Secretary of State Marco Rubio told the press he is acting director of USAID.
Transcript:
RUBIO: Well, look, I mean, my frustration with USAID goes back to my time in Congress. It’s a completely unresponsive agency. It’s supposed to respond to policy directives of the State Department, and it refuses to do so. The functions of USAID, there are a lot of functions of USAID that are going to continue that are going to be part of American foreign policy, but it has to be aligned with American foreign policy. I said very clearly during my confirmation hearing that every dollar we spend and every program we fund that will be aligned with the national interest of the United States. And USAID has a history of sort of ignoring that and deciding that there’s somehow a global charity separate from the national interest. These are taxpayer dollars. And so I’m very troubled by these reports that they’ve been unwilling to cooperate with people who are asking simple questions about what does this program do? Who gets the money? Who are our contractors? Who’s funded? And that sort of level of insubordination makes it impossible to conduct a sort of mature and serious review that I think forne writ large. We’re spending taxpayer money here. These are not donor dollars. These are taxpayer dollars. And we owe the American people the assurances that every dollar we are spending abroad is being spent on something that furthers our national interest. And so far, a lot of the people that work at USAID have just simply refused to cooperate. REPORTER: Are you currently in charge of USAID? RUBIO: I’m the acting Director of USAID. I’ve delegated that authority to someone, but I stay in touch with him. And again, our goal was to go in and align our foreign aid to the national interest. But if you go to mission after mission, embassy after embassy around the world, you will often find that in many cases, USAID is involved in programs that run counter to what we’re trying to do in our national strategy with that country or with that region that cannot continue. USAID is not an independent, non governmental entity. It is an entity that spends taxpayer dollars and it needs to spend it as the statute says in alignment with the policy directives that they get from the secretary of state, the National Security Council and the president. And it’s been 20 or 30 years where people have tried to reform it.
Leslie wrote about the USAID going dark last week after DOGE started to audit the agency.
The headquarters closed on Monday. The administration placed at least two senior staffers on leave who did not comply with President Donald Trump pausing foreign aid.
Leslie included X posts from Elon Musk that show what DOGE found during the audit.
It’s disgusting.
Leslie wrote:
In 2013, EcoHealth Alliance received a three-year, $2 million grant from USAID to address land use alteration as a driver of disease emergence and climate change in Asia.In other words, a non-governmental organization (NGO) reaped millions in our tax dollars in the name of “science” using two popular globalist phrases: “disease emergence” and “climate change.”—Furthermore, EcoHealth Alliance was also part of USAID’s PREDICT program, which ran for 10 years prior to 2019, focusing on identifying and increasing capacity to respond to new and emerging disease threats…like the ones it created.
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