March 10 (UPI) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday that 83% of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s programs will be canceled.
Rubio posted to his personal X account that the decision followed a six-week review, and that the 5,200 related contracts being terminated “spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States.”
Rubio added that the remaining 18% of programs being kept, expected to be roughly 1,000, will be “administered more effectively under the State Department.”
He then thanked the Department of Government Efficiency and his staff for working “very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform.”
Elon Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump working with DOGE, wrote on X that the move was “tough, but necessary.”
Musk has been a critic of USAID, and at one point said it should be placed into a woodchipper.
Some of the contracts to be canceled granted nutrition assistance for infants in developing countries, and for treatments and prevention of diseases such as polio, malaria, tuberculosis, Ebola and HIV, among other illnesses.
A federal judge approved the Trump administration to move forward with firing USAID employees, while another ruled that almost $2 billion in unpaid fees for related humanitarian work must be paid out despite a freeze on foreign aid. The ruling regarding the fees to be paid has since been upheld by the United States Supreme Court, but no timeline for payouts has been established.
