Agency Report
The Trump administration took sweeping new steps against the U.S. Agency for International Development on Tuesday, putting an additional vast swath of employees on leave and notifying all overseas staff they would be recalled within a month.
In an internal notice Tuesday night, USAID announced that all “direct hire” staff — chiefly civil service and foreign service officials — would be put on paid leave effective Friday night, with the exception of personnel “responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs.” The notice was also displayed as the landing page on www.usaid.gov.
The agency also said it was preparing a plan to arrange for the repatriation of all USAID staff located overseas within 30 days, with potential exceptions for medical and other reasons.
Taken on the heels of steps in recent days to sideline the agency’s vast corps of contractors, who make up at least half the workforce, USAID officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said the announcements would mean that most of the staff was fired, furloughed or put on leave.
The move is the latest move in a stunning broadside against America’s foreign aid architecture that has followed Trump’s return to the White House last month. In the weeks since the Jan. 20 inauguration, the new administration has announced a broad freeze on foreign aid programs, unleashing upheaval across the aid sector and financial crises for groups reliant on USAID funding, and fired, furloughed or put on leave the bulk of AID employees.
The campaign to overhaul — and potentially abolish — USAID has been led by billionaire Elon Musk, who is advising Trump in his effort to shrink the federal government. Musk has tweeted that USAID “must die” and has sent representatives of his pseudo-governmental “Department of Government Efficiency” into the agency.
Democrats have vowed to fight any attempt to dismantle USAID, citing its creation in statute. But it remains unclear what opponents in Congress can do to halt the staff purge or the unwinding of aid programs should the Trump administration decide to stop short of eradicating the agency altogether.
USAID did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has taken on the role of acting USAID administrator, informed lawmakers of his plan to review and potentially restructure or abolish the agency, part of the administration’s drive to bring foreign policy institutions in line with Trump’s “America First” agenda.
While Rubio has voiced support for foreign aid in the past, he harshly criticized USAID this week, saying it worked against U.S. interests and blaming aid groups for failing to navigate Trump’s 90-day aid freeze.
Rubio has delegated significant authorities over USAID to Pete Marocco, a hard-charging controversial figure who held jobs in multiple agencies during Trump’s first term.
Earlier Tuesday evening, scores of agency employees received a letter from Marocco saying they were being put on a paid “excused absence” effective immediately.
“During the period that you are on administrative leave you are not to enter USAID premises, access USAID systems, or attempt to use your position or authority with USAID in any way without my prior permission or prior permission of a supervisor in your chain of command,” Marocco said in the letter, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Post.
At least some affected staff had their access to the USAID system frozen shortly after receiving the email. That echoed the experience of other employees who have been abruptly locked out of email and phone systems in the last week, some left in limbo about their employment status.
Before the recent moves, USAID had a staff of more than 10,000, roughly two-thirds of whom were positioned overseas, according to the Congressional Research Service. The notice about overseas staff posted on USAID’s website also said that contractors overseas would have work arrangements terminated “that are not determined to be essential.”
USAID staff members have spent the past few days scrambling to get information, at times receiving conflicting guidance from superiors who retain lines of communication to the agency and having to rely on encrypted message groups with colleagues for updates about the fate of the agency — and that of their own jobs.
For staff working in overseas missions, there has been an additional layer of concern about how a potential recall order would impact their families, including children halfway through the school year and housing options if they return to the United States earlier than expected. In the wake of Tuesday’s announcement, USAID staff began to organize a list of spare rooms, pullout couches and other options to offer overseas personnel who might return with nowhere to go.
One foreign service officer located in Latin America, speaking Tuesday before the recall order was posted on USAID’s website, said he had spent recent days worrying about what an abrupt move would mean for his children, his wife and their life in the country they had made home for years. He said USAID staff was blindsided by the recent moves.
“If the president wants a new foreign policy, we are 100 percent prepared to comply with that,” he said. “Nobody is resisting; everybody is cooperating. It’s a very deflating feeling.”
Jeremy Konyndyk, who served as a senior USAID official during the Obama administration and is now president of Refugees International, said the latest moves represented a “brutal and shameful betrayal” of people who had served their country.
“These are people who were forward deployed on reconstruction teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, who brought the global HIV epidemic under control, who have fought famines and stabilized fragile economies and charged headlong into epidemic hot zones,” he said. “They represent the best face of America abroad.”
Swiftly placing officials on leave has also hamstrung large parts of USAID as humanitarian groups around the world seek exemptions to Trump’s aid freeze. The steps to lock out or put officials on leave has made it more difficult for remaining staff to manage the flood of exemption requests, a bottleneck that aid workers say has prevented lifesaving aid projects from restarting across the developing world.
That freeze has resulted in clinics for HIV medication in Africa shutting down, the suspension of demining efforts in Cambodia and challenges for the malaria prevention program known as PMI.
Rubio accepted no responsibility for the bottlenecks in funding.
“I issued a blanket waiver that said, if this is life saving programs … if it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives … you’re not included in the freeze,” Rubio told reporters in Costa Rica’s capital. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.”
It is not clear how much of the suspended aid portfolio will be reinstated at the end of Trump’s 90-day review. Foreign aid accounts for 1 percent of the U.S. budget.
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