Pete Marocco spent much of this month in a series of offices on the seventh floor of the State Department supervising the dismantling of architecture on the way the United States provides foreign aid.
But he had time to greet a foreign guest who had toured Washington during the beginnings of the Trump administration: an official of the government of Viktor Orban, Autocratic leader in Hungary.
During the meeting, according to published declarations By the Hungarian official, Tristan Azbej, Mr. Marocco is committed to interrupt all the aid programs which “intervened” in the internal affairs of Hungary.
The next day, Mr. Orban state radio Announce that the media, pro-democracy groups and other organizations that have received money from the American agency for international development would be considered “illegal agents”. He praised the Trump administration’s efforts to close the help agency as a “cleaning wind”.
It was a moment of symbiosis a little noticed between the governments of President Trump and Mr. Orban, who spent years trying to stifle the political opposition and the independent media in Hungary. The country remains a member of NATO, even though Mr. Orban has assiduously cultivated closer ties with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
But it is also an overview of how Mr. Marocco – the head of the State Department who has taken over the remains of the USAID and is now accused of having reoriented a foreign help mission to serve the agenda of Mr. Trump – sees his work.
Help aid programs can be a weapon to punish certain countries, especially those who are poor. It can also be a gift for others where Mr. Trump is looking for a more friendly relationship.
Mr. Marocco now directs the pace of battle for the most prominent combat that the Trump administration has chosen to lead in his efforts to shrink the federal workforce and put an end to what he depicts as left-wing policies . In doing so, he almost closes an agency that the presidents have seen for decades as an essential tool to advance American interests by distributing aid abroad.
The question of whether this struggle dates back to the law – and the Constitution – is a question at the center of many legal challenges to the efforts of the Trump administration. The money of foreign aid that Mr. Trump ordered in Frozen in his first week in power had already been appropriate by the congress, and several prosecution is heading for the courts contesting his directives.
Before his new job, Moroccoco worked as a conservative political activist in the Dallas region and used appearances on podcasts and other media to advance the false affirmation that Trump had won the 2020 elections.
The State Department did not return Mr. Marocco available for an interview. This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen representatives of the current and former government who worked with it.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio told members of the congress he had given to Mr. Marocco, A former sailor Known for a hot temperament and to demand the total loyalty of its staff, the work of examining all the facets of foreign aid to “maximize efficiency and align operations on national interest”.
For his part, Mr. Marocco described USAID as a rogue organization in contradiction with Mr. Trump’s agenda.
In an affidavit filed on February 10 as part of a trial brought by the American Foreign Service Association to stop the agency’s dismantling, Mr. Marocco said that he had “great concern about whether the USAID followed the directives of the president and the secretary faithfully ”. He said the freezing in American Aid, what he called “pencils down”, was necessary “to take control of an organization” which included insubordinate employees.
Last week, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to get rid of foreign aid, saying that the coverage was stopped based on dubious logic. He gave the administration until Tuesday to show that he was complying with the order.
Mr. Marocco told the officials of the State Department that his work was an act of balancing and that he includes the mandate of a team led by billionaire Elon Musk to eliminate almost all foreign aid. In social networks publications, Mr. Musk called the USAID “criminal organization” and said that he was “time to die”.
According to a former American official, Mr. Marocco accompanied Mr. Musk’s team when he entered the agency’s headquarters on January 27, after Mr. Marocco was appointed supervisor of foreign aid to the department of ‘State but a week before being officially appointed officially appointed to his USAID work.
On the other hand, Moroccoco said that Mr. Rubio wanted foreign aid to be more effective, unlimited and that influential members of Congress have similar opinions. Mr. Rubio, he told colleagues, provides him with “superior coverage”.
USAID officials, who spoke under the guise of anonymity because the staff had been ordered not to discuss the agency changes, said Mr. Marocco was an engine of many stages for the Demotel since he was appointed appointed on February 3.
