OAN Staff Abril Elfi
2:07 PM – Monday, February 3, 2025
State Secretary Marco Rubio has confirmed that he is the acting chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), verifying the State Department’s takeover of the humanitarian organization.
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Rubio made the announcement during his five-nation trip to Central America, while answering questions from the press at a maintenance firm, Aeroman, in San Luis Talpa, El Salvador.
Rubio stated that his long held frustration with USAID goes back to his time in Congress, describing the agency as “completely unresponsive.”
“It is supposed to respond to policy directives at the State Department “and it refuses to do so,” the secretary said. ”There are a lot of functions of USAID that are going to continue, that are going to be a part of American foreign policy, but it has to be aligned with American foreign policy.”
During his confirmation hearing, Rubio declared that “every dollar that we spend and every program that we fund will be aligned with the national interests of the United States, and USAID has a history of sort of ignoring that and deciding that they’re somehow a global charity separate from the national interest.”
“These are taxpayer dollars. And so I’m very troubled by these reports that they have been unwilling to cooperate with people who are asking simple questions about what does this program do, who gets the money, who are our contractors, who’s funded,” Rubio said. “And that sort of insubordination makes it impossible to conduct the sort of mature and serious review that I think foreign aid at large should have.”
“We’re spending taxpayer money here. These are not donor dollars,” Rubio continued. “These are taxpayer dollars, and we owe the American people the assurances that every dollar that we are spending abroad is being spent on something that furthers our national interests. And so far, a lot of the people who work at USAID have simply refused to cooperate.”
After reports surfaced related to how DOGE head Elon Musk had been expressing an interest in shutting down the foreign aid agency, Rubio was asked if he was currently in charge of USAID, to which he replied: “I’m the acting director of USAID. I’ve delegated that authority to someone, but I stay in touch with him.”
“And again, our goal was to allow our foreign aid to the national interest,” Rubio continued. “But if you go to mission after mission, and embassy after embassy around the world, you will often find that in many cases USAID is involved in programs that run counter to what we’re trying to do and our national strategy with that country or that region. That cannot continue. USAID is not an independent, non-governmental entity. It is an entity that spends taxpayer dollars, and it needs to spend it, as the statute says, in alignment with the policy directives that they get from the Secretary of State, the National Security Council and the president.”
“It’s been 20 or 30 years where people have tried to reform it. And it refuses to reform, it refuses to cooperate with people. When we were in Congress we couldn’t even get answers to basic questions about programs,” he added. “That will not continue.”
USAID employees were reportedly told early on Monday to avoid the agency’s Washington offices — after Musk asserted that President Donald Trump had agreed to shut it down. USAID staffers also received an email that its Washington headquarters would be closed on the same day, according to two sources who spoke with Fox News Digital.
Nonetheless, thousands of USAID personnel have already been let go, and activities have been halted in the two weeks since Trump took office.
According to USAID officials, more than 600 additional employees were shut out of the assistance agency’s computer systems overnight. Those who remained in the system received emails stating that “at the direction of Agency leadership,” the HQ building “will be closed to Agency personnel on Monday, February 3.”
“In fiscal year 2023, the U.S. disbursed $72bn of assistance worldwide on everything from women’s health in conflict zones to access to clean water, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. It provided 42% of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations in 2024,” according to The Guardian.
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