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Europe|Foreign Strongmen Cheer as Musk Dismantles U.S. Aid Agency
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/world/europe/usaid-russia-putin.html
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Leaders in Russia, Hungary and El Salvador welcomed the Trump administration’s assault on U.S.A.I.D., which many authoritarians have seen as a threat.
Feb. 5, 2025, 5:44 a.m. ET
When Elon Musk set about “feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper,” as he put it, it wasn’t only supporters of President Trump’s “America First” agenda who were cheering the dismantlement of the foreign aid agency.
The Kremlin was, too.
“Smart move,” Dmitri A. Medvedev, a former Russian president who is currently the deputy chairman 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 V. Putin of Russia, celebrated what he called an end to the funding of “globalist” organizations in a Facebook post on Tuesday. Mr. Orban’s political director said he “couldn’t be happier” with what Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump were doing. (Mr. Musk reposted the comment on 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 on Monday in front of the U.S.A.I.D. headquarters to support the agency, leaders intolerant of dissent rejoiced. Mr. Trump’s administration was dismantling an agency they long have seen as a threat, often for pointing up their governments’ transgressions.
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