Trump Admin Plans to Slash All USAID International Positions

Yahoo

a day ago

The Trump administration is planning on cutting all of the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) international positions by the end of September, and transferring control to the State Department.
According to a State Department cable obtained by The Guardian Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered that USAID's entire overseas workforce be eliminated, granting the State Department 'responsibility for foreign assistance programming previously undertaken by USAID' starting on June 15.
'The Department of State is streamlining procedures under National Security Decision Directive 38 to abolish all USAID overseas positions,' the cable said.
The move would affect thousands of USAID staff members, such as contractors, foreign service officers, and employed personnel, across over 100 countries.
The Guardian reported that chiefs of mission at U.S. embassies were told to prepare themselves for the cuts and changes that would go into effect over the next four months.
The administration has already cut around 90 percent of USAID's foreign aid contracts during Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) rampage back in February.
Musk, who has previously called the agency a 'criminal organization' and that it was 'time for it to die,' also spearheaded a near total wipe-out of its 10,000 strong work-force, reducing it to only 294 employees in March.
At the time, former USAID administrator J. Brian Atwood warned that 'a lot of people will not survive' the administration's devastating decision.
According to The Guardian, internal documents revealed that several other USAID senior officials also warned Rubio against the drastic cuts, emphasizing the devastating impacts they would have over the next decade if implemented.
USAID has been on the president's radar ever since his return to office. Trump signed an executive order on his first day back as president which placed a 90-day pause on U.S. foreign development assistance for 'assessment of programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy.'
Two weeks later, a state department press release revealed that in an 'interim step toward gaining control and better understanding' over USAID's activity, Trump would be appointing Rubio as acting administrator of the agency.
The president claimed that the agency was 'run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we're getting them out,' and that once USAID was gutted, then the administration would be able to 'make a decision' on its future.
The State Department doubled down on the president's sentiment in its press release, alleging that USAID had 'long strayed from its original mission of responsibly advancing American interests abroad,' and that it was now 'abundantly clear that significant portions of USAID funding are not aligned with the core national interests of the United States.'
In a speech announcing his new position, Rubio also admonished the agency for their 'ridiculous' behavior.
'Everything they do has to be aligned with U.S. foreign policy,' he said. 'And the attitude that USAID has adopted over the years is no, we are independent of the national interest.'
'There are things that [USAID] does that are good and there are things that it does that we have strong questions about,' Rubio added.
Nicholas Enrich, USAID's former acting assistant administrator for global health, said in a series of staff memos obtained by the press in late February that pausing the agency's lifesaving programs would 'no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale.'
He stated that if the cutbacks were not restored, then each year 1 million starving children would not have access to food, 28,000 people will suffer from infectious diseases like Ebola, and hundreds of millions of people will suffer from polio infections over the next decade, with 200,000 more people becoming paralyzed by polio, among other impacts.
Enrich said he was placed on leave minutes after sending out his memos, though a source familiar with the matter told Reuters that the agency had already decided to place him on leave days earlier.
According to NPR, USAID's website went dark on Feb. 1, and its X account was also wiped. Now, the website only has a 'Notification of Administrative Leave' statement which was released on Feb. 23.