Only 294 employees with the United States Agency for International Development have been deemed essential among more than 10,000 global staff members.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that crucial health and humanitarian aid will continue, following threats from Donald Trump and Elon Musk to dissolve the entire agency, but the administration intends to decimate its size, including limiting staff to only 12 people in Africa.
What appears to be an internal chart of the employee breakdown shared by a former USAID global health director also notes that only 21 people will serve the Middle East, with only eight people assigned to all of Asia and eight people assigned to Latin America.
The dramatic cuts were also confirmed by The New York Times, Reuters and the Associated Press.
A memo on the agency’s website earlier this week noted that nearly the entire workforce would be put on “administrative leave” by the end of the week, with only a small number of “designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs” who would be exempt.
USAID workers abroad, which account for roughly two-thirds of the agency’s staff, will “be offered optional and fully reimbursed return travel to the United States within 30 days,” though “personnel are not required to accept Agency-sponsored travel or to return to the United States within any specific deadline.”
“Beyond 30 days, however, Agency funded and arranged return travel may not be available unless an individualized exception is sought and granted,” the memo states.
“Thank you for your service,” it reads.
Trump administration officials have smeared the agency’s spending as unnecessary, wasteful, politically motivated and in conflict with the president’s foreign policy and ideological agenda.
Rapidly escalating threats to the 63-year-old agency — which funds and supports health services, disaster relief and anti-poverty efforts around the world — have scrambled employees, leaving many in shock and disbelief as Musk and his allies baselessly label USAID a “criminal organization” and a “radical-left political psy op.”
Musk, the unelected world’s wealthiest man at the center of Trump’s attempts to gut billions of dollars in federal spending, said this week that the administration was “in the process” of “shutting down” the agency, which supports life-saving projects abroad as part of its expansive mandate — from combatting HIV/AIDS and containing Ebola outbreaks to staffing field hospitals in war-torn regions.
USAID manages aid projects in roughly 100 countries with a budget of roughly $40 billion, including tens of millions of dollars returned to the American economy through the purchase of U.S. food shipments.
The agency spent roughly $38 billion in fiscal year 2023, or less than 1 percent of the total federal budget.
A request for comment to the State Department, which has assumed control of the agency in the wake of Trump’s presidency, referred The Independent to the statement posted on the USAID’s website.
Rubio told Fox News this week that the State Department’s takeover was “not about getting rid of foreign aid.”
“But now we have rank insubordination,” he said. USAID’s staff has been “completely uncooperative, so we had no choice but to take dramatic steps to bring this thing under control, according to Rubio.
