Trump administration plans to retain fewer than 300 USAID staff

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The Trump administration plans to retain only a few hundred employees from the US Agency for International Development’s staff of thousands, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Agency leaders were briefed on the plans on Thursday after notifying staff this week that most of them would be placed on leave and ordered home from overseas postings within 30 days, according to the people. 

The lay-offs are the latest blow to the agency that has been targeted by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who has been tasked with eliminating wasteful spending in the government.

The US spends about $40bn annually on foreign assistance, which makes up less than 1 per cent of the federal budget. The projects have long enjoyed bipartisan support, including from secretary of state Marco Rubio when he was in the Senate. He has been made the agency’s acting administrator.

“Foreign aid is the least popular thing government spends money on,” Rubio told embassy staff in Guatemala on Wednesday, according to a partial transcript viewed by the Financial Times. “I spent a lot of time in my career defending it and explaining it, but it’s harder and harder to do across the board.”

Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency have taken a special interest in USAID as they seek to slash spending across government departments.

“The goal of our endeavour has always been to identify programmes that work and continue them and to identify programmes that are not aligned with our national interest and identify those and address them,” Rubio said on Thursday in the Dominican Republic.

There are about 10,000 people employed by USAID, including 5,000 who are “direct hires” or civil servants. Of those, fewer than 300 will remain, largely focused on humanitarian assistance and global health.

The fate of 5,000 locally employed staff remains unclear, said people familiar with the matter. USAID has already eliminated thousands of contractor positions.

More than 1,400 USAID employees are serving overseas, often with their families. The state department will arrange and pay for their return home within 30 days. Those who do not agree to leave within 30 days might not have their travel paid for, according to updated guidance from USAID. The state department will consider exceptions.

A senior official described the Trump administration’s gutting of the agency as “stunning and irresponsible”. In an internal message to their Middle East team, the official described the security risk to staff, families, US government property and life-saving programmes as “unacceptably high”.

USAID and the companies that implement foreign assistance projects have been plunged into chaos since Rubio ordered a freeze on foreign assistance two weeks ago. An advocacy group tracking the stop work order’s effects said 10,275 American jobs at contracted companies had been lost as a result.

Rubio has said all foreign aid must make the US safer and more prosperous. But current and former officials said it was unlikely that Rubio would achieve that goal.

Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior USAID official who is now president of Refugees International, said USAID was laying off all staff and contractors involved in terror vetting of its own programmes.

“Seems to fail Secretary Rubio’s ‘does this make America more secure’ standard,” he wrote on X.

A USAID official said the hasty decision to dismantle the agency would have disastrous consequences.

“This is Trump’s Afghanistan,” said the official. “This is going to be worse than Afghanistan because not only are we pulling out with no notice, but we also have Elon Musk tweeting that USAID is a bunch of criminals, and that feeds into the narrative of a lot of the governments in the places where we work.”