Pete Marocco Returns to Battle in Trump’s War on Foreign Aid

Pete Marocco has spent much of this month hunkered in an office suite on the seventh floor of the State Department overseeing the dismantling of the architecture for how the United States delivers foreign aid.

But he did have time to greet a foreign guest who had been making the rounds in Washington during the Trump administration’s early days: an official in the government of Viktor Orban, Hungary’s autocratic leader.

During the meeting, according to statements released by the Hungarian official, Tristan Azbej, Mr. Marocco pledged to halt all aid programs that “intervened” in Hungary’s internal affairs.

The next day, Mr. Orban took to state radio to announce that media outlets, pro-democracy groups and other organizations that have received money from the U.S. Agency for International Development would be considered “illegal agents.” He praised the Trump administration’s efforts to shutter the aid agency as a “cleansing wind.”

It was a little noticed moment of symbiosis between the governments of President Trump and Mr. Orban, which has spent years trying to suffocate political opposition and independent news media in Hungary. The country remains a NATO member, even as Mr. Orban has assiduously cultivated closer ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

But it is also a glimpse of how Mr. Marocco — the State Department official who took over the remains of U.S.A.I.D. and is now charged with reorienting a foreign aid mission to serve Mr. Trump’s agenda — sees his job.

Gutting aid programs can be a weapon to punish some countries, especially those that are poor. It can also be a gift for others where Mr. Trump is seeking a friendlier relationship.

Mr. Marocco is now directing the battle rhythm of the most high-profile fight the Trump administration has chosen to wage in its effort to shrink the federal work force and end what it portrays as left-wing policies. In doing so, he is all but shutting down an agency that presidents have seen for decades as an essential tool to advance U.S. interests by distributing aid abroad.

Whether this fight runs afoul of the law — and the Constitution — is a question at the center of numerous legal challenges to the Trump administration’s efforts. The foreign aid money that Mr. Trump ordered frozen during his first week in office had already been appropriated by Congress, and several lawsuits are making their way through the courts challenging his directives.

Before his new job, Mr. Marocco worked as a conservative political activist in the Dallas area and used appearances on podcasts and other media to advance the false claim that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 election.

The State Department did not make Mr. Marocco available for an interview. This article is based on interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials who have worked with him.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio told members of Congress that he had given Mr. Marocco, a former Marine known for a hot temper and for demanding total loyalty from his staff, the job of reviewing all facets of foreign aid to “maximize efficiency and align operations with the national interest.”

For his part, Mr. Marocco has described U.S.A.I.D. as something of a rogue organization at odds with Mr. Trump’s agenda.

In an affidavit filed on Feb. 10 as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Foreign Service Association to halt the dismantling of the agency, Mr. Marocco said he had “grave concern about whether U.S.A.I.D. was faithfully following the president’s and secretary’s directives.” He said the freeze in American aid, what he called “pencils down,” was necessary “to gain control of an organization” that included employees who were insubordinate.

Last week, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze foreign aid, saying the blanket halt was based on dubious logic. He gave the administration until Tuesday to show it was complying with the order.

Mr. Marocco has told State Department officials that his job is a balancing act and that he understands the mandate of a team led by the billionaire Elon Musk to eliminate nearly all foreign aid. In social media posts, Mr. Musk has called U.S.A.I.D. a “criminal organization” and said it was “time for it to die.”

According to one former American official, Mr. Marocco accompanied Mr. Musk’s team when it first entered the agency’s headquarters on Jan. 27, after Mr. Marocco had been appointed overseer of foreign aid at the State Department but a week before he was officially appointed to his U.S.A.I.D. job.

On the other hand, Mr. Marocco has said that Mr. Rubio wants foreign aid to be more efficient, not eliminated, and that influential members of Congress have similar views. Mr. Rubio, he has told colleagues, provides him “top cover.”

Officials at U.S.A.I.D., who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the staff had been ordered not to publicly discuss the changes at the agency, have indicated that Mr. Marocco has been a driving force behind many of the steps to dismantle it since he was appointed on Feb. 3.

