The Trump administration’s effort to close the U.S. Agency for International Development will cost more than $6 billion, according to a preliminary estimate from the State Department disclosed by Bloomberg Thursday.
The tally includes hundreds of millions of dollars for legal fees required to respond to lawsuits challenging the abrupt closure and the dismissal of thousands of employees.
“There are large numbers of pending and projected litigation matters and grievances to be resolved,” a nine-page State Department memo says. As a result, the agency will need to maintain a team of attorneys and human resources personnel, as well as an outside team of experts.
The agency must also close out numerous existing contracts and dispose of more than 100 properties that are owned or rented around the world.
The cost analysis was reportedly written by Jeremy Lewin, who led a three-member team from the Department of Government Efficiency responsible for budget cuts at USAID. Billionaire Elon Musk, who spearheaded the DOGE effort, targeted the agency in the earliest days of the Trump administration, writing on February 3 that “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
The DOGE cost-cutting effort has been popular among conservatives who laud its political goals, but it has fallen far short of its trillion-dollar-plus savings targets, and the USAID report highlights how uncertain some of DOGE’s savings claims appear to be.