Authoritarians Around the World Celebrate Trump Destroying USAID

Authoritarian leaders around the world are applauding Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s destruction of USAID.

“In just 14 days, Donald Trump has turned the world upside down with just a few measures. In America, gender madness is over, funding for globalist Soros organizations is over, illegal migration is over, and support for the Russian-Ukrainian war is over. In other words, everything that the bureaucrats in Brussels have tried to force down our throats in recent years is over,” Hungary’s hard-line President Viktor Orbán wrote on Facebook.

Orbán’s top political director, Balázs Orbán, echoed these sentiments. “Couldn’t be happier that @POTUS, @JDVance & @elonmusk are finally taking down this corrupt foreign interference machine,” he wrote on X. “Good riddance!”

Trump’s favorite Latin American strongman, Nayib Bukele, also chimed in. “Most governments don’t want USAID funds flowing into their countries because they understand where much of that money actually ends up,” he wrote on X. “While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.”

And of course Russia—perhaps USAID’s biggest foreign hater—had something to say.

“Russian Deputy Security Council Chair Dmitry Medvedev wrote, “Smart move by @elonmusk, trying to plug USAID’s Deep Throat. Let’s hope notorious Deep State doesn’t swallow him whole …”

“Essentially, [USAID] was the primary transmission belt for globalism as an ideology aimed at the worldwide imposition of liberal democracy, market economics, and human rights, while dismantling sovereign states and overthrowing regimes capable of resisting this on a global scale,” the Russian far-right nationalist Alexander Dugin wrote for a right-wing Russian outlet on Monday. “The banning of USAID is a critical, fundamental move, the importance of which, as I said, cannot be overstated. This is especially true because countries like Ukraine largely depend on this agency, receiving significant funding through it. All Ukrainian media, NGOs, and ideological structures were financed by USAID.”

USAID was a far from perfect organization. But what does it mean now that all of these men with shaky human rights records (at best) are dancing on its grave?

Elon Musk’s team of coders are creating a “backdoor” into the U.S. Treasury system, according to legal and I.T. professionals.

“Pushing live production code cooked up by some young coders over a week of [sleepless] nights in place of a legacy system that is fundamental to the operation of the US government is against every programming best practice,” University of Kansas law professor Corey Rayburn Yung posted on BlueSky.

Highlighting a Talking Points Memo piece about how Musk’s team is implementing untested code into the U.S. Treasury to create new paths that “block payments and possibly leave less visibility into what has been blocked,” Yung warned that the world’s richest man was creating a “backdoor into the US Treasury.”

“This is incredibly dangerous both because of its intended use (by Elon and Trump) and the risk of other actors exploiting a major security vulnerability to cause a massive disruption to the US government,” Yung continued.

“There’s clearly no QA process, live testing with mocks, technical support for bugs, etc.,” Yung said. “This is insane. It’s the coding equivalent of hammering a complex, fragile machine until it does what you want.”

Musk was appointed as a “special government employee” by the White House, but on Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt couldn’t explain whether he had received security clearance or a background check to operate within the federal government.

A special government employee is “anyone who works, or is expected to work, for the government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period,” according to the Justice Department.

To help him, Musk has tapped a group of college students between the ages of 18 and 25, several of whom have little other professional experience than interning for him at SpaceX or Neuralink.

Musk and his staffers at the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have had seemingly unfettered access to federal databases containing Social Security numbers, home addresses, medical histories, and other sensitive data.

Last week, Musk’s team was spotted installing a commercial email server into the Office of Personnel Management, in what many considered to be a massive security risk. The server gave the uncleared team potential access to onboarding, job performance reviews, and government employee health care details, which could violate HIPAA laws.

The U.S. Military Academy West Point is disbanding 11 affinity groups as a result of Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In a memo Tuesday, the school announced that the Asian Pacific Forum Club, Japanese Forum Club, Korean-American Relations Seminar, Vietnamese-American Cadet Association, Native American Heritage Forum, and Latin Cultural Club were all disbanded and ordered to cease all activities immediately.

The National Society of Black Engineers, the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers, and the Society of Women Engineers were also shut down.

The Corbin Forum, which “empowers and promotes women’s leadership within the Corps of Cadets and Army,” was disbanded, and its web page was removed from West Point’s website. Spectrum, a group supporting LGBTQ+ cadets, was similarly ordered to shut down.

The memo also dissolved the Contemporary Cultural Affairs Seminar Club, which supported cadets who were “transitioning from civilian to cadet and cadet to officer.”

