USAID and the Media in a ‘Time of Monsters’

Over the weekend, amid spiraling headlines about the increasingly tentacular influence of Elon Musk and his minions within the federal government, CNN reported on an apparent showdown at the offices of the US Agency for International Development: staffers from Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE) tried to enter, apparently seeking access to sensitive information including personnel data and classified records, but were blocked from doing so; eventually, after threatening to call the US Marshals, they were admitted; afterward, two senior security officials at USAID were reportedly placed on leave. On Sunday, as speculation swirled that Musk and his allies were seeking to shut USAID down, Musk reposted a rough summary of CNN’s reporting with the caption “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die”—part of a barrage of posts on X, the social platform that he owns, in which he also referred to the agency as “very corrupt,” “evil,” and “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” Early Monday, on an X livestream with the Republican senator Joni Ernst and his short-lived DOGE-mate Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk claimed that he’d spoken with President Trump, who had agreed that USAID should be shuttered. The agency, Musk added, isn’t “an apple with a worm in it” but “a ball of worms.”