Within the span of seven weeks, the Trump administration delivered major blows that left the 64-year-old United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in shreds.
The quick and sweeping actions that decimated the agency and dismantled the bulk of its $40 billion foreign aid programs had the hallmarks of a relatively unknown member of the new Trump administration: Pete Marocco.
Marocco was appointed as the Director of Foreign Assistance at the State Department and Deputy Administrator for USAID. His signature appeared on many of the administration's directives, including orders to cancel 5,200 of USAID's anti-poverty and health-care programs and to shrink the agency's workforce to a couple of hundred people.
Having successfully overseen the effective shutdown of USAID, Pete Marocco is now moving on from leading the day-to-day at USAID to his main job as the director of Foreign Assistance, according to an email he sent to his team last week.
"It's been my honor to assist Secretary Rubio in his leadership of USAID through some difficult stages to pivot this enterprise away from its abuses of the past. Now that USAID is under control, accountable and stable, I am going to return to my post as the Director of Foreign Assistance to bring value back to the American people," Marocco wrote.
In that post, Marocco will continue to play a key role in shaping a new and vastly altered world of foreign aid in the Trump era.
For a better understanding of how foreign aid will look with Marocco at the helm, NPR spoke with 18 current and former government employees, some of whom worked with Marocco when he was part of the Trump administration in 2020 and some of whom work with him now.
These individuals spoke to NPR on the condition of anonymity because they fear retribution from Marocco that could jeopardize their employment whether in the government or in the private sector.
NPR sent an email to Pete Marocco requesting an interview for this story and detailed the characterizations of his workplace behavior and philosophy made by our sources.
In an email response on March 21, Marocco said that NPR is "welcome to cite my op-ed for accurate statements," referring to an opinion piece he wrote for RealClearPolitics on March 19.
"It has become abundantly clear that the mindset gripping foreign assistance for decades was one that prioritized funding overseas slush funds instead of delivering results for Americans," he wrote. His conclusion: "President Trump and Secretary Rubio promised to put Americans first. That is exactly what we've done during the first two months and will continue to do every single day of this administration."
Who is Pete Marocco?
The 39-year-old is a military veteran — he served in the Marines for seven years but was never deployed abroad. He holds a graduate degree in international human rights law from the University of Oxford.
He is also a veteran of the first Trump administration. Between 2018 and 2020, he was appointed to positions of authority at four federal agencies: the State Department, the Commerce Department, the Defense Department and, lastly, USAID. Those who worked with him say that his actions at that time are critical in understanding his role in this second Trump term.
Then and now, Marocco had a distinct vision of foreign aid, according to people who worked with him and Marocco's own words.
"He was hell bent like he is today on finding and validating his preconceived notion that [foreign aid] is all corrupt, it's all dirty," said a former senior official who worked with Marocco at USAID.
As he pursued that vision at USAID in 2020, according to more than half a dozen current and former USAID officials, Marocco established a confrontational style in the workplace, butting heads with more senior Trump political appointees, including ambassadors, who held a different view of U.S. foreign aid — as an extension of American power and a key element of its diplomacy and defense.
Marocco's title at USAID was assistant to the administrator overseeing the Bureau of Conflict Prevention and Stabilization Operations, supervising a large range of programs. And he issued directives to his staff demanding that programs be cut and hiring be frozen, according to more than half a dozen USAID officials — paralleling his 2025 actions.
Just three months after Marocco joined the agency in July of 2020, staff filed a 13-page memo to USAID leadership.
The memo, which was leaked to Politico at that time, requested "urgent intervention" regarding Marocco, and said that his directives had led to "significant waste" of government resources and made the bureau "less rapid, less trusted, and less efficient" by halting funds to programs and disrupting operations, prompting ambassadors from affected countries to complain.
Priority to the military
What did Marocco want to spend federal money on?
There are indications in both the staff memo and in a daily log of meetings, calls and emails between Marocco and agency staff that a former senior USAID official began keeping in 2020 — and shared with NPR for this story.
Both documents suggest that Marocco was disdainful of aid spent on health care, economic development and programs to promote democracy and human rights. Marocco often proposed diverting funds from those arenas to military ends — such as training and equipping a country's military.
According to the daily log, and confirmed by one official at USAID, Marocco sent an email about pivoting funds for programs in Malaysia aimed at curbing corruption, hate speech and improving gender equality toward military training and private security groups.
Two former USAID officials with direct knowledge said that Marocco gathered a few USAID staff members in the fall of 2020 and asked them to classify a memo on diverting funds earmarked for USAID programs in Nigeria toward private security firms. According to the officials, the memo contained no classified information, did not cite any classified sources and had not gone through the proper channels of approval. These officials believe that Marocco made this request to hide his moves from public view. According to the officials who spoke to NPR, this infuriated senior agency leaders because they believed classifying the information under these circumstances would be prohibited under administrative law.
In the memo to agency leadership, staff wrote that one of the main consequences of Marocco's actions had been that the bureau's "strategic focus is being redirected from American foreign policy priorities towards [Marocco's] personal (but undefined) conception of 'national security.'"
Not beholden to Congress
Another hallmark of Marocco's tenure was a disregard for Congressional authority, according to officials who worked with him.
