Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the official end of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on Tuesday, after rapidly dismantling the government’s foreign aid arm since President Trump’s return to the White House.
USAID’s official shutdown comes following a study published Monday in the Lancet Medical journal projecting that more than 14 million additional deaths could occur globally as a result of the U.S. aid reductions, including 4.5 million deaths among children.
The Trump administration defended its shutting down of USAID as rooting out “waste, fraud and abuse” and reorienting American aid dollars to deliver concrete returns. Elon Musk, during his time leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), bragged about putting USAID through the “wood chipper.”
Rubio said that decades of U.S. foreign assistance had failed to deliver results for America.
“Development objectives have rarely been met, instability has often worsened, and anti-American sentiment has only grown,” Rubio wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. “This era of government-sanctioned inefficiency has officially come to an end.”
Democrats have roundly denounced USAID’s demise as unconstitutional and cruel. The administration has frozen foreign assistance, issued sweeping stop-work orders to USAID staff and locked out employees from workstations and emails. The moves triggered chaos in the aid community and put lives in danger, according to a lawsuit.
“Rather than engage in constructive conversations to lessen the devastating impact of these layoffs, the administration chose instead to inflict maximum pain and hardship through a barrage of questionable—and likely illegal—policies, accompanied by dismissive and dehumanizing rhetoric, all delivered with little thought to implementation or human consequences,” the American Foreign Service Association, the union representing foreign service officers, wrote in a statement.
“The actions of this administration will haunt our country far longer than any of us can foresee. The trust of allies and communities will take decades to rebuild—if it can ever be restored. This is not simply a policy failure; it is an open wound in American diplomacy that may never heal.”
Of the $120 billion in contracts that were in effect at the beginning of January, about $69 billion in programming was kept, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
These include 580 humanitarian aid programs, 167 health programs, 65 economic development programs and 79 other initiatives, according to the Times.
Rubio on Tuesday said USAID would “officially cease to implement foreign assistance,” with the State Department taking over distribution to ensure that programs “align with administration policies.” Rubio also promised assistance will be delivered with “more accountability, strategy, and efficiency.”
The announcement was welcomed by some of President Trump’s core Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters in Congress.
“America First: Every Dollar, Every Diplomat. Thank you President Trump and Secretary Rubio for your leadership,” the Republican majority for the House Foreign Affairs Committee wrote in a post on the social platform X.
Opponents said the Trump administration was making a tremendous mistake on foreign policy.
“The closure of USAID is a historic mistake and will harm the U.S. globally and in our competition with China,” R. Nicholas Burns, who most recently served as former President Biden’s ambassador to China, wrote in a post on X.
Former President Bush reportedly joined a ceremony commending USAID staff on June 30 that marked the agency’s last day. He brought up the uncertainty surrounding the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a popular HIV/AIDS prevention program he created that has saved an estimated 25 million lives.
“Is it in our interest that 25 million people who would have died now live? I think it is,” Bush said. “On behalf of a grateful nation, thank you for your hard work, and God bless you.”