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Thousands of US Agency for International Development (USAID) employees are being given just 15 minutes on Thursday and Friday to clear out their offices.
The workers were recently terminated or placed on leave due to the Trump administration’s dismantling of the agency.
According to a State Department spokesperson, USAID placed 4,080 staff members on leave on Monday, in addition to a “reduction in force”affecting another 1,600 employees.
USAID has emerged as a primary target in President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s campaign to reduce the size of the federal government. These actions have left only a fraction of USAID’s employees still working.
Trump and Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), have moved swiftly to close the foreign aid agency, denouncing its programmes as misaligned with the president’s agenda and baselessly asserting its work as wasteful.
Their effort is extraordinary due to its scope and because it has not involved Congress, which authorized the agency and provided its funding.
Earlier this month, the Congressional Research Service reported that congressional authorization is required “to abolish, move, or consolidate USAID.” However, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate have not pushed back against the administration’s actions.
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The administration has stated it is eliminating over 90 per cent of USAID’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in U.S. assistance worldwide.
It’s unclear how many of the more than 5,600 USAID employees who have been fired or placed on leave work at the agency’s headquarters building in Washington. A notice on the agency’s website said staff at other locations will have the chance to collect their personal belongings at a later date.
The notice laid out instructions for when specific groups of employees should arrive to be screened by security and escorted to their former workspaces. Those being let go must turn in all USAID-issued assets.
Workers on administrative leave were told to retain their USAID-issued materials, including diplomatic passports, “until such time that they are separated from the agency.”
Many USAID workers saw the administration’s terms for retrieving their belongings as insulting. In the notice, the employees were instructed not to bring weapons, including firearms, “spear guns” and “hand grenades.” Each worker is being given just 15 minutes at their former workstation.
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The administration’s efforts to slash the federal government are embroiled in various lawsuits, but court challenges to temporarily halt the shutdown of USAID have been unsuccessful.
However, a federal judge on Tuesday gave the Trump administration a deadline of this week to release billions of dollars in US foreign aid, saying it had given no sign of complying with his nearly two-week-old court order to ease the funding freeze. Late Wednesday, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked that order, with Chief Justice John Roberts saying it will remain on hold until the high court has a chance to weigh in more fully.
That court action resulted from a lawsuit filed by nonprofit organizations over the cutoff of foreign assistance through USAID and the State Department. Trump froze the money through an executive order on his first day in office that targeted what he portrayed as wasteful programs that do not correspond to his foreign policy goals.
Virginia Democratic Rep. Gerald Connolly said in a statement that the attack on USAID employees was “unwarranted and unprecedented.” Connolly, whose district includes a sizable federal workforce, called the aid agency workers part of the “world’s premier development and foreign assistance agency” who save “millions of lives every year.”