When reminded by staff that halting programs would lead to scrutiny from the Hill, the senior official who kept the daily log noted that Marocco responded: "We don't report to them [Congress]."
During a phone briefing with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2020, according to the official's log, Marocco was asked about his demand to be the sole arbiter for all of the programs in his bureau, to which Marocco replied that the programs had "gone off the tracks" and that he needed to "reign in accountability."
According to the log, later in that meeting when faced with "contentious questions" from the committee, Marocco "abruptly hung up" the call.
Marocco reiterated these ideas about USAID being off track in a briefing to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in 2025, according to one source aware of the interaction.
Reforming the agency
Marocco's position that the agency needed reform is not radical. Dean Karlan, former chief economist for USAID, was brought in to the agency in November, 2022. His role was to help design more cost-effective programs and produce more evidence to guide future policies. Karlan told NPR he had been enthused to work with the new Trump administration on improving the agency: "I came to help choose effective programs to get more bang for our buck."
But Karlan is a critic of the reform efforts in 2025.
"Let's improve by figuring out what works and what doesn't, and how to scale up and fund the things that are most effective in both helping people and making America safer, stronger and more prosperous," Karlan said, referring to Secretary of State Marco Rubio's publicly stated standards for foreign aid.
Addressing the dismantling of USAID in this new Trump administration, Karlan said: "Unfortunately, that's not the way this has played out." He resigned his position on Feb. 25 because, he said, the administration "made clear their plan was to annihilate [USAID]."
As for Marocco's vision of what foreign aid should look like, he shared his ideas in 2023 at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Hungary in an interview with Ben Ferguson, a conservative radio host.
Marocco said that during his tenure at USAID he'd discovered that U.S. funds were being used to undermine traditional family values, such as funding abortion and LGBTQ rights. Marocco did not provide specifics or evidence for his claims, but any foreign assistance funding going toward abortion has been prohibited by law since 1973.
"It was shocking to me, the stuff that I saw," Marocco told Ferguson.
"I call it the Democrat word soup, right? It was liberal word soup. It was euphemisms," he said. "It was, hey, we are providing gender equity in health care access for teenage girls. And that's how they would couch it [abortion]. You would have gay pride parades in the Balkans, and they would couch it as democracy."
He demands loyalty to the president
Marocco's belief then and now, officials say, was that he only owed loyalty to one figure in the administration — the president. And he expected the same from all those employed in the agencies where he held authority.
Two officials who worked closely with him at USAID told NPR that Marocco would go through social media accounts of USAID staff looking for any partisan posts or criticisms of President Trump. The officials said that when he found even a handful of such comments, he tried to fire the employees — but that agency lawyers intervened, citing First Amendment rights.
"It got ugly. If you got in his way, he would just simply say, 'I'm gonna fire you. I'm gonna get rid of you,' " said one of the officials. "He used to say, 'I don't report to anyone but the president.' "
In recent weeks, Marocco has encouraged staff to send emails expressing their support for President Trump and his agenda, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
A 'personal vendetta'
Officials who worked with Marocco at USAID in 2020 said he was relentless in pursuit of his goals.
"There was always something that he was trying to destroy," said one former senior official. "If Pete was stymied or thwarted in pursuing one thing, the next week, it's something else" — from who's been hired at the lowest levels to whether the names of existing programs revealed a bias that ran contrary to what he perceived as American values.
"[Marocco] was a one-man show trying to stop all funding and make these unanimous decisions," said another former official. This led to conflicts with ambassadors in countries where Marocco had halted funds for USAID programs, according to the staff memo.
In the end, Marocco was not able to achieve his goals at USAID during the first Trump administration. Current and former officials told NPR that Marocco was thwarted by more senior Trump appointees and career agency staff.
That first experience at USAID, say all 18 sources interviewed by NPR, has fueled what they see as an added motivation — what many of them characterized as a "personal vendetta" in bringing down the agency that he tried to dismantle in 2020.
"What we're seeing right now is Pete's revenge tour," said a former senior USAID official who worked with Marocco in 2020 when he tried to impose similar cuts on the agency. "He is acting out every personal slight and beef and grievance from that time [2020]. This is personal."
Why 2025 is different
What's different this time, according to the official, is that Marocco is no longer the lone wolf trying to wipe out USAID: In 2025, other administration officials are in line with his thinking. "There are of course people in the right wing of the [Republican] party who have been long against foreign assistance of any type, and he's just the perfect attack dog for this," said the official.
At a closed-door House Foreign Affairs Committee briefing with Marocco on March 10, Democrats were critical of how Marocco has handled his job — saying that he has mostly kept Congress in the dark.
"We'll be paying for this for years to come, because these aren't merely expenditures of money, they're investments," Rep. Bill Keating, who questioned Marocco on the cuts to programs in Ukraine, told NPR. "They're cost effective, and they deal with our most important threats globally and importantly back here at home."
Marocco himself has indicated that the disruptions of the first months of this Trump administration are far from over. At the House briefing, according to a source with direct knowledge, Marocco spoke about "additional phases" on the future of foreign assistance to come in the weeks ahead — and said he'd be looking into whether foreign aid was "constitutional" to begin with.
When asked if there was a difference between what Marocco tried to do in 2020 and what he is doing now, one of the former senior USAID officials who worked with him back then said: "No one is stopping him the way they did last time."
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