Monday, during an appearance on FNC’s “Special Report,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed the Trump administration’s move to wind down the functions of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
According to Rubio, evidence of “rank insubordination ” was discovered by Trump administration officials who attempted to reform the agency early on.
Partial transcript as follows:
EDSON: So you’re now the head of USAID. The head of DOGE, Elon Musk, called USAID a criminal organization, and added that it is time for it to die. Do you agree with that?
RUBIO: They have, basically, evolved into an agency that believes that they are not even a U.S. government agency, that they are out there, 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 are not in the national interest.
One of the most 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 cooperative, they undermined the work that we are 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. So they’re completely unresponsive. They just don’t consider that they work for the U.S. They just think they’re a global entity and that their master is the globe and not the United States. And that’s not what the statute says, and that’s not sustainable.
EDSON: Can it be reformed, or does it need to die?
RUBIO: That was always the goal was to reform it. But now we have rank insubordination. Now we have basically an active effort, where their basic attitude is we don’t work for anyone. We work for ourselves. No agency or government can tell us what to do.
So the president made me the acting administrator. 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 are going through now at the State Department. I think there are some — this is not about getting rid of foreign aid. There are things that we do through USAID that we should continue, that make sense. And we’ll have to decide, is that better through the State Department is that better through a reformed USAID? That’s the process we’re working through.
There are things that are happening at USAID that we should not be involved in funding, or that we have a lot of questions about. But they are completely uncooperative, so we had no choice but to take dramatic steps to bring this thing under control.
EDSON: Do you think that we’ll still be the most generous nation on earth at the end of this process?
RUBIO: I think we’ll be the most generous nation on earth, but I think we’re going to the most generous nation on earth in a way that makes sense, that’s in our national interest.
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