Secretary of State Marco Rubio slammed the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for what he called "rank insubordination," and is full of rogue employees who do whatever the hell they want.
"Well, that was always the goal was to reform it, but now we have rank insubordination," Rubio told Fox News, in comments just one day after President Trump announced that Rubio would serve as the acting head of USAID - which itself came after Elon Musk's DOGE team descended upon the agency and revealed that "USAID is a ball of worms. There is no apple. And when there is no apple you just need to get rid of the whole thing. That's why it's got to go. It's beyond repair."
According to Rubio, "Now we have basically an active effort — their basic attitude is, ‘We don’t work for anyone, we work for ourselves, no agency of government can tell us what to do."
"So the president made me the acting administrator," he added. "I’ve delegated that power to someone who is there full-time, and we’re going to go through the same process at USAID as we’re going through now at the State Department."
According to Rubio, USAID has lost its focus and abandoned the "national interest" - telling Fox: "They have basically evolved into an agency that believes that they’re not even a U.S. government agency, that they are out — they’re a global charity, that they take the taxpayer money, and they spend it as a global charity irrespective of whether it is in the national interest or not in the national interest."
🚨RUBIO: USAID rife with “rank insubordination” — “we had no choice but to take dramatic steps to bring this thing under control."
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) February 4, 2025
"They have basically evolved into an agency that believes that they're not even a U.S. government agency...they're completely unresponsive. They… pic.twitter.com/LQOKRDUlBk
"One of the most common complaints you will get if you go to embassies around the world from State Department officials and ambassadors and the like is USAID is not only not cooperative — they undermine the work that we’re doing in that country, they are supporting programs that upset the host government for whom we’re trying to work with on a broader scale, and so forth," Rubio added.
On Monday, deep state crusaders Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD) staged a dramatic protest outside the USAID headquarters, with Omar suggesting that Trump's move to fold the agency into the State Department was "what the beginning of dictatorship looks like!" - and Raskin suggesting that Elon Musk had "illegally seized power over the financial payment systems of the United States Department of Treasury," adding "Elon Musk, you didn’t create USAID," and that Musk "doesn’t have the power to destroy it."