Donald Trump and Elon Musk work to shut down US humanitarian aid agency

euronews (in English)

Thousands of USAID employees have been laid off and programmes shut down around the world in the two weeks since Trump became president and imposed a sweeping freeze on foreign assistance.

Transcript

00:00Staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development have been told to stay out of

00:05its Washington headquarters after billionaire Elon Musk announced that President Donald

00:10Trump had agreed to shut the agency down.

00:15A notice sent to staff early on Monday confirmed the closure, with around 600 employees reporting

00:21they were locked out of the agency's computer systems overnight.

00:26President Donald Trump has since defended his plans to shut down the agency, insisting

00:31it's rife with fraud and run by radical left lunatics.

00:34We just want to do the right thing. It's something that should have been done a long time ago.

00:40It went crazy during the Biden administration. They went totally crazy, what they were doing

00:45and the money they were giving to people that shouldn't be getting it and to agencies and

00:51others that shouldn't be getting it. It was a shame. Tremendous fraud.

00:56Demonstrators gathered outside the USAID headquarters in protest against the move, while Democratic

01:02lawmakers vowed to act, slamming the agency's shutdown as illegal.

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