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Elon Musk has threatened to shut down America’s $50-billion-a-year foreign aid agency, USAID, calling it “criminal” and “beyond repair”.

The billionaire tech mogul said President Donald Trump had agreed with him to close the federal agency, which was founded by JFK and has the largest budget of its kind in the world.

USAID said its Washington D.C. headquarters were closed on Monday, and told staff to work from home on Tuesday. Several hundred employees reported being locked out of the agency’s computer systems.

“He agreed we should shut it down,” Musk said during a live discussion on X Spaces. “It became apparent that it’s not an apple with a worm it in. What we have is just a ball of worms. You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair. We’re shutting it down.”

He branded USAID a “criminal organization”, without anything to back up the wild claim, adding: “Time for it to die”.

While USAID has faced criticism and speculation over its spending in the past after an investigation from TBIJ, Musk did not provide any evidence to support his recent claims.

Just days after taking office, Trump issued an executive order to halt foreign aid for 90 days – a decision that came to be reflected in the State Department’s divisive action to freeze almost all funding for foreign assistance programs.

What is USAID and who do they support across the globe?

USAID is an organization that provides foreign aid and humanitarian assistance to countries grappling with poverty, conflict, disease, and natural disasters.

Initially established in 1961 under President John F. Kennedy, it has released billions of dollars since its inception across the world to support and propel struggling nations out of economic and political instability.

It operates as the world’s largest single donor of international food assistance, according to its website – which has been down since the weekend and continues to be inaccessible as of Monday.

Annually, the U.S. spends roughly $40 billion on foreign aid from a $50 billion budget – a sum that accounts for every four out of 10 dollars in global humanitarian aid, according to the Department of State.

USAID assists approximately 130 countries and has a workforce of over 10,000 people worldwide, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

In 2023, the countries to receive the most funding from USAID (in descending order) were:

Musk’s comments followed the news that two top USAID security chiefs had been placed on leave after they refused to hand over classified information to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, inspection teams, according to a U.S. official to The Associated Press Sunday.

The DOGE staff lacked sufficient security clearance to obtain and access the desired information, so the two USAID security officials — John Vorhees and Deputy Brian McGill — were legally obligated to deny access.

Despite facing resistance, the DOGE teams did eventually obtain access to the classified information, which includes intelligence reports, according to the former official.

On Friday, two agency officials told Reutersthat Musk aides, charged with running the U.S. Office of Personnel Management locked senior government workers out of computer systems – a database that contains the personal data of millions of federal employees.

Trump previously said that Musk and venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy would “pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies” – effectively gutting federal departments as and when they choose.

The Independent contacted USAID for comment.