Susie Wiles, White House Chief of Staff and gatekeeper to President Donald Trump, doesn't have the best opinion of Elon Musk, the billionaire who decimated the United States' USAID using the Department of Government Efficiency.
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In several interviews with Vanity Fair ’s Chris Whipple conducted over the past year, Wiles described Musk as a “ completely lone player ” who had plunged the Trump administration into several unnecessary crises — including the closure of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, which Musk had cut during his tenure at DOGE.
“I was surprised at first,” Wiles told Whipple. “Because I think anyone who pays attention to the government and has ever paid attention to USAID thought, as I did, that they were doing a very good job.” This week, the Center for Global Development released a report estimating that cuts to USAID’s humanitarian assistance could contribute to the deaths of 500,000 to 700,000 people a year.
It says a lot about the chaotic news cycle of 2025 that the DOGE saga was a minor reference to a wide range of features that included interviews with Trump’s inner circle and real-time conversations during major political crises like the failed release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. But Wiles’ assessment of Musk can be seen as how the government remembers the impact — or perhaps the damage — of the Tesla billionaire on their political agenda.
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In his executive order freezing foreign aid, Trump had ordered that life-saving programs be exempt. Instead, they were shut down. “When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already in it,” Wiles said. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be scary for others. But he decided it was a better approach to shut it down, lay off everyone, and then go rebuild it. Not the way I would have done it.”
According to Wiles, the only immediate solution was to integrate USAID into the State Department under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, but even then Musk was negative.
Wiles says she confronted Musk. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she remembers him telling her. At first, Wiles didn’t understand the impact cutting USAID programs would have on humanitarian aid. “I didn’t know much about the extent of their grants.” But with vaccinations halted in Africa, lives will be lost.
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He was soon receiving anxious calls from heads of aid agencies and former government officials.
