The ‘Toy’ Trump Gave to Musk

A big question mark looms over the cooperative relationships the United States has established with so many countries over the past 50 years.

It has not even been a month since Donald Trump took office as president, yet the earthquake he has generated with its epicenter in the White House seems to have been felt in even the most remote corner of the world.

First, he put the brakes on migrants without documentation (estimated at 14 million people in the United States); then he attacked by imposing aggressive increases in tariffs, potentially a lethal depth charge for many companies whose trade depends on the United States. And then he put Elon Musk in charge of the nation’s scissors, promising to cut the welfare-driven foreign policy that Washington implemented during the Kennedy era, among other things.

It is worth recalling the episode in 2022 when Musk bought Twitter in a chaotic acquisition, paying $44 billion, an unprecedented figure at the time. As soon as he took control, the tycoon founder of Tesla and SpaceX set about restructuring the social network, determined to turn a platform he considered to be stagnant into something profitable. In a matter of weeks, he fired four out of five employees and transformed Twitter into a laboratory for his vision of free speech and business efficiency.

A few years later, and now with Trump’s blessing, he appears to be trying the same approach, there being a slight difference in the size of his new “toy.” He is no longer engaging with a company realizing $5 billion in annual revenue, as Twitter was when Musk bought it, but with the near $7 trillion U.S. federal budget, a colossus literally a thousand times larger.

In his new term, Trump has placed Musk at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency, the entity created for the sole purpose of slashing U.S. public spending, eliminating bureaucracy and dismantling programs that the administration deems unnecessary.* It is a new chapter of what was done to Twitter, but on a monumental scale. Musk’s mission is ambitious: to slash up to $2 trillion in spending, more than half of the federal government’s discretionary budget. Thanks to Trump’s executive orders, DOGE has gained unprecedented access to government agencies and sensitive databases, unleashing in just a few weeks an unprecedented wave of layoffs and restructuring in Washington.

WIRED has revealed how DOGE recruited dozens of young people without experience in public administration for what was described as a six-month job to cut federal government spending by a third in line with policy from Washington. This reduction is no small thing; federal spending accounts for about a quarter of the U.S. gross domestic product.

The most notorious case of the young Edward Scissorhands’ onslaught has been the elimination of the United States Agency for International Development, which has served as America’s helping hand to the world with a $40 billion annual budget for humanitarian assistance and development programs — including a relevant role in Colombia. However, in concert with the new administration, Musk described the agency in a message published on X as a “viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” and a “corrupt” and “criminal” organization, and ordered its immediate closure.

DOGE supporters are celebrating a “necessary purge” of bureaucracy; however, many critical voices warn that Musk’s decisions are irresponsible and even illegal. We will see the true impact over time. For now, the result is complete disarray in the government’s payment systems, posing a critical risk to financial stability and crippling essential programs, misusing sensitive U.S. Treasury information and potentially eroding market confidence in government bonds.

On the geopolitical front, a big question mark looms over the cooperative relationships the United States has established with so many countries over the past 50 years; international assistance having been a tool of geopolitical influence. Latin America’s shift to a left that is usually anti-U.S. and China’s increasingly visible incursion into the region show that this strategy was perhaps insufficient for meeting Washington’s goals.

Colombia is especially feeling this tremor. For years, the country has been one of the major recipients of USAID funds. It has benefited more than anyone else in Latin America, receiving up to three times the resources received by Mexico or Brazil. Last year, for example, it received $384 million, a little more than 1.5 billion pesos, funds that have been vital for implementing Colombia’s peace accord,** and supporting environmental issues and vulnerable communities.

With the funds frozen, hundreds of nongovernmental organizations and alternative media that depend on this cooperation could collapse. Not to mention the gaping hole in entities such as Colombia’s Special Jurisdiction for Peace*** and the office of the attorney general.

*Editor’s note: The Department of Government Efficiency is not a Cabinet-level department of the U.S. government but a temporary contracted government organization scheduled to end on July 4, 2026.

**Editor’s Note: The peace accord is a U.N.-facilitated agreement between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Colombian government.

***Editor’s Note: The Special Jurisdiction for Peace is Colombia’s extrajudicial court system established to try individuals for crimes committed during more than five decades of armed conflict.