The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been immobilized in recent days as part of the Trump administration’s tumultuous effort to remake the federal government. 

The Trump administration on Monday said it is merging USAID with the State Department, a move that came amid days of turmoil at the agency and statements by tech billionaire and close presidential advisor Elon Musk that the agency was being shut down completely. 

Employees have been told to stay out of USAID’s headquarters in Washington, career staffers have been put on leave, contractors have been laid off, and international staffers across the globe have been ordered to return home. 

USAID is the U.S. government’s lead humanitarian and development agency, providing assistance to countries worldwide to help address poverty, disease, and other humanitarian crises as well as to promote democracy and other U.S. interests. 

Critics of the agency including Musk and President Donald Trump argue that it is rife with fraud and waste and that its expenditures don’t align with U.S. interests. But experts warn that the administration is moving to dismantle an agency that provides essential aid to millions across the globe and serves as a critical source of U.S. soft power, potentially opening the door for adversaries such as China and Russia to gain increased influence as Washington pulls back from the world.

Here’s what you need to know about what’s going on with the agency, why Trump and Musk want to dismantle it, and what’s at stake. 

What’s going on at USAID? 

A flurry of recent moves has sparked alarm and confusion at USAID, leaving the agency in limbo and with an uncertain future. 

It all began with Trump signing an executive order on Inauguration Day freezing all U.S. foreign assistance for 90 days pending review. Secretary of State Marco Rubio followed that with a cable detailing how that order should be carried out, freezing nearly all foreign assistance, with a few carveouts for emergency food programs and military aid to Egypt and Israel. 

As the primary agency responsible for providing such assistance, USAID soon came into the administration’s crosshairs. The USAID website went dark on Saturday, the Trump administration closed the agency’s headquarters on Monday, and staffers were told to work from home. Close to 100 career USAID staffers have been placed on leave, and hundreds have reported being locked out of the agency’s computer systems. 

Two top security officials at USAID were also placed on administrative leave after attempting to prevent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) representatives from gaining access to restricted parts of the agency. 

USAID “has long strayed from its original mission of responsibly advancing American interests abroad, and it is now abundantly clear that significant portions of USAID funding are not aligned with the core national interests of the United States,” the State Department said in a post on X on Monday. 

Going forward, Trump has tapped U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the agency’s acting administrator, the statement said. Rubio’s messaging on the agency hasn’t been as absolute as Musk’s, and he’s said that his agenda is not “about ending the programs that USAID does, per se.” 

“There are things that USAID, that we do through USAID, that we should continue to do, and we will continue to do,” the top U.S. diplomat told reporters in El Salvador.

In a letter to Congress, Rubio said that he had tapped Trump ally Peter Marocco to engage in a “review and potential reorganization of USAID’s activities.” That could entail a “suspension or elimination of programs, projects or activities; closing or suspending missions or post; closing, reorganizing, downsizing, or renaming establishments, organizations, bureaus, centers, or offices; reducing the size of the workforce at such entities and contracting out or privatizing functions or activities performed by federal employees,” he wrote. 

However, on Tuesday, a notice was posted on the USAID website stating that as of 11:59 p.m. Friday, Feb. 7, “all USAID direct hire personnel will be placed on administrative leave globally, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs.” Direct hires have 30 days to return home, and contracts deemed nonessential will be terminated, the notice added. 

As of now, USAID has effectively been shuttered, in practice if not officially. 

“What we’ve seen in the last two weeks is a stoppage of almost all foreign aid and U.S. implementing organizations having to send their staff home,” said George Ingram, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Sustainable Development. “This goes on for a few more weeks and a number of them are going to go belly up.” 

Why do Trump and Musk want to dismantle USAID? 

Critics say that the agency is wasteful and that its spending doesn’t align with U.S. interests. As head of DOGE—which is not an official government agency—Musk has been one of USAID’s sharpest opponents. He has baselessly decried USAID as a “criminal” organization and said it should “die.” 

U.S. foreign aid traditionally garners bipartisan support. Washington has been the world’s biggest foreign aid donor, even as that money represents a relatively tiny fraction of U.S. spending. Foreign assistance—which includes development support, humanitarian assistance, and security funding—accounts for just 1 percent of the entire U.S. federal budget. Around 60 percent of that money is administered by USAID.

