#Trump Appointees Fire Hundreds at #USAID Working on Urgent #Aid
The firings added to doubts about whether Secretary of #State #MarcoRubio, the agency’s acting head, supports lifesaving #humanitarian assistance, as he has said he does.
#USpol #geopolitics #SoftPower #ForeignPolicy #Diplomacy #TheCrueltyIsThePoint
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/us/politics/usaid-urgent-aid-firings.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
#Trump appointees have fired or put on paid leave thousands of employees of #USAID A task force of young engineers working for #ElonMusk [#DOGE] has shut down many technical systems in the #aid agency & barred employees from their email accounts. #Musk has posted dark #ConspiracyTheories about USAID on social media, asserting with no evidence that it is a “criminal organization” & that it was “time for it to die.”
#USpol #geopolitics #SoftPower #ForeignPolicy #Diplomacy #TheCrueltyIsThePoint
The latest round of dismissals occurred on Friday night, when hundreds of people working for the agency’s Bureau for #Humanitarian Assistance got emails saying their jobs had been terminated. Two employees who got the emails said they were strange because they did not state any job titles specifically & did not have the recipients’ names in the “to” field. They were generic emails sent out in a large wave.
#USAID #MassFirings #Trump #Musk #USpol #geopolitics #ForeignPolicy #TheCrueltyIsThePoint
In addition, 36 people were fired from the Office of Transition Initiatives, a unit in the agency’s conflict prevention bureau that specializes in helping partner countries with political transitions & #democratic initiatives, said US officials & recent agency employees.
#USAID #MassFirings #Trump #Musk #USpol #geopolitics #SoftPower #ForeignPolicy #Diplomacy #TheCrueltyIsThePoint
~400 people were fired in recent days from #humanitarian assistance positions…. ~200 of those were contractors for the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, …& another 200 were part of a unit called the Support Relief Group, a collection of #crisis experts who helped the bureau in responding quickly to #NaturalDisasters & armed conflicts. Now only about a dozen people remain in that group.
#USAID #MassFirings #Trump #Musk #USpol #geopolitics #SoftPower #ForeignPolicy #TheCrueltyIsThePoint
The fired employees were contractors who were employed directly by the #US govt. Some had worked for #USAID in various capacities for 25yrs.
Many of the contractors for the Support Relief Group had worked for the agency in #war zones, including in #Ukraine, #Syria & #Afghanistan. They often lived in different places around the world & spent weeks or months at a time in #crisis areas. One employee who got the email said they were being flown home next week from a US diplomatic mission overseas.
Another fired employee said the hundreds of dismissals meant that the #aid agency now had only a skeleton crew to respond to #humanitarian crises.
The appointee running day-to-day operations at #USAID is #PeteMarocco, a #State Dept official overseeing foreign aid who was a #divisive figure at the agency & other government departments in the first #Trump administration. Early this month, #MarcoRubio announced he was taking over the aid agency as acting administrator.
#MarcoRubio has said all foreign #aid will remain halted for 90 days during a review process. But ofcls & contractors working in foreign aid said they expected most of the aid to be cut permanently & many more employees to be fired, & what little remains of #USAID to be folded into the #State Dept. Although USAID was created by #Congress & lawmakers appropriated govt money for foreign aid this year, few, if any, #Republicans have raised objections to the freeze & the job cuts.
Nonilex