After the quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency helped gut the U.S. Agency for International Development — better known as USAID — Elon Musk was apparently feeling a bit defensive. “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Donald Trump’s top campaign donor recently said. “No one.”

It led The New York Times’ Nick Kristof to explain in his latest column, “That is not true. In South Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, the efforts by Musk and President Trump are already leading children to die.”

The columnist added, “Trump and Musk are right that U.S.A.I.D. needed reforms. It was endlessly bureaucratic, and much of the money went not to the needy but to American companies that knew how to work the system. Yet what Trump and Musk undertook was not reform but demolition.”

To be sure, USAID still exists, though given the “demolition,” it’s a shell of its former self. The good news is, the agency is getting new leadership. The bad news is, given the new team’s background, it’s difficult to be optimistic about the beleaguered agency’s future. NBC News reported:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is delegating authority over the U.S. Agency for International Development to DOGE, senior staffer Jeremy Lewin, who will now run the day-to-day operations of the largely dismantled agency. … In an email to the remaining staff of USAID last evening, Pete Marocco, who had been acting deputy administrator and oversaw the cuts to 84% of its foreign aid programming, said he was returning to his post as the head of the State Department’s Foreign Assistance bureau.

To be sure, there is still a pending legal dispute surrounding USAID, with a federal judge ruling this week that the Trump administration’s efforts to effectively destroy USAID “likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways.” That case is ongoing.

But while the legal developments unfold, these personnel developments are important in their own right.

Jeremy Lewin, as an Associated Press report noted, played “a central role” in slashing USAID. He’ll now lead USAID. Lewin will work alongside Kenneth Jackson, a State Department official who was also named the acting president of the U.S. Institute of Peace, who’ll serve as USAID’s chief financial officer.

As for Marocco, as he passes the reins and takes control of the State Department’s Foreign Assistance bureau, his record remains highly relevant. 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 that Trump administration officials would intervene.

Most important of all, NBC News reported that online sleuths who aided the FBI in cases against Jan. 6 rioters “identified Marocco and his now-wife as being among the rioters who stormed the Capitol in 2021.”

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.”

Earlier this month, during a congressional hearing, a Democratic lawmaker asked Marocco where he was on Jan. 6, 2021. He declined to answer.

Two weeks later, Marocco received a promotion at Rubio’s State Department.