U.S. taxpayer money around the world. But U.S.A.I.D. had come through the first Trump administration largely unscathed, and Marco Rubio, the incoming secretary of state, was a longtime supporter.
A little after 4 p.m., Mr. Gray issued an upbeat memo to the agency’s more than 10,000 employees, telling them to expect a focus on innovation and new partnerships.
“The next four years offer a great opportunity for our agency,” he wrote.
Two weeks later, U.S.A.I.D. was on the cusp of oblivion — its programs around the world stopped, its staff in Washington told to stay home.
Today, the rapid-fire dismantling of the country’s sprawling global aid agency remains one of the most consequential outcomes of the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul the federal government. Not only did it transform U.S. foreign policy, but it also provided a vivid opening display of Mr. Trump’s willingness to tear down institutions as he saw fit, in defiance of Congress and the courts, with a speed that was hard for his opponents to comprehend, much less resist.
This is the story of those two weeks.
A New York Times examination found that Trump administration officials came to U.S.A.I.D. with no plan to dismantle the agency, at least not so quickly. Instead, that decision emerged day by day, marked by rash demands, shock and confusion. It culminated with a tense showdown 10 days after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, in which agency employees defied orders from Elon Musk, who was then at the height of his influence in Washington, and personally intervened to drive the agency’s elimination.
Mr. Musk demanded that Mr. Gray shut off email and cellphone access for U.S.A.I.D. workers around the world, including in conflict zones. Mr. Gray refused, saying that doing so would put their lives at risk, according to people familiar with the exchange. By the next day, he had been removed from his post.
This account, the most definitive to date of the sprawling agency’s rapid demise, is based on interviews with more than 50 current and former U.S.A.I.D. and State Department officials, and a review of internal emails and other documents. Most of those interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.
The Times investigation found that Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency first approached U.S.A.I.D. as a source of useful anecdotes of what it called “viral waste” — government spending that seemed foolish, and could be exploited to support the case for cuts.
When employees raised concerns about demands that they viewed as dangerous or unlawful, the administration branded their actions as “insubordination” — then used that charge to justify dismantling the agency.
The result was a real-time decision to take down an institution created almost 65 years ago as a linchpin of U.S. foreign policy, intended to advance the country’s national security interests by establishing new markets for American goods, reducing conflicts that risked entangling U.S. troops, and countering efforts by communist and autocratic regimes to expand their power.
Few Republicans had been as vocal in their support for U.S.A.I.D. as Mr. Rubio, who, as a senator, once said that “in every region of the world, we should always search for ways to use U.S.A.I.D. and humanitarian assistance to strengthen our influence.” But as the agency collapsed, its remnants placed under his control as secretary of state, Mr. Rubio was largely a bystander while Mr. Musk and others shaped decisions on foreign aid.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
The State Department did not address detailed questions outlining the findings of The Times’s investigation. In a statement, Jeremy Lewin, the department’s director of foreign assistance, said Mr. Rubio has “refocused foreign assistance to be more efficient, strategic and calibrated to advance American interests.”
“Folding U.S.A.I.D. under State has been an idea many have talked about for decades,” Mr. Lewin said. “President Trump and Secretary Rubio have actually gotten it done.”
Shuttering U.S.A.I.D. so quickly “likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways,” a federal judge ruled less than two months into the new administration.
By that point, it didn’t matter. The agency was effectively gone.
Immediate Confusion
The decision to end U.S.A.I.D. brought deadly consequences. But the events leading to that moment can be traced in part to a particularly banal cause: a confusingly worded directive from Mr. Trump.
On the day he was sworn in — Monday, Jan. 20 — Mr. Trump signed 26 executive orders, far more than his predecessors. Among them was Executive Order 14169, directing officials to “immediately pause new obligations and disbursements of development assistance funds” for a 90-day review.
Even the agency’s supporters acknowledged it could use reform. Much of the more than $35 billion it managed last year went to Washington-based contractors, not directly to communities in need overseas. The success of its programs, especially those focused on economic and political development, was often hard to measure. And U.S.A.I.D.’s goals sometimes clashed with those of the State Department.
U.S.A.I.D. had its share of fraud, waste and abuse, according to Paul Martin, whose job as inspector general at U.S.A.I.D. gave him responsibility for investigating such cases.
But Mr. Martin, who like other inspectors general was fired by the Trump administration, said he had found no evidence that U.S.A.I.D. was subject to more fraud, waste or abuse than other agencies.
Whether U.S.A.I.D. was wasteful often depended on how the term was defined. Under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., U.S.A.I.D. emphasized priorities that many Republicans disagreed with, including promoting gay and transgender rights.