The dispersal of these groups, meant to provide resources and community to cadets, many of whom are from marginalized backgrounds, was done “in accordance with recent Presidential Executive Orders, Department of Defense guidance, and Department of the Army guidance,” according to the memo. No other rationale was provided for the action.

The U.S. Army and Air Force closed their respective DEI offices and programs in January. Last week, after Trump baselessly blamed the government’s DEI practices for a deadly plane crash, federal employees at several agencies received instructions to remove their pronouns from their email signature.

Donald Trump’s foolish pledge to take over the Gaza strip was quickly slammed by major world leaders, including American allies.

The president said Tuesday in a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the “U.S. will take over the Gaza strip” and send its Palestinian residents to a “beautiful area with homes and safety … so that they can live out their lives in peace and harmony,” boasting that he would turn the territory into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

Trump’s plan for ethnic cleansing was immediately panned by the U.S.’s Arab allies. Egypt’s foreign ministry said in a statement that Gaza needed to be rebuilt “without moving the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip.” Saudi Arabia also issued a statement reaffirming its desire for a Palestinian state as a “firm, steadfast and unwavering position,” contradicting Trump’s statements about the Gulf country earlier in the day.

“The kingdom of Saudi Arabia also stresses what it had previously announced regarding its absolute rejection of infringement on the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, whether through Israeli settlement policies, annexation of Palestinian lands or efforts to displace the Palestinian people from their land,” the Saudi statement said.

China also criticized Trump’s harebrained idea, stressing that it supports a two-state solution.

“We oppose the forced relocation of people in Gaza and hope that the relevant parties will take the ceasefire and post-war governance in Gaza as an opportunity to push the Palestinian issue back on the right track,” said Lin Jian, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Turkey, a member of NATO with U.S. military bases, harshly criticized Trump’s plan, with the country’s foreign minister calling Trump’s plan to deport Gaza’s Palestinians to neighboring countries “unacceptable.”

“Deportation (of Palestinians) is something neither we nor the region can accept. Even thinking of it is absurd. Even launching a debate on it is wrong,” Hakan Fidan told the state-run Anadolu Agency.

Of course, the people actually living in Gaza are not fans of the idea either. Palestinians of all factions came out against Trump’s ethnic cleansing scheme, with Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri saying the president’s remarks “are ridiculous and absurd, and any ideas of this kind are capable of igniting the region. We consider them [the plan] a recipe for generating chaos and tension in the region because the people of Gaza will not allow such plans to pass.”

Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, said, “These calls represent a serious violation of international law. Peace and stability will not be achieved in the region without establishing a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital on the borders of 1967, based on the two-state solution.”

Perhaps Palestine’s U.N. envoy Riyad Mansour put it best.

“For those who want to send the Palestinian people to a ‘nice place’, allow them to go back to their original homes in what is now Israel,” Mansour said, using Trump’s own words. “The Palestinian people want to rebuild Gaza because this is where we belong.”

Trump’s plan has even drawn skepticism from Republicans in Congress, with Senators Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Josh Hawley, and others puzzled at the idea. It’s going to be a hard sell for the president to convince his “America First” supporters, let alone the rest of the country, to invade, ethnically cleanse, and then occupy Gaza against the will of its long-suffering people.

Trump’s “buyout” offer (aka the “agree with me or leave” special) has hit the CIA.

The Central Intelligence Agency on Tuesday became the first of the intelligence community to receive Trump’s exit offer of eight months of pay and benefits. The agency is also now enforcing a hiring freeze, and anyone who was hired or in the process of getting hired at the CIA will likely have their offers pulled—especially if their background doesn’t align with the Trump administration’s goals, an aide told The Wall Street Journal.

Those goals are more aggressive surveillance and more anti-China activity, the aide said. Trump’s CIA plans to spy on allied governments like Mexico and take a more hardline approach to drug cartels, classifying them as terrorist organizations. This buyout is yet another step in Trump’s efforts to reshape the federal bureaucracy in his image and fill it to the brim with loyalists who will carry out his goals no questions asked.

The buyout itself is also highly questionable, as Trump does not have the line-by-line authority to authorize funds for such a thing.

“There’s no statutory authority that I can see for the president making this offer,” Senator Tim Kaine told The Wall Street Journal. “The administration immediately knows, you don’t want to work for me. They’ll find some other way to get rid of you. You should not raise your hand.”

Some federal workers in other agencies have resisted the buyouts thus far. How the CIA will respond remains to be seen.