Trump administration moves to fire remaining USAID staff

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Trump administration told Congress on Friday it would cut nearly all remaining jobs at the U.S. Agency for International Development and shut the agency, a key instrument for gaining U.S. influence and saving lives across the globe with humanitarian aid for more than 60 years.

USAID staff were told in an internal memo that all positions not required by law would be eliminated in July and September.

The memo reviewed by Reuters was sent to staff by Jeremy Lewin, the agency's acting deputy administrator and a member of billionaire Elon Musk’s job-cutting Department of Government Efficiency.

The notice came on the same day that a powerful earthquake hit Thailand and Myanmar, toppling buildings and killing scores of people. USAID has historically played a major role in coordinating disaster relief efforts.

In the memo, Lewin said all agency personnel around the world would shortly receive emails notifying them that their jobs are being eliminated. Staff would be given the choice of being fired on July 1 or September 2, according to the memo.

Over the next three months, the State Department would assume USAID’s remaining "life-saving and strategic aid programming," the memo said, adding that USAID personnel will not automatically be transferred to the department, which would conduct "a separate and independent hiring process."

President Donald Trump on his first day back in the White House ordered a 90-day freeze of all U.S. foreign aid and a review of whether aid programs were aligned with his administration's policy.

Soon after Trump's White House return, Musk and DOGE gained access to USAID's payment and email systems, froze many of its payments and told much of its staff they were being placed on leave. On February 3, Musk wrote on X that he had "spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper."

The cuts threw humanitarian efforts around the world into turmoil.

A statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department had notified the U.S. Congress on Friday of its intent to reorganize USAID, saying the agency had "strayed from its original mission long ago."

"Thanks to President Trump, this misguided and fiscally irresponsible era is now over. We are reorienting our foreign assistance programs to align directly with what is best for the United States and our citizens," Rubio said.

'A TOTAL ABDICATION'

The decision to cut the remaining USAID jobs sparked alarm among humanitarian aid groups.

In a post on X, Jeremy Konyndyk, a former USAID official who is president of Refugees International, called the move "a total abdication of decades of US leadership in the world."

He added that the firings will cut "the last remnants of the team that would have mobilized a USAID disaster response" to the earthquake centered in Myanmar.

Trump on Friday said he had spoken with officials in Myanmar about the earthquake and that the U.S. would provide assistance.

But the former USAID disaster response chief told Reuters that the Trump administration's massive personnel and funding cuts have “kneecapped” the agency’s ability to send disaster response teams to Thailand and Myanmar to help with the aftermath of the earthquake, opening the way to U.S. rival China and other countries.

“I suspect we will see very shortly Chinese teams showing up, if they haven’t already, possibly Turkish, Russian, Indian teams really making their presence known in support of people that are really suffering right now in Thailand and Burma, and the U.S. won't be there,” said Sarah Charles, who served as assistant USAID administrator for humanitarian affairs until February 2024, using the former name of Myanmar.

After Trump began his second term on January 20, Musk's DOGE launched a drive to shrink USAID and merge its remnants into the State Department.

The administration has since fired hundreds of staff and contractors and terminated billions of dollars in services on which tens of millions of people around the world depended.

Rubio said earlier this month that more than 80% of all USAID programs had been canceled.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey, Doina Chiacu, David Brunnstrom and Jonathan Landay and Daphne Psaledakis; Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal and Erin Banco; Editing by Don Durfee, Lisa Shumaker and Bill Berkrot)