Ex-USAID Head Says America Will ‘Pay The Price’ From Musk, Trump Attacking Agency

A former administrator of the United States Agency for International Development went after billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump on Thursday as the administration looks to shut down the agency responsible for distributing billions in foreign aid.

“The notion that the agency are criminals and all that, that’s a lot of garbage. It’s a lie, it’s an insult,” said Andrew Natsios, a Republican who served as the USAID head under President George W. Bush, in an interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.

Musk — who’s on a cost-cutting crusade with his nonofficial Department of Government Efficiency title — has taken aim at what he’s called a “criminal organization” and an agency he’s described as feeding into a “wood chipper.”

Nearly all USAID staff have been laid off, The New York Times reported Thursday, just as unions of workers with the agency have sued the Trump administration over its “unconstitutional and illegal” moves. The administration has also put a freeze on aid programs.

He noted that one result of the Trump-Musk duo making “an example” out of USAID is the lack of an early warning system for diseases in 90 countries.

“We’re not going to have that anymore, it’s going to disappear. It’s already shut down now. In my view, this is an enormous risk for the United States,” he said.

“You know what happens when famines take place? People start moving en masse. If we shut down the emergency programs at AID, which is what’s happened, we’re going to have famines across the globe and guess where they’re going to end up? In Europe and the United States.”

He continued, “The people, when they start panicking, they start moving. In almost every famine that’s taken place in the last 50 years and we’re going to pay the price later on.”

Natsios, a former vice president of the evangelical non-profit organization World Vision U.S. and an Army Reserves veteran who served in the Gulf War, declared that he’s “not on the left” before noting that the “long-term beneficiary” of USAID is the U.S. itself.

He argued that the reason that Trump and Musk have targeted the agency is because it has a “relatively weak constituency” in the Global South.

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“You don’t see the programs, if you saw the program there’d be no one in the Congress voting against it,” said Natsios, who cited “far-right wing” lawmakers and “prominent” conservatives — including Rush Limbaugh — who supported USAID programs after seeing them in action around the world.

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