But Mr. Trump’s executive order created a more immediate problem: U.S.A.I.D.’s leadership, including the president’s own appointees, wasn’t sure what his directive meant.
The document blocked U.S.A.I.D. from signing contracts for new projects. But, staff members wondered, did it also stop U.S.A.I.D. from making payments for contracts that were already agreed to? And did the directive block payments for work that had already been performed? Such a step, some worried, might be illegal.
The following evening — Tuesday, Jan. 21 — Mr. Gray seemed to acknowledge the confusion. In a memo about the president’s instructions, Mr. Gray said that the order’s effect on payments “will be subject to further guidance.”
That guidance arrived two days later, but not in a way that Mr. Gray could have expected.
The Return of Pete Marocco
On the Trump administration’s third full day — Thursday, Jan. 23 — a U.S.A.I.D. official got a late-night call that marked the first sign of trouble for the agency.
On the phone was Pete Marocco, the State Department’s newly appointed director of foreign assistance, giving him a degree of authority over U.S.A.I.D. Mr. Marocco said he had reason to believe employees were trying to subvert the president’s executive order, according to people with direct knowledge of the call. He was upset.
Mr. Marocco’s forceful approach was no surprise. In 2020, near the end of the first Trump administration, Mr. Marocco had been appointed to run a division inside U.S.A.I.D., the Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, where he tried to stop spending that he believed failed to support the president’s agenda.
A former Marine Corps platoon sergeant and an Oxford University graduate, Mr. Marocco followed a particular pattern at U.S.A.I.D. in the first Trump administration, according to people familiar with his time there. He would try to cancel contracts or freeze payments, then accuse U.S.A.I.D. employees of insubordination when they would complain.
The political appointees above Mr. Marocco in 2020 soon encouraged him to take personal leave. They were frustrated that Mr. Marocco wouldn’t follow their guidance on how to run the bureau, according to people familiar with those events. U.S.A.I.D. employees viewed the episode as a public rebuke.
Now, back in power in a second Trump administration, Mr. Marocco was demanding that the employees he saw as subverting the president’s directives be identified, then pushed out.
The next morning — Friday, Jan. 24 — senior staff members met in the Ronald Reagan Building, U.S.A.I.D.’s glass and limestone headquarters three blocks from the White House, to decide how to respond to Mr. Marocco’s accusations.
Staff members said Mr. Marocco’s concerns appeared to reflect a misunderstanding of U.S.A.I.D.’s convoluted payment systems, according to people familiar with what happened during the meeting.
Even if the president’s order prohibited the flow of funding for existing contracts — and U.S.A.I.D.’s leaders believed it did not — there was still the question of timing. Employees explained that the agency’s payments moved slowly: After U.S.A.I.D. signed off on a payment, that money was transferred to other agencies, such as the Treasury Department, where it often sat for days or weeks before leaving the federal government.
In other words, the payments in question had likely been approved by U.S.A.I.D. before Mr. Trump’s directive. The administration appointees at the meeting seemed satisfied. Once that system could be explained to Mr. Marocco, the thinking went, he would realize his concerns were unfounded.
The meeting ended with U.S.A.I.D.’s leaders believing the problem was resolved. Instead, it was about to get worse.
Shock Waves to Global Aid
A few hours later, on Friday afternoon, the State Department issued a memo written by Mr. Marocco and signed by Mr. Rubio, putting a halt to all foreign assistance payments from the agency.
But that new directive also went a step further. It told U.S.A.I.D. to issue “stop-work orders” on its more than 6,200 grants and contracts.
Mr. Rubio’s instructions reverberated around the world.
U.S.A.I.D.’s programs included preventing and treating diseases like H.I.V. and malaria; providing emergency food assistance; supporting emerging democracies by funding election monitors and civil rights groups; and helping communities cope with climate shocks like storms or drought.
Sometimes the agency’s programs had even simpler goals, like reuniting families.
Gabriel Walder, the head of a faith-based nonprofit called Alliance for Children Everywhere, was in London, meeting with prospective funders, when he got an email telling him to halt projects, including one helping destitute families in Africa whose children had been placed in orphanages. The group provided parents with the resources to feed and care for their children at home.
The group had signed a contract to reunite families in Malawi, with a focus on children who were younger than 5 — those at the greatest risk living in institutions. It had already identified the families whose children would be returned; after U.S.A.I.D.’s stop-work order, the families had to be told their children would not be coming home after all.
On Saturday, Jan. 25, Dayne Curry, who was then the Afghanistan country director for Mercy Corps, a large nonprofit, awoke to an email carrying the same message to stop all programs.
