Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Chip Roy introduced legislation Friday that would abolish the beleaguered U.S. Agency for International Development. 

Their move comes on the heels of a whirlwind week for the agency that’s a prime target of the Trump administration’s cost-cutting efforts. 

A federal judge on Friday paused President Trump’s plan to place thousands of USAID workers on leave in response to a lawsuit from a pair of federal unions, the American Federation of Government Employees and the American Foreign Service Association. 

Mr. Trump believes the USAID was operating as a rogue bureaucracy, spending money beyond the boundaries of his wishes and outside the intentions of Congress. 

Ms. Greene, Georgia Republican, and Mr. Roy, Texas Republican, want to turn the president’s desire into law and permanently abolish the USAID, which delivers billions of dollars in aid to over 100 countries but also spends piles of money on what White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt calls “crap.”

The president’s zeal to ax the agency was spurred in part by Elon Musk, the leader of Mr. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, who accused the USAID of being filled with “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” 

Ms. Greene, who chairs the House’s Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee, called the agency “the Democrats’ taxpayer-funded slush fund” used to push their agenda abroad. 

“As Chairwoman of the DOGE Subcommittee, I’ve launched the War on Waste — and USAID is a major culprit lighting over $40 BILLION on fire each year,” she said, in a statement. “It’s time to do what DOGE does best: cut the waste.”

The White House this week highlighted the agency’s “waste” and “abuse,” including: 

• $1.5 million to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities
  - $70,000 for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland
  - $2.5 million for electric vehicles in Vietnam
  - $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia
  - $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru
  - $2 million for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala

Mr. Roy said in a statement that he’s “pleased that the rot and corruption [are] finally getting the attention and action it deserves” from Mr. Trump, but that Congress needs to back the administration to “end this problem permanently.” 

The congressman added, “With $36 trillion in debt, we have to get our fiscal House in order; but we can start right now with getting rid of USAID.”

• Alex Miller can be reached at amiller@washingtontimes.com.