The Trump administration has hollowed out the U.S. Agency for International Development through freezes, contract cancellations, mass program terminations, and a transfer of leftover work to the State Department, without waiting for Congress to abolish the agency by statute.
Just the News reported that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency effort examined USAID contracts while the White House moved to cancel deals, cut the workforce, and end roughly 83 percent of the agency’s programs by March 2025. Remaining functions moved into the State Department on July 1.
The practical result is a far smaller foreign-aid apparatus that officials say no longer bankrolls projects far removed from core U.S. interests. Congress still holds the only durable power to wipe the agency off the books, yet the executive branch has already changed how the money moves and who runs what is left.
On Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14169. The order froze foreign assistance for a 90-day assessment of spending priorities.
DOGE then reviewed USAID contracts. By March 2025 the administration had terminated roughly 83 percent of the agency’s programs, a timeline figure tied to KFF’s public chronology of the reorganization. On July 1, remaining functions were absorbed into the State Department.
In August 2025 the White House announced a pocket rescission that canceled additional billions. The administration said those dollars had funded climate, DEI, and LGBTQ activities of no value to taxpayers.
The sequence left USAID standing on paper while stripping most of its operational reach. That is the core of the fight conservatives have pressed for years: stop the spending first, then force a lasting statutory fix.
A White House release framed the case with concrete line items. It cited $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbian workplaces and $2 million for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala.
The same release pointed to millions directed to EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit tied to Wuhan Institute of Virology research connected to COVID-19. It also described hundreds of thousands of meals that reached al-Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria.
Those figures come from the administration’s own accounting of waste and abuse. They supplied the political fuel for the freeze, the terminations, and the later rescission package.
Long before the second-term overhaul, oversight reports had already flagged weak controls. The USAID Office of Inspector General found the agency lacked complete systems to track or document indirect costs charged by contractors and grantees from fiscal 2016 to 2021, leaving overhead charges hard to verify.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s final accounting documented between $26 billion and $29 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse across two decades of reconstruction spending. That total covered failed opium-eradication efforts and infrastructure projects that collapsed.
In October 2024, Sen. Tom Cotton wrote USAID Administrator Samantha Power about Gaza humanitarian aid. He warned of the “likely misuse of more than one billion dollars” and cited inspector general findings of “shortcomings and vulnerabilities” in partner vetting that could let funds reach terrorists. He urged immediate suspension.
Those warnings fit the broader conservative critique that foreign-aid pipelines were too loose, too ideological, and too slow to correct course without outside pressure.
Mike Benz, a former USAID special government employee who aided the Trump administration’s review of the agency, told Just the News the cuts will outlast any single budget cycle. He argued the disruption itself changes incentives for people who once treated USAID as a permanent home.
Benz said the overhaul sent a blunt signal to long-tenured staff.
"There has been a kind of shock and awe message sent to the class of electioneers and subversive influence types, insofar as many of them had spent 10, 20, 30 years at USAID and had built their careers around that being a permanent position,"
He also described why a future restart would not be simple.
"Even if you turn the apparatus back on, there will be a slower ramp-up simply because I think the precarious nature of it, knowing it might be turned off again four years after that, makes a career at USAID inherently less attractive because of the political thin ice that it now sits on,"
In plain terms, the agency becomes a riskier career bet. That matters for any later administration that might try to rebuild the old model at speed.
President John F. Kennedy created USAID by executive order in 1961. Congress later made it an independent agency permanently in 1998. Because of that history, only Congress can fully dismantle it.
House bill H.R. 1029 would abolish USAID by barring funds for its functions and shifting assets to the State Department. The Rescissions Act of 2025 already cut billions from foreign aid. Additional statutes, zeroed-out accounts, or further rescissions remain available tools if lawmakers want the change locked in.
Until that vote comes, the executive actions still control the near-term reality: fewer programs, a thinner workforce, and foreign-aid functions parked at State. The legal posture is straightforward. The president can freeze, cancel, reorganize, and rescind within existing authorities. Congress alone can erase the agency’s statutory footing.
Authorities have not publicly released a single consolidated dollar total for every canceled contract beyond the White House examples and the broader “billions” figures attached to the rescission. Investigators and appropriators will need to determine the full ledger of terminated awards and the precise headcount reduction inside USAID.
Lawmakers will also need to decide whether H.R. 1029 or a similar measure advances, and whether future appropriations simply starve leftover accounts. Oversight teams will need to test whether partner-vetting gaps flagged in Gaza and earlier inspector general work have been closed inside the State Department offices now handling residual functions.
None of those open items reverse what has already occurred. The freeze under EO 14169, the March 2025 terminations, the July absorption into State, and the August 2025 pocket rescission are completed moves on the public timeline Just the News laid out.
For conservatives who long called USAID a soft-power slush fund, the episode is a case study in executive muscle used against an entrenched bureaucracy. The administration framed the cuts as a direct response to DEI projects, contested social programming, weak vetting, and reconstruction failures measured in the tens of billions.
For institutionalists focused on separation of powers, the unfinished business sits on Capitol Hill. Executive orders and rescissions can shrink an agency’s footprint. Only a statute can end the charter Congress cemented in 1998.
Benz’s point about career incentives cuts across both camps. Once a workforce learns the spigot can close, the old assumption of permanence fades. That cultural shift may prove as durable as any single line-item cut.
Taxpayers finance foreign aid. When inspectors document tens of billions in waste abroad and senators warn that more than a billion in humanitarian funds faces likely misuse, the demand for tighter control is not abstract. It is basic stewardship.
The Trump team did not wait for a perfect legislative vehicle. It used the tools at hand, moved functions to State, and left Congress with a clearer choice: restore the old machine, replace it, or finish the job by law.
When an agency spends public money with weak tracking and contested priorities, the clean remedy is accountability first and permanence only by statute.
