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Employees and supporters protest outside USAID headquarters, February 3, 2025, after Elon Musk posted on social media that he and President Trump would shut down the agency.
More than 1,000 U.S. Agency for International Development contractors, whose work involved providing humanitarian assistance overseas and helping advance U.S. foreign-policy objectives, have been left in the lurch after the White House furloughed, fired, and locked most of them out of computer systems and their downtown Washington, D.C., office building.
Democratic lawmakers and dozens of shocked and dejected employees responded with a demonstration at agency headquarters Monday morning.
Mark Austin, an Alexandria, Virginia, resident, worked for USAID for roughly 25 years before being summarily terminated last week, without benefits or severance. “I’ve got a kid going into college,” Austin told me on Monday. “This is just awful.”
Another former USAID worker, who was wary of being identified, told me she and other colleagues received a “stop work” order via email last Tuesday, along with directives to turn in all government-provided equipment immediately and to leave the building. She added that her doctors had recently raised concerns about some troubling spots when she went in for a mammogram.
The White House’s unprecedented plans to scrap the nearly 65-year-old agency came into full view on X, formerly Twitter, and during the Monday protest at USAID headquarters.
By then, the Trump administration had already frozen billions in foreign-assistance money, issued worldwide stop-work orders, and furloughed hundreds of USAID workers in the week prior. Then, at midnight on Monday, Tesla CEO and Trump ally Elon Musk hopped into a live chat on X Spaces and announced that Trump had agreed with him that USAID is “beyond repair,” and that “we should shut it down.” Staffers were instructed this morning to stay out of the agency’s headquarters in the Ronald Reagan Building, and reports began to circulate that the Trump administration is planning to merge USAID into the State Department.
There is no legal authority that permits the White House and executive branch to unilaterally shut down a congressionally created agency, nor to merge or restructure it so significantly.
Several Democratic lawmakers and dozens of USAID workers showed up at the Reagan Building to protest the administration’s moves, although lawmakers were ultimately blocked from entering the offices to discuss the White House’s actions.
The USAID’s Office of the Administrator is “not able to take the meeting currently,” a USAID employee told Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) at the entrance. They advised that “it’s best to contact the Department of State at this time if you need any further comments,” the official added.
A LARGE SHARE OF THE PROTESTING EMPLOYEES were contractors, who have many fewer legal protections and benefits than direct employees, although they often work on some of the agency’s most important and prominent projects.
USAID has many varying mechanisms and categories of employment, including direct hires into the civil service and foreign service, personal service contractors (PSCs), and institutional support contractors, or ISCs.
Contractors made up 29 percent of USAID’s overall workforce in fiscal year 2020, according to a 2022 workforce report by the agency’s inspector general. They make up a majority of staff in the agency’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, which provides “life-saving humanitarian assistance” for vulnerable populations, and its Office of Transition Initiatives, which supports foreign-policy objectives by providing “short-term assistance targeted at key political transition and stabilization needs.”
In FY2020, more than 90 percent of OTI were contractors, as were more than 70 percent of the workers in BHA, according to the IG report.
That’s not unusual; in 2020, the federal government had approximately five million contractors on staff, compared with 2.2 million full employees. The full-fledged employees generally enjoy job protections that private-sector workers tend to have. Many of them are unionized, and enjoy additional protections under the federal merit systems, which are meant to guard against other potential abuse by agency management, like ageism, as well as partisan political moves. Generally, unionized workers can’t be terminated without cause, and often only after progressively escalating disciplinary actions, like warnings and suspensions, for example.
Contractors’ employment, on the other hand, is governed by the agreement between their formal employer and the agency, which puts them at a significant disadvantage by comparison.
Of the five USAID contractors I spoke with, each said they were unaware of whether their cohort has a relationship with existing unions at USAID; all said they were unsure of what recourse they might have for their terminations, if any.
Lawmakers who spoke at the protest said they would call hearings about the mass firing, and that Democrats are working on legislation to prevent the kinds of actions Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has taken in recent weeks.
Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ), who arrived well before most of the workers, said he’s been in touch with the USAID unions “about what kinds of workers’ rights there are here,” and whether any legal protections around political discrimination might apply.
“They’re exploring some of those types of actions while we’re exploring some of the congressional efforts we can try to push for,” Kim said. “But at this point, you know, it’s all hands on deck. This is not the only federal agency that they’re trying to gut.”