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

A former administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development went after billionaire Elon Musk and President Donald Trump on Thursday because the administration appears to close down the company liable for distributing billions in international support.

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

Musk — who’s on a cost-cutting campaign together with his nonofficial Department of Government Efficiency title — has taken intention at what he’s known as a “criminal organization” and an company he’s described as feeding right into a “wood chipper.”

Nearly all USAID workers have been laid off, The New York Times reported Thursday, simply as unions of staff with the company have sued the Trump administration over its “unconstitutional and illegal” strikes. The administration additionally has put a freeze on support applications.

He famous that one results of the Trump-Musk duo making “an example” out of USAID is the dearth of an early warning system for illnesses in 90 international locations.

“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 stated.

“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 vp of the evangelical nonprofit group World Vision U.S. and an Army Reserves veteran who served within the Gulf War, declared that he’s “not on the left” earlier than noting that the “long-term beneficiary” of USAID is the U.S. itself.

He argued that the rationale that Trump and Musk have focused the company is as a result of it has a “relatively weak constituency” within the Global South.

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