President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk‘s crackdown on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contradicts how the conservative manifesto Project 2025 suggested the agency should operate.
Newsweek has reached out to The Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank that authored the 922-page document, for comment via email outside of regular working hours.
Why It Matters
President Donald Trump has repeatedly denied any connection to Project 2025, which outlines how a potential Republican administration could overhaul the federal government, despite multiple members of his Cabinet being involved in drafting the manifesto.
The dismantling of USAID suggests Trump is not following all the recommendations in Project 2025 and that Musk is having an even-greater influence on the president.
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What To Know
USAID is an independent agency that delivers billions of dollars in foreign humanitarian aid.
The Trump administration has announced plans to gut the agency and merge it with the State Department. Thousands of employees are set to lose their jobs by the end of Friday as part of the move.
The crackdown is overseen by Musk, who leads the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump announced the department on January 20 as part of his plan to “dismantle” government bureaucracy and reduce federal spending.
Project 2025 is a lengthy guideline outlining how a new administration could restructure the government to align with a hard-line conservative agenda.
The proposals include making it easier to fire federal workers, eliminating the Department of Education, and removing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. Several versions of these policies have already been implemented or proposed by Trump in his second term.
According to the Tracking Project 2025 blog, dismantling USAID runs counter to what is outlined in the manifesto.
A chapter in the manifesto by Max Primorac, a senior research fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation based in Washington, D.C., generally praises USAID’s humanitarian work.
The chapter suggests a presidential administration could “resize and repurpose” USAID’s humanitarian aid portfolio to restore its original purpose of “providing emergency short-term relief, preparing vulnerable communities for transition, and doing no harm” without completely dismantling it.
Primorac recommended that USAID should operate more like it did in Trump’s first term, including pushing “pro-life and family-friendly policies”; promoting international religious freedom; and building an “unprecedented genocide-response infrastructure.”
What People Are Saying
The author of the Tracking Project 2025 blog said in a Thursday post: “The Mandate does lament that USAID’s spending and bureaucracy have grown too large, calling out the ‘aid industrial complex’ that they claim has developed in response to an agency that needs more oversight. But the Mandate does not suggest—or even hint at—doing away with the agency wholesale, as Musk has done.”
Max Primorac wrote in Project 2025: “The next conservative administration should scale back USAID’s global footprint by, at a minimum, returning to the agency’s 2019 pre-COVID-19 pandemic budget level. It should deradicalize USAID’s programs and structures and build on the conservative reforms instituted by the Trump administration. This will require working closely with the U.S. Congress to make deep cuts in the international affairs ‘150 Account’ while granting USAID greater flexibility in spending its appropriated funds to achieve better developmental outcomes.”
President Donald Trump told reporters on February 2: “USAID, run by radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out, and then we’ll make a decision.”
Elon Musk posted on X, formerly Twitter, on February 2: “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”
What Happens Next
USAID said in a statement on its website that, by the end of Friday, all direct-hire personnel at the agency will be placed on administrative leave globally, except for those responsible for “mission-critical functions, core leadership, and specially designated programs.”