The following day, Mr. Marocco informed 1,400 U.S.-based staff members that they had been put on indefinite administrative leave, according to two people with knowledge of the order and a copy of the note viewed by The New York Times. Hours later, U.S.A.I.D. foreign service officers were told they would have to return to the United States within 30 days.

Those orders are now on hold until Friday, after a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order as part of the lawsuit to overturn the Trump administration’s cuts to the agency.

Mr. Marocco bounced around the government during the first Trump administration, with brief stints at the Commerce Department, the State Department, the Pentagon and U.S.A.I.D. One former Defense Department official who worked with him said that Mr. Marocco was deeply suspicious of anyone who raised questions about his policy initiatives, even Defense Department lawyers, whom he saw as insubordinate “deep state” bureaucrats.

In 2020, he spent several months at U.S.A.I.D., running a bureau that oversaw the agency’s Office of Transition Initiatives, which had a $225 million budget to mitigate conflict in select countries. U.S.A.I.D. employees who worked with Mr. Marocco said that job turned out to be a kind of dry run for his current role.

The Office of Transition Initiatives, unlike much of the rest of U.S.A.I.D., was supposed to move swiftly to deliver grants to countries vital to American interests. But when Mr. Marocco arrived at U.S.A.I.D. in the summer of 2020, according to five former employees, he ground to a halt the office’s operations by ordering an immediate review of most of its programs.

He insisted on personally approving expenditures above $10,000, and that he at least be notified about expenditures below that threshold. He started targeting staff members who he believed had espoused anti-Trump sentiments on their social media profiles or elsewhere. When managers resisted firing people he had identified as potentially disloyal, they also became targets.

In the process of trying to reshape the agency, Mr. Marocco clashed not just with career U.S.A.I.D. employees but also with the Trump administration’s political appointees.

In September 2020, U.S.A.I.D. employees wrote a 13-page memo in the agency’s “dissent channel” detailing a number of Mr. Marocco’s actions that they said had led to the office becoming “less flexible, less rapid, less trusted, less efficient” and “plummeting” morale.

“Intervention is urgently needed,” the cable concluded. Mr. Marocco left the agency shortly afterward.

Given how his previous tour at the agency had ended, some employees said they saw some of Mr. Marocco’s actions in recent weeks as retribution.

“In the past, what he was doing seemed designed to gum up the works, to slow everything down,” said Joseph Curtin, who worked at the Office of Transition Initiatives in 2020 and now works in a different bureau of U.S.A.I.D. “Now he wants to destroy everything.”

Mr. Curtin was publicly critical of Mr. Marocco and other appointees at the agency in 2020, which resulted in him being put on “Mr. Marocco’s list,” he said a colleague told him.

Another appointee whom Mr. Curtin criticized was Merritt Corrigan, who ended up leaving the agency in August 2020 amid criticism for her past statements, including that the United States was in the grip of a “homo-empire” pushing a “tyrannical L.G.B.T. agenda.”

Ms. Corrigan and Mr. Marocco are now married. She held a previous job at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington and has described Mr. Orban as “the shining champion of Western civilization.”

A group of investigators identified the couple as being outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The group, which calls itself Sedition Hunters, has pored over videos and photographs of the mob and has aided the F.B.I. in its investigation into the attack. Neither Mr. Marocco nor Ms. Corrigan was charged, and neither has confirmed being at the Capitol that day.

When asked by a Dallas-based news outlet last year about his role in the attack, Mr. Marocco did not address whether he or his wife were part of the mob. Instead, he called the accusations “petty smear tactics and desperate personal attacks.”

But in a podcast interview in 2022, he made clear that he believed the results of the 2020 election were suspicious. Mr. Marocco said he had volunteered after the election for an effort to scrutinize and challenge the results in Pennsylvania, where he claimed to have seen “firsthand” evidence of fraud.

In particular, he cited the fact that in some counties, Joseph R. Biden Jr. had claimed a large share of registered Republican and independent votes, calling the idea “laughable on its face.”

“The decisions that were being made, and this characterization that there was no evidence of fraud, is absolutely untrue,” he said. “There’s evidence everywhere.”

Eric Schmitt, Edward Wong and Michael Crowley contributed reporting.