Four days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk’s top lieutenants at the Treasury Department asked its acting secretary, a career civil servant, to immediately shut off all USAID payments using the department’s own ultra-sensitive payment processing system. The ask was so out of line with how Treasury normally operates, it prompted a skeptical reply from David Lebryk, then serving as acting Treasury secretary, who said he did not believe “we have the legal authority to stop an authorized payment certified by an agency,” according to a source familiar with the exchange. Lebryk suggested a “legally less risky approach” would be for the State Department, which oversees USAID, to rescind the payments itself and examine whether they complied with President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day executive order freezing foreign development aid.
Officials working with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency sought access to the U.S. Department of Treasury payment system to stop money from flowing to the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to two people familiar with the matter. DOGE’s efforts to stop USAID payments undermine assurances that the department gave to federal lawmakers in a Tuesday letter that it sought only to review the integrity of the payments and had “read-only access” to the system as part of an audit process. The two people familiar with the matter spoke Thursday to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
USAID workers received an email Monday telling them to stay out of the agency’s DC headquarters — as Elon Musk and the White House moved to “shut it down” and reorganize it under the State Department. Staffers with the US Agency for International Development were ordered “at the direction of Agency leadership” to “work remotely,” except for “personnel with essential on-site and building maintenance functions individually contracted by senior leadership,” according to an agency-wide email reviewed by The Post. “Further guidance will be forthcoming,” the missive said. The email appeared to have been drafted by Gavin Kliger, an engineer at Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which has been charged with trimming federal spending from the agency’s roughly $40 billion budget as well as other Executive Branch departments.
