USAID tells employees to stay home hours after Elon Musk said it was going to be shut down

• USAID, the agency responsible for foreign aid, suddenly shut down its headquarters on Monday.
• DC-based employees received a text alert, seen by BI, instructing them to work remotely.
• Just hours earlier, Elon Musk said he'd discussed shutting down the agency with President Trump.

Employees at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) were told that the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. would be shut down for the day, according to a text alert seen by Business Insider.

The message went to all USAID workers who have signed up for the agency's emergency notification system. It instructed all employees who report to the DC office— excluding those who perform "essential on-site and building maintenance functions individually contacted by senior leadership"— to work remotely. It did not specify whether and when the office would reopen, and CNN reported that the message also came to employees via email.

Though the instructions in the text come from "the direction of Agency leadership," Elon Musk said he supported shutting down the agency early Monday morning in a conversation on X Spaces, just hours before employees heard of the closure.

"With regards to the USAID stuff, I went over it in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down," Musk said of a conversation he had with President Donald Trump. Musk, who is spearheading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), continued posting about the agency throughout Monday morning, writing on X that "USAID is a criminal organization" and "We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper."

On Sunday night, Trump echoed the disdain for the agency, telling reporters it is run by "radical lunatics." He has already ordered a 90-day freeze on foreign aid.

A 15-year veteran employee at USAID told BI that staffers are feeling "nervous, annoyed, sad, anxious, what you'd imagine." BI has verified their identity and employment.

"We wish they would tell us directly what's happening instead of waking up to emails and texts telling us things," they said.

Congress established USAID, the agency responsible for government humanitarian aid, in 1961. The US government is the world's biggest humanitarian donor.

Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said in a letter on Sunday that only Congress can merge USAID into the State Department, as it is reported Trump has said he wants to do. In the letter, they also said reports about DOGE personnel accessing USAID headquarters and sensitive data "raises deep concerns."

"No classified material was accessed without proper security clearances." Katie Miller, a DOGE spokeswoman, said in an X post on Sunday.

The agency's website has been shut down, its social media pages deactivated. Retired and former employees are planning a protest at the Capitol on Wednesday, according to a flyer BI has seen making the rounds on personal social media accounts.

Representatives for the White House, USAID, and Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BI.