Trump Agreed On Shutting Down Foreign Assistance Agency -Elon Musk says 

U.S billionaire Elon Musk, has on announced the shutting down of foreign assistance agency ,USAID adding that he alongside President Donald Trump were in the process of shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development, escalating their war on the federal bureaucracy and defying the constitutional power of Congress to determine how money is spent. 

Musk, the head of Trump’s government efficiency initiative, announced the shutdown in the middle of the night in an audio-only appearance on his social media site X. 

 “we’re in the proces of shutting down USAID.” musk said 

 He added that the idea had the full support of the president and that he had spoken with Trump on the matter several times. 

“With regard to the USAID stuff, I went over the decision with him in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down, I actually checked with him a few times and he agreed to this decision” he added 

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Musk’s announcement early Monday. 

Trump applauded on Sunday, that Musk is doing a good job and criticized USAID as run by a bunch of radical lunatics though he did not go so far as to say he planned to shut down the agency, with or without congressional agreement. 

Trump administration officials have discussed placing USAID under the authority of the State Department, according to more than a dozen current and former officials and sources familiar with the discussions. 

NBC News reported a move that Democratic lawmakers and legal experts have argued would violate a law adopted by Congress establishing the agency.

Musk’s announcement followed an unusual incident Saturday in which USAID’s director of security and his deputy were placed on administrative leave after they tried to prevent employees from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing secure USAID systems, five sources told NBC News. The DOGE employees threatened to call the U.S. Marshals, two of the sources said. The DOGE employees were eventually able to gain access to the secure systems, three of the sources said, but it was not clear what information they were able to obtain.

It was already clear last week that the Trump administration and Musk’s staff planned a radical shakeup of USAID, one of several agencies where fear and chaos are sweeping over the federal workforce. More than 50 career civil servants at USAID were placed on administrative leave last Monday. 

USAID has in the past had a partnership with one of Musk’s companies, SpaceX. The agency announced in 2022 that it had partnered with SpaceX to provide 5,000 Starlink satellite internet terminals to the government of Ukraine following Russia’s invasion.