Trump administration eliminating 2,000 USAid positions in US, notice says

The Trump administration on Sunday said it was placing all but a handful of USAid personnel around the world on paid administrative leave and eliminating about 2,000 of those positions in the US, according to a notice sent to agency workers and posted online.

“As of 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, February 23, 2025, all USAid direct hire personnel, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and/or specially designated programs, will be placed on administrative leave globally,” the notice said.

“Concurrently”, the notice added, the agency is “beginning to implement a Reduction-in-Force” affecting about 2,000 USAid personnel in the US.

The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Billionaire Elon Musk has boasted that he is “feeding USAID into the wood chipper” as his so-called “department of government efficiency” has led an effort to gut the main delivery mechanism for American foreign assistance, a critical tool of US“soft power” for winning influence abroad.

On Friday, a federal judge cleared the way for the Trump administration to put thousands of USAid workers on leave, a setback for government employee unions that are suing over what they have called an effort to dismantle it.

The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, was appointed acting USAid administrator by Donald Trump earlier this month. The unsigned notice came from “the office of the administrator”.

Two former senior USAid officials told Reuters that a majority of some 4,600 agency personnel, career US Civil Service and Foreign Service staffers, would be placed on administrative leave.

“This administration and Secretary Rubio are shortsighted in cutting into the expertise and unique crisis response capacity of the US”, said Marcia Wong, one of the former officials. “When disease outbreaks occur, populations displaced, these USAid experts are on the ground and first deployed to help stabilize and provide aid?” In a post on Musk’s social-media platform, Wong was even more blunt, calling the job cuts “a shortsighted, high risk and frankly stupid act”.

“Unsigned notices like this are not self-implementing. They must be followed up by an individual personnel action or at least an approved leave slip, properly executed by someone with that authority”, a second former official, who asked not to be further identified, told Reuters.

The US president ordered a 90-day pause on foreign aid shortly after taking office, halting funding for everything from programs that fight starvation and deadly diseases to providing shelters for millions of displaced people across the globe.

Trump, his press secretary and Musk have all tried to justify the cuts by pointing to wildly mischaracterized or wholly invented spending on overseas aid projects.

The administration has approved exceptions to the freeze totaling $5.3 billion, mostly for security and counter-narcotics programs, according to a list of exemptions reviewed by Reuters that included limited humanitarian relief.

USAid programs received less than $100 million in exemptions, according to the list. That compares to roughly $40bn in USAid programs administered annually before the freeze.

Trump’s ally, the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, joined the campaign to smear USAid, posting video on Musk’s social media platform of a speech in which he attacked the agency in conspiratorial terms for supporting “pseudo-civil organizations” to promote democracy and human rights.

“USAID was the heart of a robust financial and power machine. A monster created to crush, crumble and erode the freedom and independence of nations so that the liberal-globalist empire could thrive,” Orban wrote. Trump, he added, “drove a stake through the heart of the empire”.