Washington – The employees of the United States International Development Agency received instructions to remain outside the agency headquarters in Washington, and the yellow police tape and the officers blocked on Monday on Monday, after billionaire Elon Musk announced that President Donald Trump had According to him to close the agency.
USAID employees also said that more than 600 additional employees reported having been blocked from the computer agency’s computer systems during the night. Those who were still in the system received emails that said that “in the direction of the agency’s leadership”, the headquarters “will be closed to the agency staff on Monday, February 3”. The agency’s website disappeared on Saturday without explanation.
The rapid movement developments occur after thousands of USAID employees have already been fired and the programs closed in the two weeks since President Donald Trump assumed the position. And show the extraordinary musk power and its Government Efficiency Departmentor Doge, in the Trump administration. Musk announced the closure of the agency on early Monday, as Trump Secretary of State, Marco RubioHe was out of the country on a trip to Central America.
At a stop in El Salvador, Rubio told journalists that USAID was a non -cooperative and opaque agency who had not answered questions about his financing or operating in line with the political agenda of the Trump administration.
“And that type of insubordination level makes it impossible to perform the type of mature and would be He had delegated that authority.
Agitation follows Trump ordering A freezing about foreign assistancewith generalized effects worldwide. The United States movements, the world’s largest humanitarian aid, have overturned decades of policy that put humanitarian, development and security assistance at the center of efforts to build alliances and counteract adversaries, including China and Russia.
American and international companies have been forced to close tens of thousands of programs worldwide, leading to licenses, layoffs and financial crises that have left many fearing that the help community has been too damaged by freezing to resume The work, even if the financing resumes.
Democratic legislators have protested the movements, saying that Trump lacks constitutional authority to close the USAID without the approval of the Congress and call the Musk accident to access government information through their inspections and programs of the federal government sanctioned by Trump .
“This is a corrupt abuse of power that is happening,” Senator Chris Van Hollen de Maryland said in a demonstration with supporters of the agency and other Democratic legislators in front of the USAID building. “As my colleague said, it’s not just a gift for our adversaries, but trying to close the International Development Agency in executive order is simply illegal.”
On Monday, two employees of the State Department who tried to enter the USAID offices said they were rejected by security guards. Later, uniformed security officers and security officers of the National Security Department blocked the USAID headquarters lobby using yellow tape with the words “No Cruces”.
The White Flag of USAID still flew in the empty square in front of the agency headquarters on Monday morning. Employees said employees on Monday had been able to reach other parts of the agency to eliminate personal belongings of their offices.
Musk, who leads an extraordinary civil revision of the Federal Government with the Trump agreement, said early Monday that he had talked to Trump about the American help and development agency of six decades and “agreed that we should close it.”
“It became evident that it is not an apple with a worm,” Musk said in a live session in X Spaces early Monday. “What we have is just a worm ball. You must basically get rid of the whole matter. It is out of repair. “
“We are closing it,” he said.
Musk, Trump and some Republican legislators have attacked the United States aid and development agency, which supervises humanitarian, development and security programs in some 120 countries, in increasingly strident terms, accusing it of promoting liberal causes.
Since Trump assumed the position, the appointed ones brought from their first mandate, such as Peter Marocco, placed more than 50 senior officials with a license for investigation without public explanation, dethripating the leadership of the agency. When the agency’s head of the agency announced that the accusations against him were unfounded and tried to restore them, he was also licensed.
During the weekend, the Trump administration placed two best security leaders in USAID licensed After they refused to deliver classified material in restricted areas to Musk government inspection teams, said an official and former United States official.
THE ALMIZCLE PIVER previously carried out A similar operation in the Treasury DepartmentObtaining access to confidential information, including the payment systems of Social Security clients and Medicare. Washington Post reported that a high treasure officer had resigned about the Musk team by accessing confidential information.
Usaid, meanwhile, has been One of the most directed federal agencies by the Trump administration in an increase Offensive against the federal government and many of its programs.
“It has been directed by a lot of radical lunatics. And we are taking them out, ”Trump told reporters about USAID on Sunday night.
The Trump administration Freeze foreign assistance He has closed a large part of Usaid’s help programs worldwide, including an HIV-Yaya program initiated by Republican President George W. Bush accredited by saving more than 20 million lives in Africa and elsewhere. Help contractors talked about millions of dollars in medicines and other goods now trapped in the port they were forbidden to deliver.
Other programs that would close provided education to schoolgirls in Afghanistan under Taliban domain and monitored an Ebola outbreak in Uganda. A crisis crisis monitoring program backed by USAID, which was accredited for helping to prevent the repetitions of the famine of the 1980s in Uganda that killed up to 1.2 million people, has been disconnected.
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Gómez Licon reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, reporter AP Farnush Amiri contributed from Washington.
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