Washington: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday the Trump administration had finished its six-week purge of programmes of the six-decade-old US Agency for International Development, and said he would move the 18% of aid and development programmes that survived under the State Department.
Rubio made the announcement in a post on X. It marked one of his relatively few public comments on what has been a historic shift away from US foreign aid and development, executed by Trump political appointees at State and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency teams.
Rubio in the post thanked DOGE and “our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform” in foreign aid.
Rubio’s social media post Monday said that review was now “officially ending,” with some 5,200 of USAID’s 6,200 programmes eliminated. Those programmes “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 wrote..