Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he is now the acting director the U.S. Agency for International Development, following the Trump administration's sudden pause on federal foreign spending and layoffs at the 63-year-old agency.
Speaking to reporters in El Salvador on Monday, Rubio accused the agency of not cooperating with requests for information on how it spent taxpayer dollars.
"Their attitude is, 'We don't have to answer to you because we are independent, we answer to no one.' Well, that's not true and that will no longer be the case," he said.
Earlier on Monday, Elon Musk announced that his Department of Government Efficiency was "shutting down USAID," with President Trump's sign-off.
USAID employees woke up to an email telling them the headquarters in Washington, D.C., would be closed for the day and that they should work from home. Since Trump's executive order to pause foreign assistance, USAID employees described chaos at the agency, with hundreds of layoffs and furloughs.
Some Democratic members of Congress are speaking out against the Trump administration's efforts to halt most of USAID's work.
"This is an entity that was created through federal statute, codified through federal statute, and something that cannot be changed, cannot be removed except through actions of Congress," Democratic Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey said, as demonstrators gathered outside USAID headquarters Monday.
In the Oval Office, President Trump was asked about whether dissolving USAID requires an act of Congress. "I don't think so," he said, "not if it's an act of fraud."
Founded in 1961, the agency manages billions of dollars in federal humanitarian assistance around the world. But its work was thrown into upheaval in the last week, as the Trump administration halted nearly all its programs and took down its website.
Atul Gawande, the former assistant administrator for global health at USAID, has criticized the moves by Musk's government efficiency unit, also known by its initials DOGE.
Shutting down USAID activities is "harming humanity and America," Gawande said in a social media post. "And the DOGE people behind this unlawful takedown of an independent agency providing the US's largest civilian operational capacity abroad—based on willfully false claims—don't have a clue what they are doing. And don't care."
While Rubio said he is officially the acting director of USAID, he said he has "delegated that authority to someone, but I stay in touch with him," without naming the person to whom he is delegating.
He said there are things that USAID does "that we should continue to do and we will continue to do. But everything they do has to be in alignment with the national interest and the foreign policy of the United States."
NPR's Fatma Tanis, Hansi Lo Wang and Shannon Bond contributed reporting.
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