USAID was initially established via an executive order signed by then-President John F. Kennedy in 1961 in concert with the Foreign Assistance Act of the same year. Legislation in 1998, the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act, established USAID as its own agency—separate from the State Department.

But the agency has been a target of conservative critics for years. Lawmakers such as GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky have long characterized USAID, and foreign aid more generally, as wasteful and corrupt. “Abolish USAID and all foreign aid,” Paul said in a recent post on X. 

A 2019 review by the USAID inspector general pointed to significant issues with programs funded by the agency falling short of expectations. Along these lines, there are also proponents of U.S. foreign aid, such as Walter Kerr, the executive director of Unlock Aid, who have criticized USAID’s effectiveness and called for reform. But Kerr said the “first priority” at the moment should be “to make sure that we can get life-saving assistance flowing again.”

Musk, the world’s richest person, has gone beyond debating the merits of foreign aid or critiquing the allocation of USAID’s budget. The billionaire has made a series of unfounded and conspiratorial statements about the agency in recent days, including an unsubstantiated claim that USAID “funded bioweapon research, including COVID-19, that killed millions of people.”

Musk has also stated that USAID is a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” Similarly, Trump on Sunday said that USAID was being run by “radical lunatics.” 

The future of USAID was also a key focus of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy blueprint. Despite Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the initiative on the campaign trail, he has appeared to draw from the plan after taking office. 

In a Project 2025 chapter focused on the agency, former USAID Deputy Administrator Max Primorac argued that the Biden administration had “deformed the agency.” Primorac advocated for further tying U.S. foreign aid to U.S. foreign-policy aims, writing that the agency must focus on “countering China’s development challenge” and turn away from the Biden administration’s “radical climate policy.” 

“The next conservative Administration should scale back USAID’s global footprint by, at a minimum, returning to the agency’s 2019 pre–COVID-19 pandemic budget level,” the chapter wrote. “It should deradicalize USAID’s programs and structures and build on the conservative reforms instituted by the Trump Administration.” 

Primorac did not respond to Foreign Policy’s request for comment. 

What’s at stake here? 

The Trump administration’s moves against the agency have alarmed former USAID officials and experts, who warn that the president is gutting an agency that provides essential aid to millions worldwide and advances U.S. foreign-policy interests. 

If the effort to dismantle USAID continues in the way it appears to be trending, “we would be looking at the removal of a huge and important tool of American global statecraft,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and a former top USAID official. “This is a key way that the United States does good in the world.”

“The U.S. will lose influence and a lot of people will suffer” if USAID disappears, Konyndyk said, and the country will “look like a ridiculous, ungenerous, and unreliable global actor.” Konyndyk warned that China and Russia will seek to “capitalize on that for their own influence.”

Moscow already appears to be paying close attention. Musk’s efforts against USAID were praised by Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia and an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, on Monday. “Smart move by @elonmusk, trying to plug USAID’s Deep Throat. Let’s hope notorious Deep State doesn’t swallow him whole,” Medvedev said in a post on X.

“Countries are asking whether or not we’re a dependable ally,” Ingram said. “The Chinese don’t do this; the Chinese carry through with their commitments.” 

The apparent merger of USAID with the State Department also raises legal questions. Since USAID was established via an act of Congress, Democrats and legal experts say the administration is acting illegally, with Democrats accusing the White House of launching the country into a constitutional crisis. 

“Trump/Musk cannot unilaterally close USAID or transfer under State,” Sen. Andy Kim posted on X. “Any action to shut USAID down would need to go through Congress, and we will fight this.” 

Even some Republicans have spoken out in support of USAID in the midst of the Trump administration’s efforts against the agency. GOP Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on Monday told reporters that he has “felt for a long time that USAID is our way to combat the Belt and Road Initiative, which is China’s effort to really gain influence around the world, including Africa and South America in the Western Hemisphere.”

But Wicker also said he was open to seeing an audit of the agency to shed light on the “mismanagement” pointed to by Rubio. 

