Rubio acting USAID head

President Donald Trump named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting administrator of the US Agency for International Development on Monday, saying that the agency “has long strayed from its original mission of responsibly advancing American interests abroad, and it is now abundantly clear that significant portions of USAID funding are not aligned with the core national interests of the United States.”

“It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out,” Trump said.

“My frustration with USAID goes back to my time in Congress,” Rubio told reporters. “It’s a completely unresponsive agency. It’s supposed to respond to policy directives at the State Department and it refuses to do so.”

Rubio said that he’s delegated authority, as acting director, “to someone, but I stay in touch with him.”

“USAID is not an independent nongovernmental entity. It is an entity that spends taxpayer dollars and it needs to spend it, as the statute says, in alignment with policy directives they get from the secretary of state, the National Security Council  and the president,” he added. —JNS