Elon Musk said Donald Trump agreed USAID needs to be ‘shut down’

With regards to the USAID stuff, I went over it with (the president) in detail and he agreed that we should shut it down,” Musk said in a X Spaces conversation early Monday. CNN reported.

Musk said he checked with Trump “a few times” and Trump confirmed he wants to shut down the agency, which dispenses billions in humanitarian aid and development funding annually. CNN has reached out to the White House and USAID for comment.

Sunday evening, before the X Spaces conversation, when asked for comment on USAID, Trump told reporters: “It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out, and then we’ll make a decision” on its future.

Musk’s comments come after two top security officials at USAID were put on administrative leave Saturday night for refusing members of the Department of Government Efficiency access to systems at the agency, even when DOGE personnel threatened to call law enforcement, multiple sources familiar with the situation told CNN.

Around 60 senior USAID staff were put on leave last week on accusations of attempting to circumvent Trump’s executive order to freeze foreign aid for 90 days. Another senior official was put on leave for trying to reverse that move after finding no evidence of wrongdoing.

In the X Spaces conversation early Monday, which he co-hosted with Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Vivek Ramaswamy – who was initially named co-chair of DOGE with Musk but has since left – the X owner called USAID “incredibly politically partisan” and said it has been supporting “radically left causes throughout the world including things that are anti-American.”

Musk said USAID is “beyond repair,” among other attacks he made against the agency created by Congress as an independent body.

We don’t have “an apple with a worm in it,” he said. “We have a ball of worms.”

“USAID is a ball of worms.”

USAID was established in 1961 under President John F. Kennedy’s administration and is the US government’s humanitarian arm. It dispenses billions of dollars annually across the world in an effort to alleviate poverty, treat diseases, and respond to famines and natural disasters. It also promotes democracy building and development by supporting non-government organizations, independent media and social initiatives.

USAID is a key soft power tool of the US to foster relations with communities around the world, officials say, noting that US national security is approached with the “three D” pillars: defense, diplomacy and development, led, respectively, by the Defense Department, State Department and USAID.