Musk’s USAID Shutdown: ‘This Is What the Beginning of Dictatorship Looks Like’

Plus: Don Jr. shoots the wrong ducks in Italy.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S UNILATERAL attempt to shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), carried out by billionaire Elon Musk during his ongoing berserker rampage through the federal government, has prompted a genuine crisis about Congress’s role and authority. Unfortunately, it seems that the lawmakers actually in a position to do anything about it have very little interest in intervening.

A bicameral group of Democratic lawmakers held court in front of the USAID headquarters Monday afternoon, and several addressed the crowd and assembled media. Speakers took turns describing the bleak prospect of a burgeoning oligarchy controlled by the world’s richest man.

The lawmakers hardly mentioned Trump. Their main concern was Musk, whom they characterized as an unelected god-king ripping up the Constitution and taking the screws out of America’s already-creaking system of checks and balances.

“We are witnessing a constitutional crisis,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), speaking to the crowd outside USAID. “We talked about Trump wanting to be a dictator on Day One, and here we are. This is what the beginning of dictatorship looks like—when you gut the Constitution and you install yourself as the sole power. That is how dictators are made.”

“What Trump and Elon and all of their [deputies] are trying to do is take away the constitutional power of Congress,” Omar added. “We get to decide. We have the power of the purse. We get to decide where money is allocated, and it’s the executive’s power to make sure that that money gets to where it needs to get.”

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) characterized Musk’s actions as a ploy to benefit his own business interests irrespective of the law.

“There’s no coincidence that Elon Musk—the world’s wealthiest man with billions of dollars of investment in China—is doing China’s bidding,” Beyer said. “What Trump and Musk have done is not only wrong, it’s illegal. USAID was established by an act of Congress, and it can only be disbanded by an act of Congress.”

“Let’s not pull any punches about why this is happening,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “Elon Musk makes billions of dollars based off of his business with China, and China is cheering at this action today. There is no question that the billionaire class trying to take over our government right now is doing it based on self-interest.”

The lawmakers later attempted to enter the USAID building but were rebuffed by police. Away from the cameras, they have been somewhat less assertive, acknowledging their limited options for trying to halt or reverse Musk’s power grab. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) spent the weekend strategizing with lawyers about how to stop the takeover. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) announced his intent to place a “blanket hold” on all of Trump’s pending and soon-to-be nominated personnel at the State Department who would face Senate confirmation.

What’s stood out as much as the tools they’re deploying is their focus on Musk over Trump.

The president is enjoying (for his standards) relatively high approval among the public after taking back the White House. Musk, by contrast, is both far less popular than his MAGA benefactor and significantly less legitimate as a wielder of power in Washington. Throughout the press conference and back on Capitol Hill as well, Trump’s name came up far less frequently than Musk’s when I was talking with Democrats.

As for Republicans, they seem to regard Musk as simply carrying out Trump’s will and doing things for the president the GOP-controlled Congress is unwilling or unable to do.

I asked Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) whether he thought unilaterally shutting down an independent federal establishment was even legal. Here’s our exchange, word for word:

Grassley: I’m not sure I’m the one to ask about it because I’m not on the Appropriations Committee. Tell me, I didn’t really read any reason for shutting it down.

The Bulwark: Well, do you think it’s legal—to shut down an agency without Congress’s consent?

Grassley: Well, I—that’s kind of a constitutional question.

The Bulwark: You’re chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Grassley: No, no. It’s not a case of being chairman of the Judiciary Committee. It’s how you define the quote-unquote executive power of the president of the United States, and I can’t define that for you.

After Grassley’s answer, I realized the better question to pose to Republicans was not about whether they think this massacre of an entire federal independent establishment is legal. I should be asking whether they think it is morally or philosophically wrong for Congress to relinquish so much of its authority to the executive branch—and, more specifically, to the richest man in human history, who is being allowed to operate according to his own whims without any guardrails or accountability. But the answers I got were just as disconcerting as Grassley’s.

“Yeah, we should [defund USAID],” said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa). “But let me tell you what my experience has been with USAID. It has been extremely frustrating. They have tried to shield records from me [while] trying to do my oversight in the last several years, so I do think we need to take a significant look.”

“Look, the scrutiny it’s receiving was much needed,” said Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.). “I fully support President Trump’s decision to have Marco Rubio take over USAID at this time.”

“It’s twenty-two billion dollars a year—it needs scrutiny,” Daines added. “They’ve got people’s attention here to make sure these are taxpayer dollars. This isn’t philanthropy. These are taxpayer dollars.”

Daines ignored my question of whether it is Congress’s role to be in charge of taxpayer dollars, instead noting, “I think it got people’s attention. It got your attention, didn’t it?”

“It’s gonna work itself out,” Daines concluded before hopping in an elevator. “It needed scrutiny. Everybody, take a deep breath as they go through how the dollars are being spent. This was much needed. This was a much-needed wake up call.”

“Well, I think, yes, we do,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.V.) when asked if Congress still has its constitutionally established power over the federal budget. “And we need to make sure that we hold our power of the purse. That’s one of the fundamental constitutional responsibilities. I think in this instance, in USAID, we’ve been frustrated by not being able to find out where the money’s being spent—how, who, when.”