The agency added that exceptions were available for “lifesaving” programs. But what counted as lifesaving? It was hard to know, because U.S.A.I.D.’s political appointees had also restricted employees from communicating with anyone outside the agency, including Congress, the State Department or even the aid groups affected by the freeze.
A U.S.A.I.D. employee who worked on projects in Afghanistan, and who held weekly meetings with aid groups, recalled suddenly being prohibited from attending those meetings, or canceling them. So when aid workers in Afghanistan signed into Google Meet for their weekly checkup, the space on the screen usually occupied by U.S.A.I.D. staff was blank.
U.S.A.I.D. had been trying to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in Afghanistan since 2021, when the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal of U.S. forces left the country without a functioning government.
“It felt like a betrayal,” the employee said of the stop-work order. “We owed people in Afghanistan just a little bit of something, and then we failed again.”
Enter DOGE
Back in Washington, U.S.A.I.D.’s problems were compounding.
One week into the Trump administration — Monday, Jan. 27 — Mr. Marocco arrived at the Reagan building. He said he still believed U.S.A.I.D. employees had deliberately violated the president’s order, and said he was expanding his investigation.
To do that, Mr. Marocco was accompanied by members of the Department of Government Efficiency — the effort set up by Mr. Musk, who had promised to cut $2 trillion in federal spending, though he would ultimately fall far short of that goal. U.S.A.I.D. was one of the first agencies visited by DOGE.
But the people who arrived at U.S.A.I.D. were neither experts in foreign assistance contracts nor trained auditors. Luke Farritor was a 23-year-old computer programmer who had dropped out of college. Edward Coristine was a 19-year-old high school graduate who goes by “Big Balls.” Clayton Cromer was a lawyer and former executive assistant to Ed Martin, Mr. Trump’s then-acting U.S. attorney in Washington, who had sought to investigate the president’s perceived enemies.
The political appointees brought in to run U.S.A.I.D., by contrast, tended to have more and broader experience. They included an oil and gas executive, a naval intelligence officer, a former Heritage Foundation fellow, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, a reporter for a right-wing media outlet and the manager of a Christian elementary school. Several had served in the first Trump administration.
But despite their relative lack of experience, the DOGE members moved quickly to force changes.
After a few hours interviewing agency officials, DOGE staff presented Mr. Gray with a list of 57 U.S.A.I.D. employees they said were involved in the payments Mr. Marocco had complained about, according to people familiar with the events of that day. DOGE demanded those employees be put on administrative leave — removed from the building, cut off from their computer systems, email accounts and work phones.
The list made little sense, according to people with direct knowledge of the meeting: It included most of the senior career officials across the agency. Even if the payments had somehow violated the president’s order, most of the people DOGE had identified would have had nothing to do with them.
DOGE insisted, promising to compile the evidence and present it to U.S.A.I.D.’s leaders a few days later. Mr. Gray relented.
The 57 employees were put on leave that afternoon. Mr. Gray later issued a memo to the entire agency, saying the employees seemed to have taken steps to “circumvent the president’s executive orders,” according to a copy of the email reviewed by The Times.
‘Viral Waste’
There soon turned out to be another reason DOGE had come to U.S.A.I.D. It was looking for something — and not just savings. Its goal was finding “viral waste,” as one person familiar with the strategy put it, meaning examples of government spending that could be easily mocked.
On Tuesday, Jan. 28, Karoline Leavitt took the podium at the White House for her first media briefing as Mr. Trump’s press secretary. Ms. Leavitt listed examples of spending that the administration had frozen. One stood out.
“There was about to be 50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza,” Ms. Leavitt said. “That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money.”
After Ms. Leavitt’s briefing, U.S.A.I.D. staff went to Laken Rapier, the agency’s political appointee for public affairs, and told her that the money in question wasn’t for condoms, but for family planning more broadly, such as birth-control pills, according to people familiar with the exchange.
More important, the Gaza in question was Gaza province, a part of Mozambique, in southern Africa — almost 4,000 miles away from the Gaza Strip. They urged Ms. Rapier to alert the White House, so it could at least avoid repeating the statement.
The warnings from staff went unheeded. The following day, Mr. Trump expanded on the claim during a White House event. “We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas,” he said, generating laughter. Mr. Trump added that Hamas used condoms “as a method of making bombs,” without explaining what that meant.
“These were the types of payments, and many others,” Mr. Trump said. “I could stand here all day and tell you the things that we found.”
Asked if Mr. Trump knew at the time that his statement about Gaza was false, a White House spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, did not address the question.
