Forced leaves start for thousands at USAID under a Trump plan to gut the foreign aid agency
WASHINGTON (AP) — Forced leaves pulling all but a small fraction of staffers of the U.S. Agency for International Development off the job around the world began Friday, while employee associations turned to federal courts to try to roll back the new Trump administration's stunningly swift dismantling of the six-decade-old aid agency and its programs worldwide.
State Department officials and others were appealing to the Trump administration to allow more USAID workers to remain on the job at least temporarily, including to manage the return home of thousands of USAID direct hires, contractors and their families abroad.
The administration told USAID officials Thursday that it planned to exempt fewer than 300 employees from global leave and furloughs ordered for at least 8,000 direct hires and contractors. Diplomats at embassies have asked for waivers allowing more time for some, including families forced to pull their children out of schools midyear.
Two current USAID employees and a former senior USAID official told The Associated Press of the administration's staffing cutback plan that was presented to remaining senior officials of the agency Thursday. They spoke on condition of anonymity due to a Trump administration order barring USAID staffers from talking to anyone outside their agency.
The remaining direct hires and contractors, along with an unknown number of 5,000 locally hired employees abroad, would run the few life-saving programs that the administration says it intends to keep going for now.
It was not immediately clear whether the reductions would be permanent or temporary, potentially allowing more workers to return after what the Trump administration says is a review of which aid and development programs it wants to resume.
The administration this week gave almost all USAID staffers posted overseas 30 days, starting Friday, to return to the U.S., with the government paying for their travel and moving costs.
In a notice late Thursday posted on the USAID website, the agency said none of the overseas personnel placed on administrative leave would be forced to leave the country in which they work. But workers who chose to stay longer than 30 days might have to cover their own expenses unless they received a specific hardship waiver.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said during a trip to the Dominican Republic that the government would help staffers get home within 30 days “if they so desired" and would listen to those with special conditions.
“We’re not trying to be disruptive to people’s personal lives,” he told reporters Thursday. "We’re not being punitive here."
He insisted the moves were the only way to get cooperation because staffers were working “to sneak through payments and push through payments despite the stop order” on foreign assistance. Agency staffers deny his claims of obstruction.
President Donald Trump posted on social media Friday “CLOSE IT DOWN.”
Rubio said the U.S. government will continue providing foreign aid, “but it is going to be foreign aid that makes sense and is aligned with our national interest."
The Trump administration and billionaire ally Elon Musk, who is running a budget-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, have targeted USAID hardest so far in an unprecedented challenge of the federal government and many of its programs.
Since Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, a sweeping funding freeze has shut most of the agency’s programs worldwide, and almost all of its workers have been placed on administrative leave or furloughed. Musk and the Republican president have spoken of eliminating USAID as an independent agency and moving surviving programs under the State Department.
Democratic lawmakers and others call the move illegal without congressional approval.
The same argument was made by the American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees in a lawsuit filed late Thursday. It asks the federal court in Washington to compel the reopening of USAID’s buildings, return its staffers to work and restore funding.
Government officials “failed to acknowledge the catastrophic consequences of their actions, both as they pertain to American workers, the lives of millions around the world, and to US national interests," the suit says.
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AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee contributed from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.
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