Elon Musk Just Started Shutting Down This Government Agency Hours Before Employees Were Expected to Report to Work

Elon Musk escalated his mission to shrink the federal government on Monday, Feb. 3, by closing the USAID headquarters hours before employees were scheduled to show up for work, hinting that the next step is shuttering the agency entirely.

The United States Agency for International Development is one of the largest aid organizations in the world, established under President John F. Kennedy to provide a variety of foreign assistance programs in developing nations.

But on Monday, just two days after the agency’s website went dark and amid days of speculation about its future, the USAID headquarters in Washington had been shut down and employees had been instructed not to return to work, according to reports from the BBC, The Associated Press and Reuters.

Before police tape blocked off the agency’s lobby, employees told the AP that 600 people were locked out of the USAID computer systems the night prior. For those who still had access, emails reportedly came in instructing them that the offices were closed to agency personnel on Monday “at the direction of Agency leadership.”

The email did not include further information on how long the offices would remain shut down, according to Reuters, instead noting that “further guidance will be forthcoming.”

The uncertainty surrounding USAID and its employees comes shortly after Musk — who leads the new “Department of Government Efficiency” — announced on X that President Donald Trump agreed that USAID needed to be “shut down.”

“With regards to the USAID stuff, I went over it with [Trump] in detail and he agreed that we should shut it down,” Musk said in an X Spaces conversation on Monday morning, per CNN.

The billionaire — who secured his government role after rallying for Trump during his 2024 campaign — reportedly added that he and the president discussed USAID “a few times.”

The day prior, Trump slammed the agency in a message of his own, per The Hill.

“It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out,” he claimed. “USAID, run by radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out, and then we’ll make a decision.”

The headquarters shutting down is not the government’s first major action against USAID, however. As CNN reports, citing sources, two security officials were put on leave Saturday for refusing to give Musk’s DOGE initiative access to its systems.

Sixty senior USAID staff were put on leave in the days prior after being accused of trying to skirt Trump’s executive order to pause foreign aid for 90 days.

CNN’s sources claim that DOGE personnel attempted to gain access to classified information from USAID via security systems and personnel files, and that they were eventually able to access the headquarters.

Democrats in the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee later wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday that they wanted an “immediate update” on what happened, per CNN, writing that it “raises deep concerns about the protection and safeguarding of matters related to U.S. national security.”

DOGE’s Katie Miller claimed on X on Sunday that “no classified material was accessed without proper security clearances.”

Elsewhere in his X spaces on Monday, Musk called USAID “incredibly politically partisan” and claimed it had been supporting “radically left causes throughout the world including things that are anti-American,” according to CNN.

Musk has also called it a “criminal organization” on X in response to reports about USAID officials being put on leave.

Per the agency’s website, as captured by the Wayback Machine before the site was taken down over the weekend, USAID reaches more than 100 countries to promote global health, stability, humanitarian assistance and empower women, among other missions.

Since 1961, it has worked to “save lives, reduce poverty, strengthen democratic governance, and help people emerge from humanitarian crises and progress beyond assistance,” per its mission statement.

A former senior USAID official told CNN over the weekend that the State Department — where USAID information appears online after its own website was shut down — doesn’t “have the capacity, the expertise, the training to do that kind of work. It is a completely separate line of effort that is undertaken on the ground.”

Trump’s latest move comes two weeks after he began his second White House term on Jan. 20.

Outside of his foreign aid freeze, Trump has also taken executive action that attempted to end birthright citizenship, pardoned roughly 1,500 people who were convicted of their roles in the 2021 Capitol riot, and established the unofficial DOGE agency.