April 2, 2025 - Epoch Times
17:27
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| Well, it's official. | |
| Elon Musk and President Trump are, once again, allowed to go ahead and dismantle USAID. | |
| After a somewhat short legal battle, a federal appeals court determined just last Friday that the Trump administration does have the full authority to gut the agency. | |
| And gutted they are, given the fact that right now, most employees have already been let go. | |
| Most contracts have already been terminated. | |
| Their headquarters building has already been given to another agency. | |
| On top of all that, within the next three months, anything within USAID that's going to be kept will be rolled into the State Department, while everything else will just be discontinued, effectively making the agency a shell of its former self. | |
| Let's go through the backstory here together, as well as what this all means going forward. | |
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| Now, getting back to USAID, if we rewind the clock back to January, one of the very first things that Trump did upon assuming office was to take an agency that was established by Barack Obama and change it into the Department of Government Efficiency, otherwise known as DOGE. | |
| He then attached Elon Musk to that department with the stated goal being to root out government fraud as well as government waste. | |
| The sheer amount of waste and fraud in the government, it is astonishing. | |
| It's mind-blowing. | |
| We routinely encounter wastes of a billion dollars or more. | |
| Elon and Doge then got to work and one of the very first things that they exposed was was the spending that was being done over at USAID. | |
| Now, I'm sure you've seen many of these examples before, but some notable line items include $1.5 million to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in Serbia's business communities, $70,000 spent on the production of a DEI musical in Ireland, | |
| $2.5 million for electric vehicles in Vietnam, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 to create a transgender comic book in Peru, $2 million for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala, $6 million to fund tourism in Egypt, and so on. | |
| USAID's yearly budget was over $40 billion, and so you can really imagine how many subversive activities they were able to fund. | |
| And the things I mentioned above were really just the top line items that got a lot of media attention. | |
| It doesn't even include the clandestine stuff. | |
| There are a plethora of other internet censorship activities, alleged regime change activities, the funding of media outlets that do the US government's bidding in other countries, the suppression of populism, the creation of social movements, and even just the use of all that money as a slush fund for those who are well connected. | |
| The $40 billion yearly budget of USAID went quite far. | |
| In fact, it was likely the USAID's large budget, what they were spending that budget on, as well as their lack of oversight and transparency that made them such a big target for Doge. | |
| And to that end, if today you went over to the Doge Tracker website, the website where they track all the different savings they've been able to achieve, and then you go to the canceled contract section and you sort by largest dollar amount, you'll find that the bulk of the high dollar terminated contracts are from USAID. | |
| Although, the details of those contracts are currently unavailable due to legal reasons. | |
| Regardless, what Elon exposed caused the Trump administration to basically gut the agency. | |
| They either fired or laid off a majority of the staff. | |
| They terminated roughly 83% of all contracts. | |
| They removed the agency name from the building. | |
| They gave the building to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. | |
| And on top of all that, they removed the leadership And they placed Marco Rubio as the acting director. | |
| Now, for your reference, Organizationally, USAID sits underneath the State Department. | |
| And so Marco Rubio, as the Secretary of State, was the natural choice to be placed in charge of it during this whole reorganization process. | |
| And also, interestingly, Marco Rubio, he was really on board with the idea of gutting the agency since he believed that USAID had been rogue for a while now. | |
| Even when he was in the Senate, he believed it was rogue back then. | |
| In fact, Shortly after becoming the acting director, he had an exchange with some reporters, and here's what he said regarding USAID, what it should be versus what it actually is. | |
| 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 they're 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 the sort of mature and serious review that I think foreign aid writ large should have. | |
| 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 Are you currently in charge of USAID? | |
| 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 and 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, and it refuses to reform, it refuses to cooperate. | |
| When we were in Congress, we couldn't even get answers to basic questions about programs. | |
| That will not continue. | |
| That's not going to continue. | |
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| Now, as you would imagine, USAID employees did not take these developments lying down. | |
| And so, pretty much as expected, on February 13th, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of 26 former and current employees or contractors with USAID. | |
| In their lawsuit, these individuals made two legal arguments for why scrapping USAID was unconstitutional. | |
| The first legal argument had to do with the separation of powers doctrine. | |
| Congress has the power to create agencies, while the executive branch has the authority to run agencies, within the guidelines that were established by Congress. | |
| And so these employees claimed in their lawsuit that shutting down the USAID headquarters, laying off most of the staff, and terminating most of the contracts, that was a violation of the separation of powers doctrine. | |
| And so that was the first legal argument. | |
| The second argument was a bit more novel. | |
| These 26 individuals claimed in their lawsuit that Elon Musk, he has been given too much power, and that he should be deemed an officer of the United States under the U.S. Constitution's Appropriations Clause, and therefore Elon Musk actually needs to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate if he is to continue being the head of DOJ. | |
| Here's specifically what they wrote in their lawsuit, quote, Defendant Musk exercises an extraordinary amount of power. | |
| Indeed, the scope and reach of his executive authority appears unprecedented in U.S. history. | |
| His power includes, at least, the authority to seize the payment of congressionally approved funds, access sensitive and confidential data across government agencies, cut off systems access to federal employees and contractors at will, and take over and dismantle entire independent federal agencies. | |
