Former Obama administration official David Axelrod expressed dismay Friday about mass layoffs at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) following a review by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Representatives from DOGE and the State Department gained access to USAID’s headquarters on Jan. 31 to review the agency’s spending in order to align it with U.S. foreign policy after a brief standoff with employees of the agency, ABC News reported. Axelrod said the Trump administration’s plans for layoffs targeting over 95% of USAID’s workforce were “profoundly bad.”
“There’s a challenge in that they are flooding the zone and doing so many things at once that it’s like sensory overload. And where do you go and what do you do? But there’s a larger issue that I think unifies all of this, which is this notion of unaccountability, of defiance of the law, of shredding, constitutional separation of powers,” Axelrod told “CNN Newsroom” host Pamela Brown. “So there’s no check. There’s no check on on Elon Musk. There’s no check on what Trump is doing. And Van is right. The thing that people out there, whether they support Trump or not, should consider, is they may love what Donald Trump wants to do or is doing. The question is, what about the next president?”
WATCH:
Federal judges have blocked or delayed President Donald Trump’s executive orders by issuing injunctions involving birthright citizenship, barring biological male inmates from women’s prisons, a buyout to encourage some federal employees to resign and a freeze on some aid programs.
Trump named Tesla CEO Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy as co-chairs of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Nov. 12, and has the power to replace Musk.
“If you shred all of these sources of accountability, if you take if to, to borrow a phrase from Elon Musk, if you put the First Amendment of the first article, one of the Constitution that guarantees Congress certain rights through a wood chipper, what happens when the next president comes?” Axelrod asked “And it may not be someone who you have that kind of faith in? It’s very, it‘s very, very dangerous.”
Fifty-Six percent of respondents to a Reuters-Ipsos poll released Wednesday supported Trump’s executive order to freeze most foreign aid programs while the administration reevaluated and realigned foreign aid spending.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the decision to drastically reduce USAID’s workforce Monday during a press conference in El Salvador, saying that his concerns about its oversight began when he was in Congress and noting that the agency is “completely unresponsive” and “not functioning” as intended. The agency reportedly spent over $100 million in Afghanistan as part of a “democracy project,” and also provided funding for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an outlet whose reporting on former Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York City was cited by then-Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman in the whistleblower complaint that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
USAID additionally spent $45 million on grants to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) scholarships in Burma and $21 million for renewable electricity in Lebanon, The Washington Times reported.
Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America