“Many people around the world are dependent on U.S. foreign aid, and that means if people can’t access emergency medicines or food, there will be grave consequences,” Kerr said, adding, “After we resolve this immediate humanitarian crisis we can focus on reform.” 

Konyndyk said there’s “a constructive, good-faith conversation that needs to be had about some of the ways that USAID works,” while going on to say that problems at the agency are not going to be solved by “woodchippering” it or merging it into the State Department.

 The Trump administration’s evolving effort against USAID leaves the agency with an uncertain future, but it’s likely to face both legislative and legal challenges in the days ahead.

“I don’t think enough is yet being done. But we’re starting to see the system react,” Konyndyk said. “Ultimately, this is going to end up in Congress, in the courts.”

U.S. President Donald Trump’s longtime ambitions of ushering in an artificial intelligence boom have only been supercharged by the emergence of Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s new AI model, which torpedoed markets last week and wiped hundreds of billions of dollars from AI chipmaker Nvidia’s market cap.

But the DeepSeek disruption has also underscored the deep uncertainty over just how much energy will be necessary to power Trump’s big AI push. The hulking data centers that underpin the technology are notoriously energy-hungry, prompting some predictions of explosive electricity demand in the coming years. 

The sudden emergence of DeepSeek’s new model, DeepSeek-R1, which the company says is built more efficiently than its U.S. competitors, reveals just how hazy that demand outlook actually is in the long run—adding yet another complication to the ongoing U.S.-China tech race.

“We’re really at the beginning of this journey with AI,” said Tanya Das, the director of AI and energy technology policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC). Das compared the current moment to the internet boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when fears arose that the internet would crush the energy grid. That, of course, never really happened. 

It’s “completely unclear where we’re going to land,” said Das, who served at the Energy Department during the Biden administration. “It’s unclear how much more efficient the chips are going to get and the algorithms and the software are going to get.”  

Trump, for his part, is moving full speed ahead. His AI aspirations stretch back to his first presidency, when he unrolled a national AI strategy and established the National AI Initiative Office. Four years later, he has again made AI a centerpiece of his presidential agenda, including by using an emergency declaration to rapidly approve the construction of new AI power stations and vowing to fast-track power plants for AI data centers. 

In a sign of the administration’s all-in approach, Trump’s new Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, cited AI as one of the agency’s top five priorities. “Those looking to invest in and develop AI should be able to do so in the U.S., while we work to ensure data centers and related facilities can be powered and operated in a clean manner with American-made energy,” Zeldin said in a statement. “Under President Trump’s leadership, I have no doubt that we will become the AI capital of the world.” 

To usher in this transformation, Trump has touted a new joint venture by ChatGPT developer OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle to dramatically expand the United States’ AI infrastructure over the next four years. Known as the Stargate Project, the plan could see as much as $500 billion invested over that time frame. 

OpenAI has said it “will begin deploying $100 billion immediately,” although exact financial details remain hazy—and tech billionaire and close presidential advisor Elon Musk has publicly cast doubt on whether the firms have enough money to make the investments. 

Financial questions aside, DeepSeek-R1’s launch has only underscored the importance of this broader AI push for Team Trump. DeepSeek “should be a wake-up call for our industries,” the U.S. president told reporters last week. 

DeepSeek “magnifies the importance of the United States being a haven for AI technology,” said Thomas Pyle, who is the president of the American Energy Alliance and headed the first Trump administration’s Energy Department transition team. “Just add this to the list of things that we are competing with China on.”

It’s harder to gauge exactly how much energy will be necessary to power the AI bonanza that Trump has set his sights on. AI is a notoriously power-hungry technology, consuming copious amounts of electricity and water to power and cool overheating data centers. 

Researchers estimate that one ChatGPT query consumes nearly 10 times as much energy as a Google search. And a Washington Post analysis, for example, found that a 100-word AI chatbot-generated email uses a half-liter of water and enough electricity to power 14 LED light bulbs for one hour. 

Scaled up, the analysis found that if 1 out of 10 Americans generated one such email per week for an entire year, it would take 435,235,476 liters of water—or the total water consumed by all Rhode Island households for one and a half days. It would also consume the equivalent amount of electricity used by all Washington, D.C., households for 20 days. 

