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A senior official with the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has been targeted for death by DOGE, has ordered remaining employees to shred or burn classified documents and personnel records.
An email Tuesday from the agency’s Acting Executive Secretary Erica Carr told employees to destroy the records, and thanked them for their “assistance in clearing our classified safes and personnel documents,” NBC News was the first to report.
USAID employees were told to first shred as many documents as possible — and destroy the rest in burn bags if the shredder becomes overwhelmed by the load of information to be eradicated.
“Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break,” Carr wrote, NBC recounted.
The destruction of documents comes amid a number of court cases challenging the legality of tech billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency dismantling of agencies and the firing of thousands of employees without supervision or congressional authorization.
The American Foreign Service Association said it was “alarmed” by the order, underscoring that the documents are vital to ongoing litigation “regarding the termination of USAID employees and the cessation of USAID grants.”
The Trump administration said last week that more than 80 percent of the programs run by the USAID, which funds global humanitarian programs, would be eliminated. What’s left has been placed within the State Department.
Critics fear the document destruction is a way to dodge the law and court orders.
Groups challenging the administration’s plans to shut down USAID, including the American Foreign Service Association, filed an emergency motion Tuesday naming Trump and seeking to stop the shredding.
“Defendants are …. destroying documents with potential pertinence to this litigation,” the motion stated. The destruction could also make it impossible to revive the agency, even if the court so rules, they argued.
An administration official told NBC that USAID classified documents are not part of any suit. But personnel records, also targeted for destruction, are.
Harold Koh, a legal adviser for the State Department during the Obama administration, told NBC News that many of the USAID documents being destroyed are likely crucial evidence in various ongoing cases.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols ordered both sides back in court Wednesday to futher address the emergency motion.
In a related case in Washington, D.C. federal District Judge Amir Ali again ordered the Trump administration on Monday to pay its USAID contracts.
Ali said by shutting down the agency and freezing funds Trump ignored congressional authority when he “unilaterally” countermanded that funds appropriated by Congress not be spent. He called it an “unbridled view of Executive power that the Supreme Court has consistently rejected” and noted that it’s likely unconstitutional.
The U.S. Supreme Court let stand Amir’s earlier ruling ordering the Trump administration to pay $2 billion to USAID contractors
Carr’s shredding order to about three dozen workers has also raised alarms about the Trump administration’s efforts to destroy recorded history within the federal government. Standard procedure for the USAID has been to shred or burn documents only if the agency was under attack or in some other emergency situation.
Last week the Defense Department launched an eradication of photos and posts involving women, people of color, and any mention of members of the LGBTQ community as part of its war against diversity in the military. The erasure was so extreme that officials were wiping out mention of people whose last name happened to be “Gay” and photos of the Enola Gay, the aircraft that bombed Hiroshima in World War II.
Critics feared as many as 100,000 photos, a critical record of American history, would be eliminated in the Defense Department DEI purge.
The destruction of the USAID’s records is “not the actions of someone looking for true waste, fraud, and abuse,” Kel McClanahan, the director of a law firm focused on national security called National Security Counselors, told NBC. “This is slash-and-burn mode and not leaving any evidence behind that could disprove their narrative.”
