You can debate whether the President has the power to dismantle USAID under the relevant statutes. Those lawsuits are winding their way through the courts. But if he does have the power, then it would be perverse if he couldn’t exercise the power due to HR rules. You cannot put HR in the way of the duly elected President exercising his powers.
It's not even established that he has the power. The fact that they do something doesn't mean they have that power.
And given that, it doesn't mean that you get to ignore all other rules.
> You cannot put HR in the way of the duly elected President exercising his powers.
When you're firing thousands of people, some due diligence is in order, no?
USAID still exists on paper. But under the current appropriations bills, the funding is allocated to the State Department.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4779...
But also the voters voted for Trump to execute the laws passed by Congress. Which law said get rid of USAID?
USAID still exists on paper, but Congress hasn’t appropriated any funding for it.
as an institutionalist myself, I agree with you that this is terrible governance.
The USAID-related litigation has largely been unsuccessful because the appropriations bills don’t necessarily require USAID to do particular programs. Most of the appropriations bills appropriate money for the State department.
The first line of Article II says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” The first three articles all start with a similar line. For the legislature and Supreme Court, everyone understands that the powers of those branches can only be exercised by the constitutionally designated actors. Congress can’t create a law that creates bodies within the judiciary staffed by employees that exercises power independently of Article III judges. Similarly, Congress can’t create independent agencies within the executive that can exercise executive power independently of the President.
On top of that, the executive has a responsibility to plan its work ahead of time and make such plans known before enacting them.
There are many cases currently in litigation regarding these failures.
But funding is provided in annual appropriations bills, and Congress has since enacted appropriations bills that allocate funds directly to the state department.
That’s why the USAID litigation has not been very successful. The best legal argument is that the executive can’t cancel funding Congress has specifically allocated to an agency. But Congress eliminated that argument.
you'd hope that an internal insurrection against the United States would not be so ragingly popular. and part of the reason it's let slide, is so poorly seen as what it is is because of "elections have consequences". it's bad.
Elections (and referenda) do indeed have consequences.
It is however perfectly reasonable to look further up the causal chain and say "propaganda influences elections".
When undocumented temporary-employee friends of Trump allies do whatever they want: This is fine.
they are, in all likelihood, foreign agents or acting on behalf of them.
If the GOP loses big in the midterms, we might finally see MAGA and the GOP turn on each other in an internecine frenzy.
I wonder if Musk's team is using AI to find loopholes in laws he can abuse.
I know it sounds extreme, but this is my takeaway.
Tech billionaires have a twisted view of the world. They openly talk about how US and Europe is lagging behind in birth rate compared to developing nations. They openly encourage people to create more babies. Conversely, while they don't openly vouch for it, DOGE and the gutting of USAID has directly resulted in higher child mortality in developing nations.
[0] https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=proj...
I know their tendancy to have wiring faults could certainly stand to be improved but jeez, that's a bit harsh
We need to fully destroy the notion the DOJ isn’t independent, and make a number of changes that bring us back to having a modern country.
HN doesn't have the kind of filters that the big social media platforms do, either.
Also USAID existing prevented NGOs to have too much local political power and the corruption that goes with it.
My opinion is that overall, USAID was a net positive, although in some specific cases it wasn't.
> A rise in instability abroad also creates a national-security risk for the U.S., Wright adds. Yemen—once a major USAID recipient, with $768 million worth of aid flowing into the country in 2024—is also home to the Houthis, an Iran-backed militant group that controls much of the country’s north and has been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. As USAID funding disappears, support for the rebels is only likely to grow, he says. “Iran can continue to finance rebellions like the Houthis,” says Wright. “These second- and third-order effects might be even more consequential to the U.S. than the direct effects.”
* https://time.com/article/2026/05/15/usaid-shutdown-rise-glob...
* Analysis: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeh7122
Or: Iran was supporting them already, but more people joined up because they were more desperate because the alternative (aid) had gone away.
The quality/quantity of support from Iran may not even have changed, but rather people's willingness to accept it.
I have, luckily, read a personal account of the logistical assistance that a USAID contractor had [0]. Doug Muir wrote about improving customs practices in Rwanda and training locals to take over for him. Improving, in this case, means standardizing inspections of trade goods to decrease holding time.
[0] https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/08/usaid-my-next-to-last-p...
This reminds me of the standard USA tech startup model, where you do something useful to get the users, while secretly exploiting them.
was purposely left to rot in warehouses instead of being distributed
six months ago the NY Times documented half a million deaths attributable to the destruction of USAID
by now it's easily a million, slow-motion murdered
may you never suffer to death like those million that could have been spared
NYT has no such reporting because it was reporting from ProPublica. In a series of (Pulitzer-prize finalist) articles they estimated about 700,000:
* https://www.propublica.org/series/the-end-of-aid
* https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/brett-murphy-and-anna-mar...
An analysis in The Lancet estimates that by 2030 as many as 14 million people could die, including 4.5 million children under age 5:
* https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
A recent article in Science found that after aid was shutdown there was an increase in violence in various regions where it was previously present:
https://programme.aids2026.org/Abstract/Abstract/?abstractid...
I guess someone should look into that
this seems to have a lot of pretty concrete data. Which do you disagree with in particular?
If you judge things based on whether they have had a net positive effect on the world, you'll find that both yourself and USAID are in the same category.