The agency, its few remaining staff, functions and programmes will now be absorbed into the US State Department, marking an end to humanitarian relief work which USAID supporters say saved countless lives around the world.

Axar.az informs, citing Euronews, after six decades of operations, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has been ended by US President Donald Trump.

The closure is part of the administration’s crackdown on the federal government and was one of the prime targets of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which sought to eliminate “wasteful” government spending.

In 1961, US Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act, and the then President John F. Kennedy set up USAID as an independent agency through an executive order, merging other agencies into the new federal body.

It’s mission over the years has been to partner with countries to end extreme poverty and promote resilient, democratic societies. The Trump administration however says that there is “little to show” for the agency’s six decades of work.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had ordered USAID and its remaining programmes to be absorbed into the State Department by Tuesday.

“Beyond creating a globe-spanning NGO industrial complex at taxpayer expense, USAID has little to show since the end of the Cold War,” Rubio said in a social media post on Tuesday.

With only a tiny fraction of the 13,000 staffers and institutional contractors who ran USAID slated to keep their jobs, some said they were labouring to push out what promised funding they could before their systems went offline to the small slice of programmes worldwide that have survived the administration’s purge of foreign assistance.

“That ends today,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a social media posting Tuesday. American taxpayers would no longer “pay taxes to fund failed governments in faraway lands," Rubio vowed.

Trump moved to dismantle the agency within weeks of assuming office for his second tenure as president. He and Musk accused the agency, with little evidence, of fraud, waste and promoting a leftist and liberal agenda.

Supporters say USAID has fundamentally improved health systems and humanitarian networks around the world, promoted democracy and boosted countries and people out of poverty in a way that has saved lives, stemmed refugee crises and wars, and built markets and trading partners for Washington.

The Trump administration's new slimmed-down aid system would cut bureaucracy to respond more quickly to crises, empower diplomats out in the field at a reduced number of regional bureaus, and emphasise US trade, not aid, stressed Rubio.

Asked for comment about the last days of USAID as an independent agency, the State Department said it would be introducing this week its foreign assistance successor, America First.

“The new process will ensure there is proper oversight and that every tax dollar spent will help advance our national interests,” the department said.