The Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development may be the first step in a broader plan to use foreign aid as a support system for fossil fuels.
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has put a 90-day freeze on most foreign assistance, ordered an end to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, and deployed Tesla CEO Elon Musk to slash federal agencies and personnel. It’s all in line with Project 2025, the policy handbook produced by the Heritage Foundation with input from more than 100 conservative organizations.
The administration’s attempts to entirely dismantle USAID — led by unelected billionaire Musk — go beyond what Project 2025 proposed. Musk has said he is “feeding USAID into the woodchipper,” and the Trump administration has moved to fold the agency into the State Department. A federal judge Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from putting thousands of the agency’s employees on leave.
It’s unclear whether Musk and the Heritage Foundation are on the same page, and neither responded to requests for comment. But Project 2025 offers insight into what Trump allies want out of U.S. foreign aid: the promotion of fossil fuels and the elimination of foreign country regulations that American industry finds burdensome.
The conservative blueprint calls for downsizing the agency’s work, rescinding its climate policies and shuttering programs aimed at curbing global warming. It pushes anti-labor union reforms in Latin America, admonishes USAID for cutting off “clean fossil fuels” in Africa and proposes using taxpayer dollars to “promote private-sector solutions to the world’s true development problems.”
“USAID should cease its war on fossil fuels in the developing world and support the responsible management of oil and gas reserves as the quickest way to end wrenching poverty and the need for open-ended foreign aid,” the blueprint says.
A State Department spokesperson did not respond directly to questions about its intentions for USAID, saying Secretary of State Marco Rubio is initiating a review of all foreign assistance programs to ensure they are efficient and consistent with Trump’s America First agenda. The agency referred any questions about USAID to the statement on its website about personnel cuts.
The executive order that prompted the 90-day aid freeze calls for Rubio and other agency heads, in consultation with the director of the Office of Management and Budget, to determine which programs to cease or modify. Newly confirmed OMB head Russell Vought was a key architect of Project 2025.
During the Biden administration, USAID took on a greater role in addressing climate change — through projects focused on resilience and renewable energy — though it devoted only a fraction of its budget to the issue.
Under Trump, USAID — if it survives — could become an agency just tasked with providing global food and humanitarian assistance, with international fossil fuel promotion doled out to other agencies.
For example, the U.S. International Development Finance Corp., which provides private sector funding for development in lower- and middle-income countries, could be expanded to support bilateral efforts on fossil fuel projects, said Karen Mathiasen, a project director at the Center for Global Development.
The Department of Energy also has a beefed-up Office of International Affairs after it got more funding and personnel during the first Trump administration. The office works across government to advance U.S. energy goals. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fracking executive, has said global energy poverty could be achieved in part by increasing U.S. fossil fuel exports.
“I can see the Trump people just repurposing aid to be some sort of pro-energy promotion kind of thing,” said Kurt Donnelly, former deputy assistant secretary of State for energy diplomacy during the first Trump administration.
On it’s face, he said, helping provide poorer countries with reliable access to energy is a good idea.
“But if the real goal of that program is just to sell them oil and natural gas as the solution to this, and they have to buy ours of course … that’s really a bad approach,” Donnelly said.
The Musk factor
Aid has long been a “tool of foreign policy,” said Max Primorac, who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on USAID and is senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Primorac, who served as a senior USAID official in the first Trump administration, did not respond to requests for comment for this story but spoke to POLITICO’s E&E News last year.
“It’s perverse that, on the one hand, we’re talking about alleviating poverty through foreign aid, but adopting climate policies that actually aggravate poverty for the simple reason that we’re preventing them from investing their own oil and gas technologies and industries that could finance their own social services, to create wealth, jobs and be more sovereign,” he said last year.
Some Republican lawmakers share that sentiment. During Rubio’s confirmation hearing for secretary of State, Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso asked the then-nominee if he was committed to ensuring the State Department promoted all forms of energy across the globe, including oil, gas and coal.
“In fact, it should be a centerpiece … of our economic diplomacy,” Rubio responded.
Rubio has tapped Peter Marocco, who heads the Office of Foreign Assistance at State, to be acting deputy administrator of USAID. The conservative movement’s plan for USAID is to ramp up funding to local faith-based organizations while dramatically slashing money flowing to international NGOs.
But reshaping the agency into one that helps the U.S. achieve Trump’s vision of American energy dominance overlooks how markets have changed, argue former officials.
“USAID isn’t pursuing its own agenda on renewable energy versus fossil fuels,” said Gillian Caldwell, the former chief climate officer at USAID under Biden. “We’re responding to a demand signal from partner governments around the world, almost all of whom are operating in a scenario in which the price of solar has dropped by 85 percent and the price of wind has dropped by 50 percent.”
The moves to remake USAID have gotten muddied by Musk’s intervention. Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency have been given unprecedented access to government infrastructure — including a critical Treasury Department payment system — and have moved quickly and possibly illegally to cut programs and personnel across the government.
Congressional Republicans have largely stayed silent amid concerns that Musk’s moves violate Congress’ constitutional power of the purse. But lawsuits are starting to emerge, and Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who leads the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Wednesday that Musk has gone too far.
Democrats have called the moves to shutter USAID corrupt, cruel and unconstitutional.
“Getting rid of [USAID] makes us all less safe. It is also downright illegal,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md) said during a rally outside the Capital on Wednesday where a crowd chanted “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Elon Musk has got to go.”
Even some conservative critics are concerned with the Trump administration’s blunt approach to downsizing government.
Neither Musk nor Trump has the power to simply cut agencies or programs that have been funded by Congress, said Jessica Riedl, an economist at the conservative Manhattan Institute who has spent more than two decades identifying government waste.
“I am sympathetic to the idea that there is significant waste and unnecessary expenditures in the federal budget, but the way to cut spending is to go through Congress and pass laws either rescinding or preventing the future appropriations of these programs,” she said. “The president can’t unilaterally cancel spending that has been approved by Congress and signed into law.”
The Trump administration’s attempt to gut USAID has also stoked worries that without experts in place to administer foreign assistance, there will be more opportunities for fraud, waste and abuse, said Chris Milligan, a former USAID counselor during Trump’s first term.
“Handing billions of dollars to a department that doesn’t have the right experience is not going to protect taxpayers’ money, is not going to make America safe and is not going to be effective for our foreign policy,” he said.
Trump could remake USAID to promote fossil fuels
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