Now that USAID has been dismantled, the officer responsible for it, Pete Marocco, has left the agency.
The conservative firebrand Marocco was notoriously skeptical of foreign assistance during his tenures in the Defense, State, and Commerce departments. Although Democrats were happy for his departure, they voiced concerns about the future of U.S. international assistance and the ferocity of the demonstrations that ensued on Capitol Hill as a result of his term.
According to a senior administration official, “Pete was brought to State with a big mission to conduct an exhaustive review of every dollar spent on foreign assistance.” This information was shared to explain the departure. He revealed shocking misuses of public funds while leading that historic assignment. On his next journey, Pete is going to do great things, as we all expect.
Secretary Marco Rubio appointed Marocco as interim deputy administrator of the agency following President Trump’s merger of USAID with the State Department. Rubio immediately began to reduce the staff of the $40 billion, 10,000-person USAID office.
Despite his resignation, Marocco assured AWN Digital that he would continue to serve President Trump with the same enthusiasm as before. To bring America back from the brink of greatness, we need a leader like him, someone who comes along just once in a lifetime. The swamp is fleeing from President Trump, therefore we should step up our battle.
In an interview with Donald Trump Jr. last week, Marco Rubio revealed that out of the six thousand projects run by the agency, only around nine hundred would be kept running.
Previously, USAID “did whatever they wanted,” as Rubio put it, and did not respect the authority of the State Department.
For RealClearPolitics, Marocco wrote an opinion piece on March 19 in which he claimed that U.S. foreign aid has “created a global welfare state, committed unwelcome political interventions, encouraged unsustainable international labor unions (communism), made countries less capable of thriving in the modern global economy, and funded international organizations that spite our great country.”
The Wall Street Journal was the first to disclose that Marocco was informed by sources that he would be fired from his position at the State Department late last week.
An officer from DOGE is now running USAID.
Upon Marocco’s departure, Democrats rejoiced. Senate Appropriations Committee leading Democrat Brian Schatz of Hawaii argued that Morocco brought “chaos to USAID, reckless and unlawful policy to the State Department, and dismantled long-standing U.S. foreign policy.”
“With his exit, serious questions still remain about the influence he leaves behind and whether or not Secretary Rubio plans to take actions that advance the mission and credibility of the United States,” said Schatz.
Posting a 13-page memo in the agency’s “dissent channel,” employees warned that “operational capacity and strategic efficacy have been and continue to be rapidly degraded” under Marocco’s leadership. He is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and holds a master’s degree in international humanitarian law from the University of Oxford. In 2020, he was employed by USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives.
According to the document, Marocco had intended to personally authorize any office spending over $10,000 out of a total $225 million budget.
“He has leveraged once-routine administrative processes to reopen previously-approved plans, interrogate and redirect country programs, halt movement on programs, procurements, and people, and inject uncertainty into daily operations and office planning,” according to the document. “Intervention is urgently needed.”
