At the U.S. Agency for International Development this week, as a team from the Department of Government Efficiency quietly worked to dismantle the aid agency, those who hadn’t already been locked out of its Washington headquarters busied themselves with work they never imagined doing — shutting it down.
“We feel like it’s closing time at the store and we’re the ones left to turn off the lights,” one career official told ABC News. “There’s lots of tears, lots of heartbreak.”
Normal day-to-day work ceased earlier in the week, when the Trump administration announced plans to place all direct-hire employees on leave starting Friday, leaving career officials to focus on the logistical hurdles of recalling thousands of overseas employees back to the U.S., including reserving flights for those officials and their families.
“We could be doing the lifesaving work we’ve been doing,” the official said, “but instead we’re stuck here like travel agents.”
Late Friday, a federal judge said he plans to temporarily block the Trump administration from placing remaining employees on leave, casting even more uncertainty on the fortunes of some 2,200 USAID staff.
As congressional Democrats scramble to rescue USAID, its thousands of employees in the U.S. and around the globe are grappling with how to “leave with dignity,” another career agency official said.
But doing so has proven to be a challenge. A message posted on USAID.gov signaled that some “designated personnel” would remain on the job, prompting a frantic race among staff to secure their livelihoods.
Black plastic covers the space where the letters of USAID were mounted on the building at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 7, 2025.
Alex Wroblewski/EPA via Shutterstock
“It’s the Hunger Games,” another career USAID official based in Washington said. “They’re narrowing down lists to the smallest number of staff. People fighting to be on those lists.”
USAID staff on Thursday were digesting news that all but roughly 600 employees would be placed on leave by the end of the week. President Trump has accused the agency of perpetrating “tremendous fraud” and promoting left-wing ideologies.
Meanwhile, officials deployed overseas face hurdles of their own. The abrupt stop-work orders and funding freezes imposed by the Trump administration have placed frontline USAID employees in the uncomfortable position of explaining to regional partners what is happening.
“Many of [the foreign service nationals] have worked for USAID for 20-30 years,” said one USAID official stationed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “It’s impossible to explain to them what is going on. It breaks their faith in America. We are going to lose thousands of our best friends and allies.”
In a different African country, staff met earlier in the week to begin choreographing their departure, a local USAID official recalled.
“The meeting today with local staff was rough,” the official said. “The ambassador was there, and folks were crying. It was extremely sad. Both the mission director and the deputy mission director were also in tears.”
A worker removes the U.S. Agency for International Development sign on their headquarters on Feb. 7, 2025, in Washington.
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One official with 20 years at USAID under their belt said the ambassador in their country encouraged staff to “start preparing your CVs and start looking for jobs, because inevitably, you’re all going to be terminated.”
“[The administration is] just terrorizing everyone in USAID who has served their country, making huge sacrifices, moving around the world every four years, pulling kids out of school and away from friends and like spouses giving up their own careers so that we can serve our country and do this important work around the world,” the official said. “And I feel like It’s being erased.”
At the agency’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, which has been the U.S. government’s lead response coordinator for international disasters, several employees said their email access was revoked, rendering them unable to communicate with senior officials.
One USAID contractor overseas said they were “stuck abroad on official travel with no guidance on how to proceed, where they are able to work, how to get home, or whether they are able to work.”
The spouse of a current USAID official in the Latin America region told ABC News that their family does not have a home to return to in the U.S.
“My spouse has served in a war zone. We have school-age children with typical challenges you would face in the U.S. — but not with the resources you would have in the U.S. — that we’ve had to manage, and we’ve been willing to move wherever is best for the agency,” the official said. “We do not have a home to go back to, which is quite typical of Foreign Service families, and we don’t know how we’re supposed to pick up and just leave.”
A USAID official based in Asia told ABC News that she’s pregnant and is worried that the administration is going to abandon her overseas.
“I am among more than a dozen American families that are either on or planning obstetric medevac to deliver our babies,” she said. “We have been told there is no money to assist USAID families that are awaiting the arrival of our infants with resettlement in the U.S. We have been using refugee resources from our churches and community groups that we usually use to help refugees from places like Syria and Afghanistan.”
“Unless the tide of public opinion shifts,” the official said, “each of these families are going to arrive homeless, jobless, and insurance-less within a matter of days, or possibly even hours, of stepping foot on American soil.”
On Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is overseeing USAID as its acting administrator, insisted during a press conference in the Dominican Republic that the administration would accommodate “exceptional circumstances regarding families or displacement.”
Federal workers and supporters hold signs as they demonstrate against Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) outside of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) headquarters in Washington, DC, Feb. 07, 2025.
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“We’re not trying to be disruptive to peoples’ personal lives,” Rubio insisted. “We’re not being punitive,” he said.
Back in Washington, Peter Marocco, a Trump loyalist and the architect of plans to drastically diminish the agency’s footprint, has been “in and out” of the building, but has not engaged with career officials or addressed any large numbers of staff. Marocco did not reply to ABC News’ request for comment.
Rubio has said rank-and-file USAID officials had demonstrated “rank insubordination” during attempts to overhaul the agency, claiming that the administration was left with “no choice but to take dramatic steps to bring this thing under control.”
Late Thursday, as working hours on the East Coast wound down, a senior career official at USAID shared this somber text message with ABC News: “I just lost my job.”
The official, who spent nearly a decade at the agency, was not told she was dismissed. Instead, she said agency leaders alerted those who will remain in their roles on Thursday afternoon, leaving the remaining employees to assume they would be placed on administrative leave.
