As Elon Musk’s DOGE team continues its efforts to dismantle the US government’s primary agency for distributing foreign aid, its overseas employees are stuck in limbo. Workers at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are stationed in dozens of different countries around the world, but reports from ABC and CBS News indicate that the majority will be imminently summoned back to the United States.
Both in the US and abroad, some USAID employees’ email and systems access have been abruptly cut off, making it harder to get official information about what might happen next. “Everybody is rightfully very concerned for our overseas staff that are essentially just being left stranded,” a current USAID employee in the US told WIRED. “We’re not sure how we’re going to get them home safe.”
WIRED has seen internal information showing that USAID leadership attempted to compile a list of overseas employees worldwide on Monday. On Tuesday, Pete Marocco, the State Department’s newly appointed foreign assistance director tapped to oversee USAID, convened with senior State Department leaders and instructed them to bring all overseas employees back to the US, according to CBS News. The news outlet also reported that Marocco said he would evacuate staff with support from the US military if necessary.
On Tuesday afternoon, USAID employees still connected to their email accounts received notice that the agency’s Washington, DC, headquarters would remain closed for the remainder of the week, according to a copy of the message reviewed by WIRED. Some received a memo from Marocco indicating that they had been placed on administrative leave “until otherwise notified.”
USAID did not respond to requests for comment. The State Department did not respond to requests for comment.
About 10,000 people work for USAID, roughly two-thirds of whom are stationed overseas, according to the US Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan policy research group that serves Congress (the figure excludes “institutional support” contractors). The agency has more than 60 regional and country missions and represents less than 1 percent of the total US federal budget overall.
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President Donald Trump froze all US foreign aid shortly after he took office last month. His administration later clarified that programs carrying out lifesaving work such as providing medical and food assistance could receive humanitarian waivers to continue, but a number of organizations around the world say that the process has been mired in confusion and chaos. Even vital HIV and AIDS prevention work has been stymied, WIRED reported Monday.
Earlier today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who took acting control of USAID on Monday, speculated that if aid organizations had any misunderstandings, that was a reflection of their incompetence. “If some organization is receiving funds from the United States and does not know how to apply a waiver, then I have real questions about the competence of that organization,” Rubio said. He added that perhaps some groups were “deliberately sabotaging” the process to make “a political point.”
When he was a US senator, Rubio repeatedly voiced support for some US foreign aid programs. “Foreign aid is not charity,” he said on social media in 2017. “We must make sure it is well spent, but it is less than 1% of budget & critical to our national security.”
In 2019, Rubio said he was working on “getting Congressional support for a multilateral humanitarian aid plan so we can get food & medicine to the suffering people of Venezuela.” (Florida, where Rubio is from, is home to a large Venezuelan population.)
Overall, USAID provided assistance to roughly 130 countries in 2023. The top recipients of aid were Ukraine, Ethiopia, Jordan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan, and Syria, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The dismantling of USAID is part of a broader “America First” agenda promoted by the new Trump administration that involves pulling back from a number of international organizations and diplomatic efforts. On Tuesday, President Trump signed an executive order withdrawing the US from the UN’s Human Rights Council.