In recent years, the United States has not experienced an explosive growth in energy demand nationally, according to a new report by the BPC and Koomey Analytics released on Wednesday. But those pressures are felt differently at the state level, with both Georgia and Virginia grappling with surging data center electricity demand. 

As the AI boom takes off, national data center energy demand could nearly triple by 2028, according to an Energy Department-backed study by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The research, which was published in December 2024, found that data centers’ annual energy consumption could account for between 6.7 and 12 percent of total U.S. electricity use in the next three years. 

But the DeepSeek revelations have added a new layer of uncertainty to projections about future U.S. energy demand, experts said. 

“Although data centers’ electricity use appears to be growing again, exactly how that growth will play out in coming years is deeply uncertain, both because growth in the use of AI is uncertain and because progress in efficiency is uncertain,” the BPC-Koomey Analytics report said. 

“On the efficiency side, this DeepSeek thing is an example of the kind of curveball that can come from new technology innovation,” said Jonathan Koomey, the president of Koomey Analytics and one of the report’s co-authors. 

After the Chinese model triggered a frenzied market scramble last week, International Energy Agency (IEA) experts stressed just how little is currently known about AI’s future energy demands. 

“This abrupt reaction highlights that the market currently does not yet have adequate tools and information to assess the outlook for AI-driven electricity demand,” IEA analyst Thomas Spencer told the Financial Times.

It’s not just the hazy demand outlook that has complicated the AI equation, either. No matter how quickly Trump and the world’s tech giants are eager to scale up their AI infrastructure, experts said a big question is whether utility companies will be able to match that pace. 

“The reality of actually building that scale of electricity infrastructure is that it can’t happen as fast as what the IT guys would love,” said Koomey, who added that the utility industry operates at an “order of magnitude slower” than the tech sector. 

Utility companies build power infrastructure expecting to use it for decades or even hundreds of years, said Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin. 

“The utility industry doesn’t move very fast, and all of a sudden it’s like someone just ran into the conference room shouting, ‘We need power right now,’” Rhodes said. “Not everyone’s just going to snap to attention for the new guy.” 

U.S. tech giants remain undeterred. Hungry for more energy, last year Microsoft announced that it had inked a 20-year deal to revive the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, the site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history. If all goes according to plan, the plant will reopen by 2028. 

As Trump barrels ahead, experts say the hunt for more power will likely drive up fossil fuel production—with big implications for U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and national climate action. 

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, said she expected the AI push to usher in greater production of natural gas, coal, and nuclear power in the United States. 

“The AI field is moving very fast,” she said. “The Chinese new DeepSeek AI is not going to be the last innovation that we see.”

U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Feb. 4  a return to the maximum pressure campaign on Iran, which is meant to starve the regime of cash as a way to curb its regional malfeasance and its nuclear program.

However—and this is becoming a pattern in everything Trump does, from his position on Ukraine’s real war to his self-inflicted trade wars—it’s not entirely clear what the president actually wants, how he means to achieve it, or even to what end.

On paper, the White House has taken a maximalist position against Iran, with the issuance of a presidential memorandum that highlighted all the bad things Iran does and ordered U.S. agencies and departments to do something about it. 

Trump himself, though, has been tendering an olive branch to Iran, proposing a negotiated peace. When signing the memo in the Oval Office on Feb. 4, Trump said that maybe “everybody can live together” and insisted he did not want to use the new authorities he just signed. He reiterated that sentiment the next day on Truth Social, saying, “I want Iran to be a great and successful Country, but one that cannot have a Nuclear Weapon.” He added that he would like to see a “Verified Nuclear Peace Agreement.”

This apparent mixed messaging has led to some confusion. 

“Now it is becoming clear that he does want to talk [to Iran], but what is his position?” asked Gregory Brew, an expert on oil and Iran at Eurasia Group, a consultancy. “The presidential memorandum lays out a much tougher position than what he said.”

The memorandum lays out all the reasons why the Trump administration thinks Iran should be hit with harder penalties, starting—as all U.S. administrations do—with the 1979 Islamic Revolution and continuing through Tehran’s role in destabilizing the Middle East and its nuclear program. What it does not do is lay out any concrete steps, sanctions, or other measures that would turn maximum pressure from a catchphrase into a policy.