| It is clear that the duties Defendant Musk and the DOJ team he directs have performed thus far represent the performance of significant governmental duties that may be exercised on behalf And so that right there is a very interesting legal argument. | |
| They're basically not saying that what he's doing is illegal, but rather their argument is that if Elon Musk is the one who's actually dismantling the agency from within, Then he needs to first be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. | |
| Now, the relevant piece of law that they're referencing here is the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution. | |
| For your reference, here is specifically what this clause says, and it can be found in Article 2, Section 2. Quote, The President shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, but The Congress may, by law, vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments. | |
| Meaning, essentially, that for high-level appointments, the President must consult with the Senate, but for lesser appointments, the President, or even the heads of departments, can appoint those people themselves, if Congress allows for it. | |
| Now, obviously, the question here becomes whether or not Elon Musk falls under the purview of this clause, whether or not he qualifies as an officer of the United States subject to Senate confirmation. | |
| Now, interestingly, this was never an issue with Elon's predecessors. | |
| As I mentioned at the top of the episode, DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, is actually just a rebranding of Barack Obama's United States Digital Service, and none of the three previous administrators of that agency needed to get Senate confirmation. | |
| They were all just appointed by the president. | |
| Also, the Trump administration, for their part, they claim that Elon is nothing more than an advisor. | |
| He has no authority himself. | |
| He can only advise Trump and Marco Rubio to take certain actions. | |
| He cannot do anything himself. | |
| Regardless, though, These were the two legal arguments that the USAID employees were making in their lawsuit. | |
| That for one, Elon needed to be confirmed by the Senate, and that secondly, dismantling USAID was a violation of the separation of powers doctrine. | |
| And so, this is where things got interesting. | |
| In the lower court, the judge actually ruled against Elon Musk and Doge. | |
| Specifically, on March 18th, U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang, who was appointed to the bench by Barack Obama, he issued an opinion wherein he wrote the following, quote, The judge based that opinion on social media posts as well as news articles. | |
| Furthermore, the Trump administration argued that their act of dismantling USAID fit within the President's authority to conduct foreign affairs as per Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution. | |
| However, Judge Chuang disagreed and he wrote that Trump's actions against USAID, quote, ... relate largely to the structure of and resources made available to a federal agency, not to the direct conduct of foreign policy or engagement with foreign governments. | |
| Meaning, in plain English, the judge found that the actions that were taken to scale down USAID probably violated the U.S. Constitution and therefore, while the case is still pending in court, the judge issued an injunction ordering DOJ to reinstate access to the workers and contractors to their systems, as well as to not place any more employees on leave, to not fire any more employees, and to not terminate any more contracts. | |
| The case will still play itself out in court, but in the meantime, the judge indefinitely blocked DOJ from basically being able to do anything. | |
| Now, the White House, as well as DOJ, they urgently appealed that decision, and wouldn't you know it, just five days ago, the Federal Appeals Court sided with ELA. | |
| Specifically, quote, The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued an order last Friday stating that the preliminary injunction filed on March 18th by Maryland-based U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang hereby is stayed pending the resolution of this appeal. | |
| Meaning that Judge Chuang's injunction has been done away with, put on hold, pending litigation. | |
| This new order was written by Judge Arthur Quattlebaum, who was appointed to the bench by President Trump during his first term in office. | |
| And Judge Quattlebaum wrote the following, quote, Elon Musk and Doge demonstrated that they will likely prevail on the merits when the case is heard and that they would be irreparably injured absent the state. | |
| Although the activities of DOJ and its leader, Musk, related to USAID are not conventional, unconventional does not necessarily equal unconstitutional. | |
| This does not mean that those who sued will not be able to develop evidence of unconstitutional conduct as the case progresses. | |
| Time will tell. | |
| Our holding is merely that, at this time, the record does not support the district court's finding of a likelihood of constitutional violations. | |
| And then he went on further to discuss the question of Musk's appointment, and he wrote as follows, quote, And as such, | |
| President Trump can now continue to dismantle USAID, which is exactly what he's doing. | |
| On the very same day that this court order was issued, the U.S. State Department put out a statement, you can see it up on your screen, saying that they will shut down USAID by July 1st. | |
| Today, the Department of State has notified Congress on their intent to undertake a reorganization that would involve realigning certain USAID functions to the Department by July 1st, 2025 and discontinuing the remaining USAID functions that do not align with administration priorities. | |
| And so, there you have it. | |
| As of right now, as of this moment, most USAID employees have been either fired or laid off. | |
| Roughly 83% of the contracts have been terminated. | |
| The USAID headquarters has been given away to another agency, and then moving forward, within the next three months, anything within USAID, such as their actual humanitarian work that's to be kept, will be rolled into the State Department, while everything else will be discontinued, effectively making USAID as an agency a shell of its former self. | |
| If you'd like to dig into anything that we discussed in today's episode, I'll throw the links to all my research notes. | |
| You'll be able to find them down in the description box below this video if you are the type of person that likes to dig into the weeds. | |
| And all I ask in return is that as you're making your way down there to the description box, take a super quick detour to smash those like and subscribe buttons so that this video can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm. | |
| And then until next time, I'm your host, Roman from The Epoch Times. |
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