Staff at the US Agency for International Development (USAid) have been instructed to stay out of the agency’s Washington headquarters after billionaire Elon Musk announced President Donald Trump had agreed with him that the body should close.
USAid employees also said more than 600 additional employees had reported being locked out of the agency’s computer systems overnight.
Those still in the system received emails saying that “at the direction of Agency leadership” the headquarters building “will be closed to Agency personnel on Monday, Feb. 3″.
USAID is a criminal organization https://t.co/Xzl70dmow1
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2025
The agency’s website vanished on Saturday without explanation.
Thousands of USAid employees have already been laid off and programmes shut down in the two weeks since Mr Trump took office, showing the power of Mr Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in the Trump administration.
Mr Musk announced the closing of the agency early on Monday as Mr Trump’s secretary of state Marco Rubio was out of the country on a trip to Central America.
Mr Trump has ordered a freeze on foreign assistance that has had widespread effects on programmes around the world. The moves by the US, the world’s largest provider of humanitarian aid, have upended decades of policy that put humanitarian, development and security assistance in the centre of efforts to build alliances and counter adversaries including China and Russia.
Democratic legislators have protested against the moves, saying Mr Trump lacks constitutional authority to shut down USAid without congressional approval and condemned Mr Musk for accessing sensitive government-held information through his Trump-sanctioned inspections of federal government agencies and programmes.
On Monday, two State Department employees who tried to gain access to the USAid offices in the building said they were turned away by security guards, who told them the offices were open but people could not go in.
Later in the morning, uniformed Department of Homeland Security officers and security staff blocked the lobby using yellow tape with the words “do not cross”.
The white USAid flag still flew on the empty plaza in front of the agency headquarters on Monday morning. Employees had earlier been able to reach other parts of the agency to clear personal belongings from their offices.
The developments come after Mr Musk, who is leading an extraordinary civilian review of the federal government with Mr Trump’s agreement, said early on Monday that he had spoken with the president about the six-decade-old US aid and development agency and “he agreed we should shut it down”.
“It became apparent that it’s not an apple with a worm it in,” Mr Musk said in a live session on X Spaces. “What we have is just a ball of worms. You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair.”
“We’re shutting it down,” he added.
Mr Musk, Mr Trump and some Republican legislators have targeted the US aid and development agency, which oversees humanitarian, development and security programmes in 120 countries, in increasingly strident terms, accusing it of promoting liberal causes.
Over the weekend, the Trump administration placed two top security chiefs at USAid on leave after they refused to turn over classified material in restricted areas to Mr Musk’s government-inspection teams, officials said.
USAid has been one of the federal agencies most targeted by the Trump administration in an escalating crackdown on the federal government and many of its programmes.
“It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics. And we’re getting them out,” Mr Trump said to reporters on Sunday night.
