The Dismantling of USAID in 2025 and Whether a President Can Close an Agency

On the morning of Monday, February 3, 2025, employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development who arrived at their headquarters in the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington were told not to come in. An email sent overnight had instructed staff at the building to work remotely. Over the preceding weekend, the agency's website had gone dark, its social media accounts had stopped posting, and senior security officials who had tried to stop representatives of the Department of Government Efficiency from entering secure areas had been put on leave. Elon Musk, who led DOGE, said publicly that weekend that he and his team had been shutting the agency down, and that the president agreed. That same day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he was now the agency's acting administrator. The agency had been founded under John F. Kennedy in 1961. It had outlasted the Cold War, a dozen presidents and countless efforts to trim its budget. Within weeks it would be all but gone.

In short: In early 2025 the administration shut USAID's headquarters, put most of its staff on leave, cancelled the large majority of its programs and, by July 1, moved what remained into the State Department. Lawsuits argued that a president cannot abolish an agency Congress created by statute and funded through appropriations; courts issued some early orders but largely let the dismantling proceed. The legal question was never fully answered, which means it will come up again.

What USAID was and how it came to be

USAID began with the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which reorganized America's scattered aid programs. President Kennedy created the agency by executive order that year to carry out the new law. For decades it existed in that somewhat ambiguous state: authorized by Congress, funded by Congress every year, but formally established by a presidential order.

That changed in 1998. In the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act, Congress folded several foreign affairs agencies into the State Department, including the U.S. Information Agency and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. It considered doing the same to USAID and chose not to. Instead, it established USAID by statute as an independent establishment outside the State Department, with its administrator reporting to the secretary of state. That 1998 decision mattered enormously in 2025, because it meant the agency was not simply the president's creation to unmake.

Over its lifetime USAID ran programs that were often bipartisan in origin. The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, launched by President George W. Bush, relied heavily on USAID to deliver HIV treatment. The agency ran famine early-warning systems, malaria control, maternal and child health programs, disaster response, agricultural development and support for elections and independent media abroad. Its budget, typically a few tens of billions of dollars a year, was well under one percent of total federal spending, though polls consistently showed that Americans imagined foreign aid to be a far larger share of the budget than it is.

How presidents used to reorganize the government

There is a well-worn, lawful way for a president to rearrange the executive branch, and its history is worth knowing because it was not used in 2025. Beginning in the 1930s, Congress passed a series of reorganization acts that gave presidents temporary authority to propose restructuring plans. Under most versions, a plan took effect unless one house of Congress voted to reject it. Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter used that authority to create, merge and reshape agencies.

The Supreme Court's 1983 decision in INS v. Chadha, which struck down one-house legislative vetoes, upended that system. Congress rewrote the authority in 1984 to require a joint resolution of approval, and then let it lapse. Since then, presidents who wanted to reorganize major agencies have generally had to ask Congress for a law. President Obama asked for renewed reorganization authority to merge trade and business agencies; Congress did not grant it. President Trump's first administration proposed a broad reorganization plan in 2018, but most of it required legislation and did not advance.

The 1998 consolidation that kept USAID independent was itself the product of that process. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, the Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime critic of foreign aid, pushed hard to fold USAID into the State Department. The Clinton administration resisted. The compromise, written into law, merged other agencies and left USAID standing as a separate statutory body. Whatever one thinks of that compromise, it was a law, negotiated in public and signed by a president.

How the shutdown happened

The dismantling moved in stages. On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order pausing foreign development assistance for 90 days pending review. Within days the State Department issued stop-work orders to most aid programs around the world, including many that delivered medicine and food. A waiver for lifesaving humanitarian assistance was announced, but aid groups reported that it was slow and confusing to use, in part because the payment systems and staff needed to process it had been shut down.

Then came the weekend at the start of February and the closure of the headquarters. Thousands of employees and contractors were put on administrative leave or laid off, and the agency's overseas staff were told to prepare to return home. On March 10, Secretary Rubio announced that after a review, about five in six USAID programs had been cancelled and the rest would be administered through the State Department. On July 1, 2025, the State Department formally took over USAID's remaining functions, and the agency effectively ceased operating as an independent body.

Along the way, Congress passed a rescission package in July 2025 that cancelled billions of dollars in foreign aid funds, and in late August the administration used a pocket rescission to let a further sum lapse. Those steps are covered elsewhere on this site. This post is about the prior question: whether the executive branch had the power to close the agency at all.

The legal case against the closure

Several lawsuits challenged different parts of the dismantling. Their core argument ran like this.

First, Congress created USAID by statute in 1998. Only Congress can abolish an agency it has established in law; the president's duty under the Constitution is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not to repeal them by shutting the office that carries them out. When Congress has wanted to reorganize agencies, it has passed laws to do so, or granted presidents temporary reorganization authority subject to congressional approval. No such authority was in effect in 2025.

Second, Congress appropriated money for USAID's programs, and the Impoundment Control Act requires that appropriated funds be spent unless Congress agrees to rescind them. Cancelling programs wholesale and withholding the money amounted, the plaintiffs argued, to an impoundment carried out without congressional consent.