“Over decades of mismanagement, USAID strayed from its original mission and became a bloated, taxpayer-funded nonprofit,” Ms. Kelly said in a statement. “President Trump was elected by the American people to put America First.”
The Big Day
The next day — Thursday, Jan. 30 — marked a turning point. Instead of redirecting U.S.A.I.D., the Trump administration and DOGE began moving to shut it down.
That morning, DOGE members approached top U.S.A.I.D. officials, seeking to back up their assertion that some of the people sent home were involved in improper payments.
That evidence turned out to be thin: It revolved around an email that Luke Farritor sent to his teammates in which he shared the results of his review of U.S.A.I.D. payments since the executive order was signed.
“I could be wrong,” Mr. Farritor wrote in the message, which was reviewed by The Times. “My numbers could be off.”
The members of DOGE also said they would not allow the senior employees who had been put on leave to come back, regardless of the evidence, according to an internal memo reviewed by The Times. They demanded that some of those people be fired.
Senior career staff members pushed back. Nick Gottlieb, U.S.A.I.D.’s director of employee and labor relations and the person who had put the 57 people on leave three days before, told Mr. Gray in the memo that he believed keeping the people on leave was unjustified, and that DOGE’s orders to fire some of them were unlawful.
“There is no evidence any of them attempted to circumvent the president’s orders,” Mr. Gottlieb wrote. He added that he would report DOGE’s actions to the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal agency that protects federal employees, including whistle-blowers.
Mr. Gottlieb sent those employees a follow-up email on Thursday afternoon, saying he had no grounds for keeping them on leave.
It was, in the eyes of DOGE and the White House, the ultimate act of resistance — a clear-cut case of insubordination by a career official.
And it was, by many accounts, the moment that sealed U.S.A.I.D.’s fate.
Mr. Cromer, one of the DOGE members, immediately began running around looking for Mr. Gottlieb’s office, according to one person with direct knowledge of the events. Moments later, Mr. Cromer knocked on Mr. Gottlieb’s door, accompanied by a group of people, including other DOGE staff members — and security personnel, who walked Mr. Gottlieb out of the building.
That evening, members of DOGE — including Mr. Lewin, who was then part of the DOGE operation — accused Mr. Gray of losing control of the agency, according to three people familiar with the conversations that followed Mr. Gottlieb’s actions.
DOGE made a striking demand, ordering Mr. Gray to consent to locking every U.S.A.I.D. employee worldwide out of the agency’s systems, including phones and emails. Mr. Marocco, who joined some of those conversations by phone, echoed that demand, the people said.
Mr. Gray refused. Mr. Lewin then called Mr. Musk, and handed the phone to Mr. Gray. Mr. Musk repeated the demand, according to the people familiar with what happened.
Again, Mr. Gray refused. He said that U.S.A.I.D. staff members were in the midst of being evacuated from the Democratic Republic of Congo because of civil unrest. They were fighting Ebola in Uganda. They were helping move food into Gaza.
Suddenly cutting off access to U.S.A.I.D. systems could get people killed, Mr. Gray said.
By the next day, the White House had removed Mr. Gray from his position as acting U.S.A.I.D. administrator.
Mr. Rubio became the new administrator, in addition to his responsibilities as secretary of state. He named Mr. Marocco the acting deputy administrator. Now Mr. Marocco had the reins — and freedom to impose what many saw as revenge for having been pushed out of the agency five years earlier.
‘Rank Insubordination’
That same night, a parallel struggle was underway for control of U.S.A.I.D.’s computer systems and access to the agency’s headquarters.
Members of DOGE demanded that U.S.A.I.D.’s security team provide them with full control of the agency’s networks, including the power to lock anyone out of the system.
Employees at first declined to give that kind of access to DOGE, most of whom lacked security clearances, according to people familiar with what happened. Members of DOGE got Mr. Musk on the phone, who told U.S.A.I.D. employees to cooperate.
Days later, when Mr. Rubio was asked if U.S.A.I.D. had to be abolished, he responded: “Well, that was always the goal, was to reform it. But now we have rank insubordination.”
“Their basic attitude is: ‘We don’t work for anyone. We work for ourselves. No agency of government can tell us what to do,’” Mr. Rubio told a reporter for Fox News.
In the days that followed, DOGE began to tear the agency down.
On Saturday, Feb. 1, DOGE demanded that U.S.A.I.D. staff members provide total access to the website, which was then shut down. One U.S.A.I.D. employee described the move as wiping away the public face of the agency.
That day also brought fresh turmoil inside the building. Some DOGE members wanted to work in the administrator’s suite, according to people familiar with what happened. But their badges were not properly coded to open that door.
