When Elon Musk set about “feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” as he put it, it wasn’t only supporters of President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda who were cheering the dismantlement of the foreign aid agency.

The Kremlin was, too.

“Smart move,” Dmitry Medvedev, a former Russian president who is currently the deputy chair of the country’s security council, chimed in from Moscow, which for years had chafed at the U.S. Agency for International Development’s actions before forcing it out of the country in 2012.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is closely aligned with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, celebrated what he called an end to the funding of “globalist” organizations in a Facebook post Tuesday. Orban’s political director said he “couldn’t be happier” with what Musk and Trump were doing. (Musk reposted the comment Tuesday).

Nayib Bukele, the leader of El Salvador, who has embraced strongman tactics to crack down on gang violence, also struck out at the aid programs, saying in a post that funds had been “funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas and destabilizing movements.”

As protesters in Washington gathered Monday in front of the USAID headquarters to support the agency, leaders intolerant of dissent rejoiced. Trump’s administration was dismantling an agency they long have seen as a threat, often for pointing up their governments’ transgressions.

Agency grants to promote democracy, human rights and good governance have gone to support election monitoring groups, anti-corruption watchdogs, independent media outlets and human rights organizations — exactly the kind of oversight that leaders like Putin detest.

Democracy initiatives amounted to $1.58 billion of USAID funding in 2023, a sliver of the agency’s annual budget. But they can attract outsize attention. Grant recipients often cross swords with the world’s authoritarian leaders, who view the activities as a threat to their power.

Orban — who met in December with Trump and Musk — and other foreign officials have persisted in asking the U.S. government to end such programs over the years.

“News of USAID’s dismantlement will be celebrated by dictators around the world and lamented by democrats around the world,” said Thomas Carothers, a former State Department official who leads the democracy, conflict and government program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

Discontinuation of the democracy and human rights funding, he said, would have a significant impact on small organizations, which often find themselves waging David vs. Goliath battles.

“It means that anti-corruption activists trying to expose government theft are unable to do that,” Carothers said. “It means that independent news outlets that are struggling to stay free of government control don’t have the resources to do that. It means that lots of people fighting against repressive power will be less able to do that.”

USAID has come under fire for wasteful spending in the past, particularly during the war in Afghanistan, when hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on botched projects, such as an incomplete road and a minimally used power plant. But Musk has said the entire agency needs to “die,” not just wasteful programs.

Much of USAID’s work focuses on health and humanitarian assistance. In 2023, the agency provided more than $1.9 billion in food aid. The agency also delivers vaccines, HIV treatment and childbirth care, and combats malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases.

The drive by Trump and Musk to unravel the agency is part of a wider campaign against almost all American foreign aid. Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 ordering a halt to the aid so that the government could review programs.

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was taking over as acting administrator of USAID. That was followed on Tuesday night by an official memo posted online that said the entire global workforce of the agency would be put on leave by the end of Friday.

Earlier, officials at a different aid agency, the State Department’s bureau for democracy, human rights and labor, issued stop-work orders to contractors.

Authoritarian leaders have criticized the bureau’s work, which includes significant democracy promotion programs, and they would welcome any erosion of its authority.

USAID funding for those same kinds of initiatives has had significant impact abroad.

In Russia, for example, the election monitoring group Golos, which received the American grants, documented extensive voting irregularities during the 2011 parliamentary elections. Anger about those violations led to the biggest protests to date against Putin’s rule and galvanized a broader opposition movement led by the late Alexei Navalny.

At the time, Putin likened foreign grant recipients to Judas. The following year, as he pushed Russia deeper into authoritarianism, he terminated all of the agency’s programs in the country.

In 2023, after Putin ordered a Russian invasion of Ukraine and led a broad crackdown at home, the co-founder of Golos, Grigory Melkonyants, was jailed. He is being tried for carrying out the activities of an “undesirable” organization, and has pleaded not guilty.

In nations once in Moscow’s orbit, including Ukraine, the top recipient of USAID funds, a withdrawal of U.S. aid would benefit Russia, some analysts say. Elsewhere in the world, particularly in nations where Washington and Beijing have been competing, China could fill the void.

“Trump’s administration and Musk’s actions have created significant opportunities for China and other authoritarian regimes,” said Li Qiang, the founder of China Labor Watch, which seeks to end the forced labor and trafficking of Chinese workers. The group’s State Department funding has been frozen.

“The U.S. reduction in foreign aid and focus on economic development is essentially mimicking China’s successful model: prioritizing economic growth while neglecting human rights, environmental protection, and labor rights,” Li said.

The Trump administration has portrayed USAID programs as an example of liberal culture run amok, and of government waste.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday accused the agency of wasting taxpayer money to promote diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in Serbia and Ireland, a “transgender comic book” in Peru and a “transgender opera” in Colombia.

Three of the four grants she cited were not in fact USAID programs, according to a review of government records by The New York Times. They were initiatives funded directly by the State Department. The Biden administration expanded support for LGBT rights abroad and diversity initiatives, but the bulk of USAID’s work is focused elsewhere.

Iran’s criticism of the agency has been more conspiratorial. It has accused the U.S. government of plotting covert operations aimed at overthrowing the Iranian leadership through funding Persian media outlets and human rights organizations focused on Iran. Iranian state media routinely have labeled these funds and groups as “CIA operatives” to discredit them.

Musk is using some of the same rhetoric, denouncing the agency as a “criminal organization” and amplifying conspiratorial posts.

Some of Musk’s comments were indistinguishable from those that Vyacheslav Volodin, chair of the lower house of the Russian parliament, made on Telegram today, when he, too, called USAID a “criminal organization.”

Humanitarian initiatives can enhance American “soft power,” supporters say, which can buy the United States goodwill and leverage in countries across the world for a comparatively small fraction of federal spending. In 2023, USAID funding represented approximately 0.7% of the U.S. federal budget. In 2021, before the war in Ukraine, it accounted for 0.4%.

The broadside against the agency in Washington has led some to wonder if European governments or private donors will step in to pay for the threatened initiatives.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled Russian oil tycoon and Putin opponent, said in a message on Telegram on Monday that he and a fellow Russian businessman, Boris Zimin, would step in to fund “Russian-language media, human rights and analytical projects, as well as humanitarian projects operating in Ukraine.” But he cautioned they wouldn’t be able to help all grant recipients in full.

Zselyke Csaky, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform, calculated that the United States spends about $2 billion a year on direct democracy promotion programs, including both direct State Department funds and USAID grants. Europe, she said, spends about $4 billion, and would need to spend about 50% more to make up the difference.

“I find that honestly quite unlikely,” Csaky said.

The immediate problem, she said, is the speed of the dismantling. “This is happening right now, and I know many organizations that will need to shut down,” she said.

“By the time European countries respond,” she said, “there may not be much of the ecosystem to save.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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