Pete Marocco, a State Department official who oversaw the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has left the agency after less than three months, according to a senior Trump administration official.
The official, who like others in this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters, confirmed to The Washington Post on Monday that Marocco had stepped down. The reason for his departure, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, was not immediately clear.
Marocco worked closely with tech billionaire Elon Musk, both of whom recommended severe cuts to USAID and State Department programs, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. Both men clashed with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has opposed some of the cuts proposed by the U.S. DOGE Service.
Marocco served in the Defense, State and Commerce departments, and at USAID, in the first Trump administration. In 2020, USAID staffers filed a complaint against Marocco, alleging that he abused and marginalized staff while he reviewed or defunded programs under his own “personal (but undefined) conception of ‘national security,’” The Post previously reported.
After stepping down from his government job before the Biden administration assumed power in 2021, Marocco repeatedly echoed President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of fraud during the 2020 president election. He joined Trump’s transition team in 2024.
Once back in government, Marocco began disassembling USAID’s $40 billion, 10,000-person operation, laying off staffers and supporting plans to cancel 83 percent of USAID’s programs.
In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers in March, Marocco described USAID as a “money-laundering scheme” and that he was examining whether foreign assistance was even constitutional, The Post reported.
In the same meeting, Marocco accused USAID of pushing LGBTQ issues in the developing world and fomenting the so-called Color Revolutions that toppled authoritarian governments in former Soviet states, a critique shared by far-right politicians in Russia and Hungary.
In a March 19 op-ed in RealClearPolitics, Marocco said the Trump administration was addressing “the plunder of American taxes for the aid enterprise.”
In late March, the Trump administration formally collapsed USAID. Some 900 of the agency’s 6,000 programs will continue under the State Department’s oversight, Rubio said last week in a podcast interview with Donald Trump Jr. In the past, USAID “did whatever they wanted,” as it was separate from the State Department, Rubio said.