President Donald Trump and Elon Musk tore through much of the federal government over the past two weeks — effectively shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the government’s foreign aid department.
Now that nearly all of the agency’s staff has been put on leave, USAID employees aren’t sure whether they’ll still be paid — and have no real way of getting answers. Meanwhile, the agency’s thousands of overseas employees are being recalled and wondering what happens next: How will they get back to America? Are they going to be stranded? Will they have to leave their pets behind? Many have had their jobs terminated.
Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump’s biggest donor, has called USAID a “criminal organization” and “a ball of worms,” and claimed that he and his team at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) received Trump’s blessing to “shut down” the agency.
On Tuesday, 25-year-old DOGE aide Gavin Kliger sent out a memo announcing that nearly all of USAID’s workforce was being put on paid administrative leave, effectively immediately. The memo demanded that employees be “available by telephone and e-mail during normal business hours” and “remain available to report to work if directed to do so,” while barring them from attempting to go into their offices or access USAID systems, according to a copy reviewed by Rolling Stone.
The memo directed employees to provide their personal contact information to a USAID human resources staffer. However, that HR staffer was also put on administrative leave, according to subsequent correspondence from the USAID employee relations team, which recommended that employees reach out to a help desk or payroll email account with further questions.
“I am sorry we are not able to provide you with more guidance at this time,” the email said. The rest of the employee relations team is expected to be put on leave soon, too.
At the moment, a USAID employee tells Rolling Stone, it’s not clear whether anyone will be around to certify employees’ hours in the payroll system while they’re all on leave. “We don’t know if they’ve left anyone in place to actually do that,” the employee says, adding: “If someone finds a new job, how do they resign? They’re holding us hostage.”
Matters are even worse for USAID’s overseas staffers, who make up roughly two-thirds of the agency’s 10,000-person workforce.
Rolling Stone interviewed a USAID staffer based in Kenya who helps administer humanitarian relief to Sudan as part of the Disaster Assistance Response Team. The staffer had just received notice his job was being terminated within 30 days.
He described the “gut punch” of the sudden, chaotic shutdown. “We are in heartbreaking meetings in the embassy. People are shaken — local and U.S. staff,” he said. “The feeling is real — saying goodbye to each other as we’re trying to obey orders and be out from post back to our homes in the next few days, unless some miracle happens.”
The staffer described a shambolic wind-down: “There is absolutely zero guidance coming out of our Washington offices and we quite frankly feel very isolated alone. Most of headquarters is shut out of their email and even our sister team doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “We are the violin playing orchestra on the Titanic deck sinking currently.”
In recent days, Facebook groups and other online forums of Americans working overseas, including for USAID, exploded in panic and utter bafflement. Many of the overseas workers learned about the recall from news reports, and not from any official channels, according to interviews and screenshots shared with Rolling Stone. Related Content YNW Melly’s Trials Highlight Florida’s Unconstitutional Death Penalty Law FAA Officials Ordered Staff to Find Funding for Elon Musk’s Starlink 'SNL' Weekend Update Tackles Trump-Zelensky Meeting, Musk's Demands of Federal Workers 'SNL' Cold Open: Mike Myers' Elon Musk Clumsily Waves Chainsaw Around Trump's Head
Per the posts, virtually none of the workers know exactly how to get themselves, their family members, or even their pets home under the new Trump-era orders. The USAID employee says the overseas workers may, indeed, be forced to leave their pets, noting that “the contents of their homes are going to be in limbo for who knows how long.”
“Bringing back all of our overseas staff is going to be insanely expensive,” the USAID employee notes, adding that employees “are all having to mobilize — while being called worms and criminals and lunatics in public — to figure out emergency housing for 1,500+ families that are about to get dropped on D.C. with little warning.”
A spokesperson for the State Department, which is set to absorb USAID, did not answer questions from Rolling Stone, instead pointing a message on the USAID website. That message says on Thursday, “all USAID direct hire personnel will be placed on administrative leave globally, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs.”
Regarding USAID personnel overseas, the message says the agency and the State Department are “currently preparing a plan, in accordance with all applicable requirements and laws, under which the agency would arrange and pay for return travel to the United States within 30 days and provide for the termination of [contractors] that are not determined to be essential. The agency will consider case-by-case exceptions and return travel extensions based on personal or family hardship, mobility or safety concerns, or other reasons…. Further guidance on how to request an exception will be forthcoming.”
Some officials and staff at USAID have internally raised the point that it will likely cost the Trump administration significantly more money to conduct an emergency mass repatriation of American USAID workers overseas than it would to recall them in an orderly, more normal fashion.
But due to the way that Trump and Musk are attempting to gut the government to the bone — and clamping down on dissent throughout the administration — it’s not clear to these staffers to whom they should be making those arguments.
Numerous career officials in the federal government and other knowledgeable sources say this week that they’re having trouble figuring out where the money for a repatriation and recall will come from, given that the government’s funding is rapidly drying up and staff are already having trouble getting their travel orders approved.
However this ends, the sources say there are now potentially hundreds if not thousands of Americans who are feeling abandoned or stranded overseas — and that they are having their lives upended by a Trump administration that is causing international panic and confusion that was entirely self-inflicted and avoidable.
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