Rubio says State Dept. will cancel 83% of USAID contracts
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday the Trump administration is canceling 83% of the contacts funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and keeping the rest under the State Department.
Mr. Rubio said the decision was the result of a six-week review.
“The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” Mr. Rubio wrote on X.
Mr. Trump targeted USAID early, describing it as an egregious part of the federal bureaucracy with billions in spending that strayed far from what Congress intended.
The Department of Government Efficiency led by billionaire Elon Musk described some USAID-funded projects and organizations as “maybe the biggest scam ever.”
Critics of the move said the Trump administration was dismantling key health programs abroad and a vital source of “soft power” that keeps foreign nations on the U.S.’s side, so they don’t come under the thumb of rival superpowers.
Michael McFaul, a professor of political science at Stanford University and former U.S. ambassador to Russia, called the cuts a “huge mistake.”
“We needed reform of USAID, not dismantlement,” he wrote on X. “China is not ending its foreign assistance programs. In an age of great power competition, the Trump administration is unilaterally destroying one of our best instruments of soft power influence.”
Earlier this year, Mr. Rubio took over USAID and handed authority over the agency to Pete Marocco, a Trump appointee who served at USAID in Mr. Trump’s first term.
On Monday, Mr. Rubio said roughly 1,000 USAID contracts would remain housed under his State Department, “in consultation with Congress.”
“Thank you to DOGE and our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform,” Mr. Rubio said.
Mr. Musk responded by calling the cuts “tough, but necessary.”
“Good working with you,” he wrote in response to Mr. Rubio. “The important parts of USAID should always have been with Dept of State.”