Asked again by another reporter if the executive can shut down agencies on its own, Capito said, “For the long term? I wouldn’t think so.”

“I mean, I think you’ll see Marco [Rubio] as secretary of state take the jurisdiction that the president has given him and provide some clarity probably pretty quickly,” she added.

That clarification from Rubio came hours later in a Fox News interview, during which he declared that the administration “had no choice” but to seize an independent establishment which Congress is tasked with funding and overseeing.

There are things that are happening at USAID that we should not be involved in funding, or that we have a lot of questions about, but they’re completely uncooperative, so we had no choice but to take dramatic steps to bring this thing under control.

Meanwhile, Musk is going ahead at full steam. He has continued to use X (formerly known as Twitter) to go after USAID, often with gross distortions of the programs it is funding. He has also used his power to effectively censor information he didn’t want to be public. After one user posted the names of several DOGE employees, Musk responded, “You have committed a crime.” X promptly removed the account from the platform and appears to have banned others that shared the reporting. (It is not a crime to publicly name federal employees.)

The constitutional question of whether the president can delegate authority to a billionaire campaign donor to shut down federal agencies is not one Republicans are very interested in answering. Understanding the manner in which it is happening is also not a priority for them.

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WITH RUBIO NOW TAKING OVER THE REINS of USAID, there’s a new question worth asking: What exactly does he think of it?

As it turns out, he’s been a fan! According to his past statements, at least, and certainly in comparison with Elon Musk. Rubio’s old Senate twitter account included many instances of him praising USAID work and even chastising then-President Joe Biden for not doing enough to support the establishment.

“If President Biden actually cares about the standard of living in developing countries, he'd let @USAID and @DFCgov invest in affordable fossil fuel and fertilizer infrastructure,” he wrote in November 2023.

In 2017, Rubio expressed his gratitude for the confirmation of Trump’s USAID administrator, Mark Green. A year later, he tweeted out pictures of him and Green meeting to talk about the need for USAID to provide humanitarian assistance to Venezuelans. In 2019, he visited a USAID facility in Colombia that he said was being prevented from delivering food “to the suffering people inside” of Venezuela. That same year, he called for “supporting critical programs through” USAID and the Global Fund to eliminate tuberculosis; he also noted that USAID was “working hard” to help address Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 2020, he praised the work of USAID in eliminating wild polio in Africa. That year he applauded USAID for helping several South American countries recover from devastating hurricanes.

Rubio was opposed to Biden’s nomination of Atul Gawande to serve as USAID administrator, but by 2022, he was urging the agency to “take action as Putin's invasion of #Ukraine sparks a global hunger crisis.” The prior year, he introduced a bill with Sen. Tim Kaine to authorize the New Partnerships Initiative (NPI) at USAID in order to diversify which organizations the agency was working with on the ground.

“USAID plays an important role in our nation’s foreign policy initiatives,” Rubio said at the time. “The bill would authorize USAID’s New Partnerships Initiative to allow smaller organizations to better assist local entities and make the agency more effective for America’s allies and partners.”

That was then, of course. Now, Rubio is in the position of being handed the remains of an entity that Musk has tried to shove into the proverbial wood chipper. And so, USAID no longer is an entity that, in his own words, plays an important role. It’s a deep state haven in need of dramatic reform.

“My frustration with USAID goes back to my time in Congress,” Rubio told reporters yesterday. “It is a completely unresponsive agency. It’s supposed to respond to policy directives at the State Department, and it refuses to do so.”

Junior is a quack

Donald Trump Jr. went on a hunting trip while traveling through Italy’s Veneto region in December, and his itinerary may have included some local crimes.

While skimming the Italian paper Corriere della Sera this morning, I noticed the Trump scion’s picture at the top of the homepage. It turns out that a video surfaced of Trump shooting ducks in a foxhole with dozens of dead waterfowl laid out around him. In Italy, hunting is only permitted for residents. In addition, the ducks he shot were the tadorna ferruginea species, which is known in English as the Ruddy Shelduck. That’s one of Europe’s rarest ducks, Don!

Compounding these infractions, Trump Jr. also shot the ducks in a protected region, according to local activist Andrea Zanoni. Evidence of the alleged crimes emerged in a video that Trump Jr.’s own magazine, Field Ethos—think Kinfolk for the culture-warring outdoorsman set (Kinvolk?)—posted to YouTube.

This isn’t the first time Trump has gotten into trouble over legally dubious hunting activities. During a 2019 hunting trip in Mongolia, Trump killed an endangered species of sheep. Instead of prosecuting him, the Mongolian government issued him a permit retroactively. He later met with the Mongolian president and received loads of special treatment, according to a report by ProPublica.

You can read the whole account in Italian here. Those who prefer the King’s English can check out the Guardian’s recap of the controversy.

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Correction (4:00 p.m. EST, Feb. 4 2025): As originally published, this newsletter described USAID as an “independent agency.” Although that term is used colloquially even by experts in government, the 1998 law that gave USAID a statutory basis technically made it an “independent establishment” within the executive branch. (Thanks to an expert reader of the newsletter for bringing this to our attention.)