Trump To Lay Off Nearly Every USAID Worker
AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
The United States Agency for International Development will lay off almost its entire workforce as President Donald Trump forces through cuts at the agency and elsewhere in complete circumvention of Congress, which funds USAID.
On Thursday, The New York Times reported more than 10,000 employees at the agency will lose their jobs and fewer than 300 will remain for the time being.
“The Trump administration will reduce the number of workers at the U.S. Agency for International Development from more than 10,000 to about 290 positions, three people with knowledge of the plans said on Thursday,” the Times said.
Trump has tasked billionaire Republican donor Elon Musk with overseeing various agencies in an unprecedented move that has seen Musk take over agency databases and put federal workers on leave despite having no clear authority to do so. Musk, who has assigned government tasks to a small cadre of twenty-something-year-olds who work at his companies, has taken particular glee in targeting USAID, which he bragged he “put through the wood chipper.”
Musk and his roving group of Zoomers have been wreaking havoc at the U.S. Treasury, the General Services Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, and other departments with ostensible aim of doing “cost cutting” in the federal government. They have clashed with several civil servants and in some cases locked them out of their computer systems. At the GSA, Musk’s aides have even installed an outside server.
He has taken particular interest and glee in all but shuttering the United States Agency for International Development, whose website was taken down and replaced with a message stating that staffers have been placed on administrative leave. Additionally, Musk has offered scores of federal employees a “buyout” to get them to leave their jobs.
Though USAID is an independent agency, Trump unilaterally folded it into the U.S. Department of State, thus adding it to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s portfolio.
