The government agency with a five-letter acronym that’s become a four-letter word to Elon Musk is vanishing from the internet.
Over the weekend, the web site of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) went offline, along with USAID’s X and Instagram accounts, as part of Musk’s attempt to shut down an agency over which he has no evident legal authority.
“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk posted on X early Monday morning about the agency that employs 10,000-plus people and had a $44.2 billion budget in fiscal year 2024 that represented 0.4% of total federal spending.
The Internet Archive’s last capture of usaid.gov, timestamped Sunday afternoon Eastern, features the agency’s self-description as the government’s lead organization for “international development and humanitarian assistance efforts to partner countries” that “reduce poverty, strengthen democratic governance, advance economic opportunities, and help achieve progress beyond programs.”
(For example, the agency has teamed up with private tech companies to lower the cost of internet access in developing countries.)
Now an attempt to visit usaid.gov gets a “This site can’t be reached” error in Chrome. Among the array of social-media accounts linked to the bottom of the page, the X and Instagram “USAID” presences are defunct. The address for the former returns a “This account doesn’t exist” error and the latter yields a “Sorry, this page isn’t available” apology.
Other USAID social presences persisted as of Monday afternoon: the agency’s Facebook page, which on Jan. 31 shared a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio; its LinkedIn page, last updated in January with a video of former administrator Samantha Power discussing “sports diplomacy”; its YouTube page, with the latest video that same clip; and its Flickr page, not updated since a November photo of Power cooking with local chefs at a restaurant in Peru.
The Washington Post reported Monday that over the weekend, operatives from Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) swept into USAID headquarters as they had at the Treasury Department, demanding access to classified data and eventually obtaining at least some of that.
(“DOGE” is not an actual department because only Congress can create new Cabinet departments; Trump has instead folded this operation into the US Digital Service, an existing office created under President Obama to modernize and streamline government IT.)
In recent weeks, Musk has appeared fixated on USAID, denouncing it in posts on X as “a criminal organization” and “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.”
This interest appears to be a recent development: A search of Musk’s posts shows no mention of “USAID” before a Jan. 27 retweet and no mentions of just “AID” beyond pledges to provide Starlink support to “internationally recognized aid organizations” in Gaza. The mercurial billionaire does, however, have a history of deleting tweets after excessive blowback or just because.
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The Post’s report and others quote President Trump as endorsing Musk’s efforts. “It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics,” he told reporters at Joint Base Andrews after returning from a weekend at his Mar-a-Lago estate. “And we’re getting them out.”
USAID’s newfound high rank on the enemies lists of Trump and Musk continues to puzzle experts. “The Agency for International Development plays a critical role in providing much needed humanitarian assistance to the world, everything from medical supplies to disaster relief to food for children,” wrote Anthony Arend, chair of the department of government at Georgetown University, in an email. “The freezes on aid and the personnel actions taken by DOGE are threatening its mission.”
He added that DOGE staffers’ attempts to read classified information “appears to be a clear violation” of the Trump executive order setting up that Musk-led effort.
USAID’s existence is not up to any president or any of his appointees or delegates, though. Congress established the agency in the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (PDF), as you can read at a still-extant page of USAID’s Inspector General. Congress would need to pass a new law hitting the “undo” key on the statute that President Kennedy signed into law over 63 years ago to terminate the agency’s existence, and it has yet to do that.
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About Rob Pegoraro
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