Third, some cases argued that the way the closure was carried out violated the Constitution's Appointments Clause, because Musk and DOGE were exercising significant government authority without having been appointed to an office in the manner the Constitution requires.

What the courts did

The results were mixed and mostly temporary. In a case brought by associations of foreign service officers and government employees, a federal judge in Washington briefly blocked the administration from placing thousands of USAID employees on leave in early February, then lifted that order later in the month, concluding that the employees' claims belonged in the administrative channels Congress created for federal personnel disputes rather than in district court.

In a separate case brought by aid contractors and grantees over the funding freeze, Judge Amir Ali ordered the government to pay for work already completed. The administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene, and on March 5, 2025, the Court declined by a five-to-four vote to block the order, leaving the payment requirement in place. Payments came slowly afterward, and further litigation followed over the scope of the order.

In Maryland, Judge Theodore Chuang ruled in March 2025 that the role DOGE and Musk had played in dismantling the agency likely violated the Appointments Clause, and ordered certain steps reversed. An appeals court put that ruling on hold soon after. No court ordered the headquarters reopened or the agency restored to its pre-2025 form, and by the time several cases reached later stages, the functions had already been moved to the State Department.

The pattern is worth noticing. Courts were willing to address specific harms, like unpaid invoices, but reluctant to undo the larger reorganization, often pointing to procedural obstacles about who could sue and where. Speed was itself a strategy: by the time the legal question about the agency's existence could be fully argued, there was little agency left to save.

The best argument on the other side

The administration and its supporters made a case that deserves a fair statement. They argued that foreign aid had drifted from American interests; that some programs funded causes many taxpayers would object to; that USAID's administrator reports to the secretary of state anyway, so moving its work under State was a management decision within the executive branch's authority; and that the president, as head of the executive branch and the official responsible for foreign affairs, has broad power to decide how diplomacy and assistance are carried out. They also pointed out that Congress did vote, in July 2025, to rescind a large share of foreign aid, which suggested lawmakers were not as committed to the old arrangement as the lawsuits claimed.

Some of this is fair. There were real debates about USAID's effectiveness, its reliance on large contractors and its overhead. Reasonable people across the spectrum have argued for reorganizing American aid, including folding it into the State Department, as Congress itself considered in the 1990s.

But the method is the problem. Reorganizing a statutory agency is something Congress can do, and has done, by passing a law. A Congress that rescinded some foreign aid did not thereby repeal the 1998 statute establishing USAID. And the foreign affairs power, broad as it is, has never been understood to let a president disregard statutes that structure how foreign assistance is delivered. The precedent being set is not about foreign aid in particular. If a president can close one agency Congress created, by locking its doors and moving its staff, the same tools are available for any other.

There is also the human cost, which deserves to be stated without exaggeration. Public health researchers have published modelling studies projecting that the abrupt end of HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and nutrition programs will lead to large numbers of preventable deaths in coming years, especially among children. Those are projections, not counts, and they carry real uncertainty. Field reports from clinics and aid groups in 2025 described medicine shortages, closed treatment programs and stalled food deliveries. The people affected had no vote in any of this.

The question that remains open

The courts never squarely resolved whether a president may dismantle an agency established by statute. That leaves the question hanging over every other independent office and agency Congress has created, from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the Department of Education, which faced its own dismantling effort in 2025.

For the new Congress, I think the lessons are practical. Statutes that create agencies can be written to make dismantling harder: specifying minimum staffing, protecting headquarters functions, requiring notice and congressional approval before major reorganizations, and providing clear rights to sue. Appropriations can be written to fund named programs through named offices. None of that guarantees compliance, but it gives courts clearer instructions. Congress also has an easier task in front of it than rebuilding from scratch. Many of USAID's career experts, from epidemiologists to famine analysts, still work in the field for other governments, universities and charities. Some of its programs were taken over, at least in part, by other donors or by the State Department. Whatever form American development work takes next, it will depend on Congress deciding what that form should be, in a statute, rather than leaving it to whichever administration holds the keys to the building.

And Congress can hold hearings, compel testimony and use its own budget power to insist that statutory agencies be restored or replaced by deliberate law rather than by a lockout.

What you can do

Whatever one thinks about foreign aid, the way USAID was closed sets a precedent that could reach any agency. Here are concrete steps.

• Call your members of Congress. The representatives lookup gives you their phone numbers, contact forms and latest votes; ask whether they support legislation requiring congressional approval before any statutory agency is closed or merged.
• Follow the votes on foreign aid and reorganization. Congress's votes and bills are tracked on the site, including spending and rescission measures.
• Read the reporting on what happened abroad. Our topic page on human rights and foreign aid collects coverage of the programs that ended and the people affected.
• See the wider pattern. The topic page on agencies being gutted tracks similar efforts at other departments.
• Support humanitarian and global health groups. Many organizations that partnered with USAID are seeking private support; the organizations directory lists nonprofits by cause.

The Reagan Building still stands on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks from the White House. What was decided there in February 2025, by a lockout rather than a law, is still waiting for Congress to answer.