Musk says Trump ‘shutting down’ US aid agency

WASHINGTON: Elon Musk, the world’s richest person and President Donald Trump’s controversial close adviser, said on Monday the giant USAID humanitarian agency will be “shutting down” as part of his radical -- and critics say unconstitutional -- drive to shrink the US government.

Employees at the US Agency for International Development, which runs aid programmes in about 120 countries, were instructed by email not to go to their offices on Monday. Some 600 staffers found themselves locked out of their computer systems, ABC News reported.

Musk called USAID “a criminal organisation” and declared “you’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing.” The founder of SpaceX and Tesla -- who has massive contracts with the US government and was the biggest donor to Trump’s presidential campaign -- said he had cleared the unprecedented move against a major wing of US government with Trump himself.

“I went over with him in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down,” Musk said in a discussion on his X online platform. USAID is the aid arm of US foreign policy, funding health and emergency programs in the world’s poorest regions. It is also seen as an important source of soft power for the superpower in its struggle for influence with rivals including China. Echoing far-right Republicans, Musk used X to call the agency “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.”