Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk, the tech billionaire deputized by President Trump to slash federal spending, sought to smooth over their ugly confrontation in the White House last week with an awkward social media embrace on Monday, as Mr. Rubio formalized deep cuts to foreign aid that Mr. Musk had demanded.
Mr. Rubio and Mr. Musk clashed during a meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House last Thursday, in which the world’s richest man jeered the secretary of state for failing to make more sweeping staffing cuts to the agencies under his purview. In the same meeting, Mr. Rubio bristled at how Mr. Musk had undercut his leadership to flatten the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government’s lead agency for distributing foreign aid.
On Monday, Mr. Rubio thanked Mr. Musk’s team at the Department of Government Efficiency for aiding in making the drastic cuts he had resisted, and announced that the agency’s remaining work would be subsumed under the State Department.
Mr. Rubio wrote on his personal account on X, the social media platform owned by Mr. Musk, that 83 percent of U.S.A.I.D.’s programs were being cut. “The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” he added.
Mr. Musk replied: “Tough, but necessary. Good working with you.”
During the meeting last week, Mr. Trump defended Mr. Rubio for doing a “great job” and decreed that Mr. Musk’s team would be merely advising Cabinet secretaries about future cuts. But Mr. Rubio’s apparent embrace of Mr. Musk’s objectives revealed the extent to which the billionaire Trump supporter wields power in the administration.
Mr. Rubio’s announcement appeared to be the official culmination of the process of culling foreign aid that had been underway for weeks, as Mr. Musk led the charge to greatly reduce the footprint of U.S.A.I.D., which manages about $42.5 billion in global assistance programs that represent less than 1 percent of the annual federal budget. The moves, which included canceling contracts, turning off payment systems, and laying off or forcing the vast majority of staff onto administrative leave, crippled the agency and left the global humanitarian aid industry that relied on the agency’s funding in limbo.