The memo orders agencies and departments, such as the State and Treasury, to enforce existing sanctions, enjoins the United Nations to snap back sanctions that should apply when Iran breaches the protocols of the (since-disavowed) 2015 nuclear deal, and toys with the idea of interdicting illicit Iranian oil cargoes on the high seas, as has been done before. But nothing outlined in the memo amounts to serious pressure, let alone of the maximum variety. 

That’s especially problematic because Iran’s lifeline is oil exports, to the tune of around 1.7 million barrels a day, more than 90 percent of which go to China. 

“Unless the memorandum is followed up with new and creative sanctions to limit oil exports to China, then this doesn’t carry a lot of weight,” Brew said.

Even so, there is a lot that the Trump administration could do to nibble away at Iran’s ability to earn money from oil sales, which it uses to finance regional proxy groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as build and maintain the uranium-enriching centrifuges that it would need to develop a nuclear weapon should it choose to do so. Preventing that from happening is among Trump’s highest priorities. 

In late January, U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi warned that Iran was “pressing the gas pedal” in terms of highly enriched uranium. Grossi said that Iran currently possesses around 200 kg (roughly 440 pounds) of uranium enriched up to 60 percent, which is much more than halfway to weapons-grade raw material for a nuclear bomb.     

Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran agreed to limit enrichment to 3.67 percent—the kind of juicing that an old-school nuclear power plant might use. Back then, Iran was a year or more from having the bomb. These days, as then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken said a few months ago, Iran’s breakout time “is now probably “one or two weeks.” 

But it would still take time for Iran to take highly enriched uranium and turn it into a missile-deliverable warhead. Experts estimate it could take Iran up to a year or more, though Tehran is reportedly exploring a faster route to building a functional weapon as it looks to reestablish deterrence in the face of the growing perception that the country is in its weakest position since 1979. 

“Breakout time has for some time now been measured in days, rather than months or years. But having the fissile material required is only part of the process, and estimates for weaponization tend to range from 1-2 years,” said Naysan Rafati, the senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group. 

There is still no evidence that Iran has decided to make a dash for the bomb, but more hawkish figures in the Iranian government have recently made calls for reassessing the country’s nuclear doctrine. Meanwhile, Iran’s diminished status due to Israel’s decimation of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Tehran’s own air defenses has raised questions as to whether Israel might pursue strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities—perhaps with Trump’s blessing. 

But Trump threw cold water on the prospect of preemptive strikes against Iran in a Truth Social post on Feb. 5. “Reports that the United States, working in conjunction with Israel, is going to blow Iran into smithereens, ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED,” Trump said.

If the Trump administration is to put teeth into its maximum pressure campaign, it could start with actually enacting the SHIP Act, a piece of legislation passed last year that empowers the president to take action against buyers of Iranian oil, whether Chinese ports or Chinese refiners. Failing that, they could just stop the ships that transport the stuff or that offload it to other ships on the high seas as a way to get around sanctions.

“It’s simple. To drive Iran’s oil exports down, you have to cast a wider net and sanction more entities involved in that trade,” said Matthew Reed, the vice president of Foreign Reports, a Washington-based energy consulting firm. “That could be done using expanded authorities like the SHIP Act, which [former U.S. President Joe] Biden refused to do.”

There are hundreds of tankers, around 250 or so, that act for Iran as Russia’s shadow fleet does and which are ripe for U.S. designations. There are, even today, ship-to-ship transfers of illicit Iranian oil from big ships to smaller ones that are well off the radar—and also fair game. Trump’s presidential memo hints at those actions but does not implement them.

The big problem, when it comes to Iran, is that it is also a China problem, since Beijing’s independent and financially stressed refiners are the main buyers of Iranian crude. But Trump does not need another trade war with China, on top of the one he started five years ago and goosed over this past weekend with additional tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States.

So the trick is: How do you mess with public enemy number three without seriously angering public enemy number one?

“It sounds cliche, but sanctions really are a cat-and-mouse game,” Reed said. “The U.S. Treasury is the cat. It has to keep up.”