DOGE members believed the agency’s employees were deliberately keeping them out. The episode cemented DOGE’s view that U.S.A.I.D. employees could not be trusted.
On Sunday, Feb. 2, thousands of U.S.A.I.D. staff members lost access to their email accounts and computer systems, according to a lawsuit filed by employees. At 12:20 p.m. that afternoon, Mr. Musk wrote on X: “U.S.A.I.D. is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”
That evening, Mr. Trump weighed in publicly on U.S.A.I.D. “It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out,” he told reporters a little after 7 p.m. “And then we’ll make a decision.”
Within a few hours, that decision was announced — not by the president or his secretary of state, but by Mr. Musk.
The Wood Chipper
That night around midnight, Mr. Musk said on X that he had obtained Mr. Trump’s approval to shut down the agency.
“As we dug into U.S.A.I.D.,” Mr. Musk said, “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.”
Around 12:45 a.m. that morning — Monday, Feb. 3 — a DOGE member emailed U.S.A.I.D. employees, telling them not to come into the office that day. At 1:54 a.m., Mr. Musk posted his now-infamous message on X: “We spent the weekend feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead.”
At the agency’s Washington offices that morning, staff members who got in fielded requests from colleagues to collect their personal items. One person recounted going desk to desk with a tote bag, gathering up family photos to return to their owners.
Not far away, at the State Department, Mr. Marocco told a meeting of senior diplomats and other officials that U.S.A.I.D. was getting shut down. “We’re going to be doing this,” Mr. Marocco said, according to a person who was in the meeting. Career officials in the room were too shocked to respond.
(Mr. Marocco would abruptly leave his role as director of foreign assistance at the State Department two months later, replaced by Mr. Lewin.)
Two thousand miles from Washington, Mr. Rubio walked onto the patio behind the American ambassador’s residence in El Salvador. Mr. Rubio had come to the country to meet with its president, Nayib Bukele; now he was scheduled to address embassy employees, many of whom worked for U.S.A.I.D.
That Mr. Rubio was in El Salvador on the day of U.S.A.I.D.’s demise carried a particular resonance. The agency spent more than $50 million on human rights and other pro-democracy programs in El Salvador last year, according to federal data. Now, Mr. Rubio was meeting with Mr. Bukele, who has called himself the world’s “coolest dictator,” to discuss sending undocumented migrants from the United States to a notorious Salvadoran prison.
One of the groups that U.S.A.I.D. funded in El Salvador, Cristosal, is a human rights group that investigates corruption by the country’s government.
When Cristosal’s director, Noah Bullock, heard Mr. Rubio would visit the country, he asked the embassy if the secretary would make time to meet with representatives from civil society groups like his, as had often been the case for such visits around the world. The embassy never responded. Cristosal’s U.S.A.I.D. funding has since been canceled; the head of its anticorruption unit, Ruth López, was arrested last month, and is still in prison.
The day before Mr. Rubio’s visit, as U.S.A.I.D. was being dismantled, Mr. Bukele posted on X that 90 percent of U.S.A.I.D.’s funding “is used to fuel dissent, finance protests, and undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda.”
One of the U.S.A.I.D. employees at the ambassador’s residence asked Mr. Rubio what would happen to the agency’s programs in El Salvador, according to two people in attendance. The employee cited some of those programs and their importance to the United States — including work aimed at helping migrants find jobs in Central America, so that fewer people would journey north to the American border.
Mr. Rubio did not repeat Mr. Musk’s message from earlier in the day that U.S.A.I.D. was being torn apart, according to the people in attendance. And he said that U.S. foreign assistance programs would largely continue.
The same day, the State Department sent Congress a letter with Mr. Rubio’s signature, which seemed to better capture the scale of change underway.
“U.S.A.I.D. may move, reorganize, and integrate certain missions, bureaus, and offices into the Department of State,” the letter read. “The remainder of the agency may be abolished.”
A few days later, workers removed the agency’s name from above the entrance to the Ronald Reagan Building.
Mr. Trump seemed delighted. He posted on social media: “CLOSE IT DOWN!”
Reporting was contributed by Michael Crowley, Zach Montague, Stephanie Nolen, Amy Schoenfeld Walker, Mattathias Schwartz, Jonathan Swan and Edward Wong. Sheelagh McNeill and Emily Powell contributed research.
Christopher Flavelle is a Times reporter covering how President Trump is transforming the federal government.
Nicholas Nehamas is a Washington correspondent for The Times, focusing on the Trump administration and its efforts to transform the federal government.
The post Missteps, Confusion and ‘Viral Waste’: The 14 Days That Doomed U.S.A.I.D. appeared first on New York Times.
