Workers at the US African Development Foundation (USADF), which Donald Trump has ordered to be closed, refused to allow Doge operatives to enter after they arrived at its Washington headquarters on Wednesday afternoon. But the Doge team returned on Thursday, accompanied by agents with the US Marshals Service and Peter Marocco, a state department official charged with dismantling US Agency for International Development (USAid), according to a government official familiar with the situation. This time, they were able to gain access to the building, the official said, and no staff was present.
“Any attempt to unilaterally dismantle the USADF through executive action violates the law and exceeds the constitutional limits of executive authority,” Democratic members of the House of Representatives’ foreign affairs committee wrote in a 24 February letter to Trump.
Democrats have argued that Doge lacks the authority to eliminate an independent entity created by Congress, and that attempts to install Marocco as the acting chair of USADF and IAF are unlawful.
The official familiar with the situation said that unlike other federal agencies such as USAid, USADF is a “congressionally chartered corporation” operated by a board of directors whose members are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
“It’s expressed in the statute that you can’t dissolve ADF except by an act of Congress,” the official said. “The president [of ADF] doesn’t take orders from anyone except for the board. The president [of ADF] isn’t even authorized to take orders from the president of the United States.”
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