Billionaire Elon Musk, who is heading US President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the federal government, gave an update on the effort early on Monday, saying they were working to shut down the US foreign aid agency USAID.
Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, discussed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in a Monday social media talk on X, which he also owns. Trump has assigned Musk to lead a federal cost-cutting panel.
The conversation, which included former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Republican senators Joni Ernst and Mike Lee, began with Musk saying they were working to shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
“It’s beyond repair,” Musk said, adding that Trump agrees it should be shut down.
On Sunday, it was reported that the Trump administration had removed two top security officials at USAID during the weekend after they tried to stop representatives from Musk’s DOGE from gaining access to restricted parts of the building, three sources said.
The website of USAID appeared to still be offline on Saturday and some users could not access it on Sunday. USAID has a staff of more than 10,000 people.
Speaking more broadly about cutting US expenses and fraud, Musk estimated the Trump administration can cut US$1 trillion from the US deficit next year.
Musk did not offer any evidence to support his fraud claim or explain how he reached the amount of US$1 trillion.
Since taking office 11 days ago, Trump has embarked on a massive government makeover, firing and sidelining hundreds of civil servants in his first steps toward downsizing the bureaucracy and installing more loyalists.
In theory the US can. The laborforce and resources are all here. But modern capitalists only know how to strip a company for parts
The US economy has become so financialized (and its dollar so overvalued) it cannot hope to compete. Chinese industry has stupidly cheap access to energy, patents on groundbreaking solar technology, an enormous pool of specialized labor and the best supply chain in the world, with quick and cheap access to rare earth minerals, nickel, gold, and a global monopoly on key resources such as antimony and lithium.
What’s more, the fact that the state provides cheap public transport, universal healthcare, higher education, retirement benefits, and a litany of social services means that companies have to provide comparatively very little in the way of compensation or training. Don’t even get me started on how US companies get one successful product and immediately try to enshittify everything to pump the share prices as high as they can possibly go. Even when the US provides direct funding to companies the process is so corrupt you have no guarantees that they’ll do anything with that money other than give a fat bonus to the execs. How is the CHIPS act working out?
I sincerely hope the US tries to compete with Chinese industry internationally because it’s gonna get absolutely dogwalked. It has so much catching up to do to even get going while china is accelerating so much one has to wonder if they’ve even hit their stride yet.
I don’t think we can catch up to the PRC without Socialism, or some form of expanded government planning.