The next day, Moroccoco informed 1,400 American staff that they had been on indefinite administrative leave, according to two people who know the order and a copy of the note referred to by the New York Times. A few hours later, USAID external service agents were informed that they should return to the United States within 30 days.
These orders are now pending until Friday, after a federal judge made a temporary ban order within the framework of the trial to cancel the Trump administration cuts to the agency.
Mr. Marocco rebounded around the government during the first Trump administration, with short stays in the Commerce Department, the State Department, the Pentagon and USAID a former official of the Ministry of Defense who worked with him said That Mr. Marocco was deeply distrusted with anyone who raised questions about his political initiatives, even the lawyers of the Ministry of Defense, whom he considered as insubordinate bureaucrats “of the deep state”.
In 2020, he spent several months at USAID, managing an office that supervised the agency Transitional initiatives officewhich had a budget of $ 225 million to alleviate conflicts in certain countries. USAID employees who worked with Mr. Marocco said that work has proven to be a kind of dry race for its current role.
The Office of Transition Initiatives, unlike a large part of the rest of the USAID, was supposed to move quickly to grant subsidies to vital countries to American interests. But when Mr. Marocco arrived in USAID in the summer of 2020, according to five former employees, he ended the office operations by ordering an immediate examination of most of his programs.
He insisted to personally approve spending over $ 10,000, and that he was at least informed of the expenses below of this threshold. He began to target staff members who, according to him, had married anti-top feelings on their social media profiles or elsewhere. When managers resisted to dismiss people he had identified as potentially unfair, they also became targets.
Trying to reshape the agency, Mr. Marocco clashed not only with USAID career employees, but also with people appointed Policy of the Trump administration.
In September 2020, USAID employees wrote a 13 -page memo in the “dissent channel” of the agency detailing a certain number of actions from Mr. Moroccoco which, according to them, had led the office to become “Less flexible, slower, less reliable, less effective” and moral “in falling”.
“The intervention is necessary urgently,” concluded the cable. Mr. Marocco left the agency shortly after.
Given the end of its previous tour to the agency, some employees have said they saw some of Mr. Marocco’s actions in recent weeks as a remuneration.
“In the past, what he did seemed designed to develop the works, to slow down everything,” said Joseph Curtin, who worked at the Office of Transitioning Initiatives in 2020 and is now working in another USAID office ” Now he wants to destroy everything.
Mr. Curtin was publicly critical of Mr. Marocco and other people appointed to the agency in 2020, which allowed him to be put on “Mr. Moroccoco’s list, “he said a colleague told him.
Another person named that Mr. Curtin criticized was Merritt Corrigan, who ended up leaving the agency in August 2020 in the middle of the criticism of his previous declarations, including the United States was in the grip of a “Homo-Empire” pushing a “LGBT tyrannical program. “”
Ms. Corrigan and Mr. Marocco are now married. She held a previous job at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington and describes Mr. Orban Like “the brilliant champion of Western civilization”.
A group of investigators identified the couple As being outside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The group, which is called Hunters of Sédition, has traveled videos and photographs of the crowd and helped the FBI in its investigation into the attack. Neither Mr. Marocco nor Ms. Corrigan was charged, and neither confirmed to be in the Capitol that day.
When Asked by a media based in Dallas Last year, on his role in the attack, Mr. Marocco did not explain if he or his wife was part of the crowd. Instead, he described the accusations as “small tactics and desperate personal tactics and personal attacks”.
But in an interview with Podcast in 2022, he clearly indicated that he thought that the results of the 2020 elections were suspect. Moroccoco said that he volunteered after the elections for an effort to examine and challenge the results in Pennsylvania, where he said he saw evidence of “first -hand” fraud.
In particular, he cited the fact that in some counties, Joseph R. Biden Jr. had claimed a large part of republican and independent votes recorded, qualifying the idea of ”laughable on his face”.
“The decisions that were made and this characterization that there was no evidence of fraud is absolutely false,” he said. “There is evidence everywhere.”
Eric Schmitt,, Edward Wong And Michael Crowley Contributed reports.
