Thousands of USAID employees have been laid off and programmes shut down around the world in the two weeks since Trump became president and imposed a sweeping freeze on foreign assistance.
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00:00Staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development have been told to stay out of
00:05its Washington headquarters after billionaire Elon Musk announced that President Donald
00:10Trump had agreed to shut the agency down.
00:15A notice sent to staff early on Monday confirmed the closure, with around 600 employees reporting
00:21they were locked out of the agency's computer systems overnight.
00:26President Donald Trump has since defended his plans to shut down the agency, insisting
00:31it's rife with fraud and run by radical left lunatics.
00:34We just want to do the right thing. It's something that should have been done a long time ago.
00:40It went crazy during the Biden administration. They went totally crazy, what they were doing
00:45and the money they were giving to people that shouldn't be getting it and to agencies and
00:51others that shouldn't be getting it. It was a shame. Tremendous fraud.
00:56Demonstrators gathered outside the USAID headquarters in protest against the move, while Democratic
01:02lawmakers vowed to act, slamming the agency's shutdown as illegal.