USAID is a key plank in the US overseas propaganda and regime change system. If moving further towards oligarchy [0] involves shutting that down and promoting global stability then it may well be worth it. Indeed, it'll be interesting to see if any evidence is uncovered that operations funded by it were also influencing the US. It is hard to see how they could operate without spreading domestic misinformation, we live in an era where communication networks are global.
Although given all the attention that Elon attracted its way it'll probably have to rebrand even if it does survive the Trump administration. It'll have the same problem as the National Endowment for Democracy in that too many people will know which names to keep an eye out for.
[0] In practice the US has always been quite oligarchic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Inter... - the general pattern for the US-backed coups is propaganda->protests->revolt. USAID seems to be providing the funding for the early phase, if not the entire pipeline to a colour revolution.
"That thing you [defunded] isn't important to me; it's the [regime change] unit. It makes shoes for orphans... nice job breaking it, hero."
~ GLaDOS, Potal
Your basic point is a bit off. A lot of those refugees are because of the destabilisation the US is responsible for. If there is a cover organisation for something terrible and it does a little good in the process it is still terrible. Take that line could justify an entire invasion because they secure peace for the survivors.
The real outrage here is Bernie Sanders defending the organisation. They should have sent in someone who isn't trying to brand themselves as principled, maybe Schiff.
Someone always fills the void, in this case it would likely be China. USAID only gets $50 billion, that's hardly enough to control the world on the scale that I think you're saying is happening.
Against a top-20 economy, sure. $50 billion doesn't look that big to somewhere like Korea with a GDP of around $2 trillion. But against the ones outside the top 30 it is a lot of money. Malaysia @ 34 [0] only has a GDP of less than $500 billion and they're a pretty big country economically speaking.
An annual budget of 50 billion and a defeat-in-detail strategy can get a lot done over the years. Picking a random country like Ukraine, their peak GDP never reached $200 billion. And there is a suspicion [1] that 80-90% of their journalists are being funded by foreign grants with involvement from USAID. It isn't entirely fair to compare the entire USAID budget to Ukraine's GDP, but the point stands that if USAID wanted to reshape Ukraine they have the resources to do it.
I'm very opposed to DT and Musk's operations for what I feel are reasons I've seen validated over time.
At the same time, I wholly agree about the CIA and USAID; my introduction was migrating several web systems for some USAID-funded groups which led me to look at what they were doing.
As far as I can tell, the groups just generally were doing what they were putatively trying to do, mostly education and disaster relief. Which seems to me to be much softer than, say, attempting the assassination of a Lamumba, Castro, or Sankara.
What gives me pause in celebrating what appears to be a rather large attack on the CIA is that I generally don't trust Trump, either his motivations or his political abilities, in dealing with these kinds of institutions.
I worry that even if he disbanded the CIA and FBI the function of the foreign and domestic secret police agencies will still need to be performed by someone or other, as they seem like the kinds of functions that a lot of folks have naturalized as being part of the modern capitalist state. And it may be the case that a modern capitalist state cannot work without its secret police.
In any case, it seems likely that whatever they replace these groups with, new institutions won't have the same cultural commitments as the existing groups, which at least have a pretense of supporting "US Democratic Principles". For all the internal contradictions that allowed those folks to justify commiting crime after crime, my feeling is that replacing them with some post-truth nihilists will result in the naked application of authoritarianism.
That's my worry, but hey, I get stuff wrong all the time and there are 3-5 points where my analysis could be off.
Part of Project 2025 was to purge those who would not swear feality to the new GOP regime. That is especially true in intelligence agencies like CIA and FBI. They want as many of those who are loyal to democracy to quit/get fired as possible so they can be replaced with brown shirt like cronies.
Although given all the attention that Elon attracted its way it'll probably have to rebrand even if it does survive the Trump administration. It'll have the same problem as the National Endowment for Democracy in that too many people will know which names to keep an eye out for.
[0] In practice the US has always been quite oligarchic.