Killing USAID by contrast is, as experts have noted, a gift to Russia and China. It's a gift to Russia because the current largest line item the USAID budget goes to Ukraine, which has been as devastated by the Russian invasion as many of those European countries were by the Nazis in 1945.

Even as Mr Musk was speaking, workers at USAID ’s headquarters in Washington were being told not to come in the next day. Some 600 of the agency’s staff seem to have been locked out of their emails. That followed a weekend in which the agency’s website went offline;

Elon Musk has begun swinging his wrecking ball at the US government, with concerns growing over the unprecedented power that President Donald Trump has handed to the world's richest man. Musk's powers have seemed almost unbounded,

Musk, the world's richest man, has been granted broad latitude by President Trump to reduce the size of the federal government.