After newly confirmed Federal Bureau of Investigations director Kash Patel told his staff over the weekend to ignore an Elon Musk-ordered demand they report to the Office of Personnel Management on their activities, another of President Donald Trump’s top MAGA allies has seemingly clashed with the White House’s billionaire lieutenant.
On Sunday, Musk quoted a conservative user on X claiming that the United States Agency for International Development had given tens of millions of dollars to a list of “terrorist linked organizations.”
Special envoy Richard Grenell immediately stepped in and questioned the veracity of the post, noting: “Some of these groups are our partners in fighting terrorism.”
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The user shared the list, which consists principally of Muslim and Arab American non-profit groups that received government funding, and offered no evidence they have terrorist links.
Among them is the Islamic Society of Delaware, which notes on its website that it “strongly condemns terrorism.”
The user also included the U.S.-based humanitarian NGO alliance InterAction and the Tides Foundation, a progressive donor fund that has been attacked by conservatives for giving money to left-wing causes. Neither has known terrorist links.
That didn’t stop Musk, whose DOGE task force has aggressively tried to dismantle USAID, from amplifying the user’s claim, adding: “Why pay terrorist organizations and certain countries to hate us when they’re perfectly willing to do it for free?”
A seemingly baffled Grenell added, in a follow-up post to his original objection to Musk: “I don’t want to see USAID funding NGOs—but some of these are American groups that have never supported terrorism."
Grenell is a longtime Trump ally who has been tasked by the president with overseeing the administration’s response to the Los Angeles wildfires and was recently appointed interim director of the Kennedy Center.
He was Trump’s ambassador to Germany during his first administration, and briefly served as acting director of national intelligence.
Grenell’s public questioning of Musk comes after Patel and the heads of several other government agencies instructed their employees to ignore replying to an OPM email sent to civil servants demanding the list their recent accomplishments (in a tweet, Musk threatened anyone who didn’t reply with termination).
Tulsi Gabbard, the newly confirmed director of the office of national intelligence and another Trump ally, was among those to tell her staff to ignore OPM’s request.