WASHINGTON — (AP) — Newly filed affidavits of U.S. Agency for International Development workers describe a lieutenant of Trump ally Elon Musk and other outsiders directing the immediate termination of hundreds of American aid and foreign assistance programs abroad this week, without required documentation or justification.
Other affidavits described some agency employees posted overseas put in danger as Musk and political appointees of Republican President Donald Trump gutted USAID, removing dozens of leaders from their duties. USAID workers and families in Congo, for example, were left to secure and pay for their own emergency evacuations to the United States as looters overran their homes last month during a time of political violence. Meanwhile, in Washington, chaos reigned at USAID's headquarters.
Those accounts, filed late Tuesday in support of a lawsuit by two associations for government employees, offer some of the most detailed looks of the scenes inside the agency and confusion abroad, and they describe Musk's teams at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency overseeing the purge of longstanding U.S. aid and development programs. The groups are suing to roll back that dismantling by the administration and Musk's government-cutting effort.
A court hearing in the case was postponed Wednesday because of heavy snow in Washington.
USAID contract officers on Monday emailed agency higher-ups asking for the required authorization and justification needed to cancel programs abroad. But the response was from a Musk associate, one of the contract workers said in a sworn account filed with the federal court.
The decisions on killing the programs came from the “most senior levels,” that associate told USAID staffers.
Other affidavits describe similar scenes from agency contract officers and tensions and uncertainty as USAID workers dealt with the shutdown.
More spreadsheets arrived in USAID employees’ inboxes into Wednesday about U.S.-funding programs -– including for agriculture, conflict resolution, democracy and human rights — that were to end, immediately and permanently, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the developments. The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The emails said Secretary of State Marco Rubio had given that order, but they came from individuals not known to staffers. The decisions about which programs to eliminate appeared to be being made using the program names and one-line descriptions of them, pulled from the USAID payment system, the two U.S. officials said.
The administration, in its filings in the lawsuit, defends its actions, saying USAID was rife with “insubordination" and must be shut down as Trump's team figures what parts to salvage. The argument was made in an affidavit by the deputy USAID administrator, Pete Marocco.
USAID staffers deny insubordination and call the accusation a pretext to break up the agency, among the world's biggest donors of humanitarian and development assistance.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who was nominated by Trump, dealt the administration a setback last week by temporarily halting plans to pull all but a fraction of USAID staffers off the job worldwide.
Nichols is set to hear arguments later this week on a request from the employee groups to keep blocking the move to put thousands of staffers on leave, and to broaden his order. They contend the government has already violated the judge's order, which also reinstated USAID staffers already placed on leave but declined to suspend the administration's freeze on foreign assistance.
A government motion in the case shows the administration pressing arguments by Vice President JD Vance and others questioning whether courts have the authority to check Trump's power.
“The President's powers in the realm of foreign affairs are generally vast and unreviewable,” government lawyers argued.
USAID staffers and supporters call the aid agency's humanitarian and development work abroad essential to national security. They say the administration's breakup of USAID has been unnecessarily cruel to its thousands of workers and devastating for people around the world who are being cut off from clean water, life-saving medical care, education, training and more since Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 freezing foreign assistance.
The American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees argue that Trump lacks the authority to shut down the agency without approval from Congress. Democratic lawmakers have made the same argument.
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