President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk's crackdown on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contradicts how the conservative manifesto Project 2025 suggested the agency should operate.
Musk drove fringe viewpoints on USAID into the mainstream on X as the Trump administration halted the humanitarian relief agency’s work.
But that accord was never bound to last, and it shattered this week after Trump unleashed perhaps his most provocative foreign policy idea yet: taking Gaza under American control, relocating its Palestinian population, and redeveloping the enclave into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
The Trump administration and Elon Musk, who's heading President Donald Trump's advisory Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), have targeted USAID hardest so far in an unprecedented challenge of the federal government and many of its programs.
