Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Even before President Trump took office, legal observers were skeptical of his plans for an Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency to unilaterally shrink the size of the federal bureaucracy. Questions have only grown in the two weeks since he has been back in the White House, and reached a new flashpoint with the administration’s de facto shutdown of the U.S.
Agency for International Development. Here’s a rundown of several DOGE issues that are in play. USAID has carried out foreign assistance programs since 1961, and Congress in 1998 established it as an independent agency, though closely intertwined with the State Department.
It is highly unlikely that Trump and Musk can formally wipe out the agency by merging it into the State Department without legislative approval. What happened in recent days is short of that, which leaves some of the administration’s moves in a gray area. The agency headquarters was closed Monday and many of its functions and communications were crippled.
DOGE officials sought access to the agency’s systems over the weekend. The Trump administration sees USAID as “a place to start to see what they can do, and see who will stop them and how," said Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Center for Global Health Policy and Politics at Georgetown University. USAID works heavily with government contractors, and the administration has more flexibility in dealing with them than government employees.
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