The Trump administration’s dramatic offensive against the U.S. Agency for International Development has put the agency’s future in doubt, but USAID’s present is precarious, too.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio tapped Pete Marocco, the director of foreign assistance at the State Department, to run USAID and launch some kind of internal review of its work. That might not seem especially notable, but Marocco has a rather unusual background.
In 2020, for example, Politico reported that Marocco, who held a variety of positions in the first Trump administration, left “a bitter trail” at the Pentagon and at the State Department, “dogged by criticism that he created a toxic work environment by undermining and mistreating career staffers.”
Months later, when Marocco worked at USAID, Politico further reported that his colleagues were “so fed up” with him that they “crafted a lengthy memo chronicling their frustrations” in the hopes Trump administration officials would intervene.
But to appreciate what makes him an especially poor choice to lead USAID, consider this NBC News report:
In early 2023, online sleuths who aided the FBI in cases against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters identified Marocco and his now-wife as being among the rioters who stormed the Capitol in 2021, pointing to multiple images of them on the Capitol grounds that day and CCTV video that shows the man they identified as Marocco entering the Capitol through a broken window. Photos of the person who entered the building were a strong facial recognition match for publicly available images of Marocco, online sleuths said.
Marocco, who was not charged with any crimes, has never explicitly denied entering the Capitol on Jan. 6, though he has complained on the record about undefined “smear tactics and desperate personal attacks.”
What’s left is an unsettling dynamic: It apparently wasn’t enough for Donald Trump to issue blanket pardons to those who entered the Capitol. Rubio is now giving one of the men who stormed our seat of government a powerful position in the State Department.
