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The Trump administration on Friday detailed its plans to put the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government’s main agency for distributing foreign aid, fully under the State Department and reduce its staff to some 15 positions.
An email to U.S.A.I.D. employees informing them of the impending layoffs, titled “U.S.A.I.D.’s Final Mission” and sent just after noon, detailed an elimination in all but name that the administration had long signaled was coming. It arrived over protests from lawmakers who argued that the changes were illegal, and from staff members and unions who sued to stop it.
The agency employed about 10,000 people before the Trump administration began reviewing and canceling foreign aid contracts within days of President Trump’s return to the White House. By Sept. 2, the email said, “the agency’s operations will have been substantially transferred to State or otherwise wound down.”
The cuts are in keeping with the administration’s plan to use foreign aid as a tool to further the administration’s diplomatic priorities. This month, recipients of U.S.A.I.D. funds were asked to justify their value to the administration through questionnaires that asked, among other things, whether their programs helped to limit illegal immigration or secure rare earth minerals.
In a statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised the forthcoming cuts.
“We are reorienting our foreign assistance programs to align directly with what is best for the United States and our citizens,” he said, calling U.S.A.I.D. in its previous form “misguided and fiscally irresponsible.”
He pledged that “essential lifesaving programs” would be among those preserved under the State Department. In plans shared with Congress, however, the administration signaled that the U.S.A.I.D. programs it was ending included one that funded vaccines for children in poor countries, as well as some funding for combating malaria.
The email to employees, which was written by Jeremy Lewin, who is part of the Department of Government Efficiency and was recently named as one of two acting deputy administrators for U.S.A.I.D., said that all nonstatutory employees of the agency would receive separation notices with a final date of July 1 or Sept. 2. But some employees reported receiving different dates on Friday, including one Foreign Service officer who was told they would have to depart their post at the end of May.
Title 5 of the U.S. Code names only 15 specific employees of U.S.A.I.D.: one administrator, one deputy administrator, six assistant administrators, four regional assistant administrators, one chief information officer, one general counsel and one inspector general. At its peak, the agency counted about 10,000 employees on its payroll, including contractors, in the United States and abroad.
Terminated employees will be able to apply to be rehired by the State Department, the email said, through a process that has not yet been established. Overseas personnel, it said, would be offered “safe and fully compensated” return packages to the United States. Employees posted overseas were told they had 72 hours to request their preferred departure date.
The email was sent to all U.S.A.I.D. employees — including those who are actively responding to the powerful earthquake that struck Myanmar on Friday. The email landed around midnight local time on the phones of dozens of U.S.A.I.D. employees sheltering in the street in Bangkok, the capital of neighboring Thailand, as tremors continued to shake the city.
Shortly after the email went out, employees began receiving formal reduction in force notices. One shared with The New York Times read: “The agency is abolishing your competitive area. You will be released from your competitive level and will not have an assignment right to another position in the competitive area.”
They then received an email encouraging them “to step away and recharge,” given the impact of the day’s announcement, according to a copy shared with The Times.
The layoffs are a far more drastic reduction than the Trump administration had initially envisioned for U.S.A.I.D. In February, senior officials at the agency were told that its work force would be cut to a few hundred employees. But on Friday, even some of the workers who had been deemed essential were given their walking papers.
While the administration notified lawmakers of their intent to pursue the cuts, Congress has not yet approved the reorganization plan, which Democratic lawmakers have called an illegal closure of the agency.
Members of the House and Senate committees that oversee foreign affairs and associated budgets were informed about the reorganization on Friday by the Trump administration, which said it would be completed by July 1.
In the meantime, several employees are taking issue with the way the termination notices were handed out. Some began circulating a list of “irregularities” on Friday, pointing out clerical errors and objecting that the notices had not been disseminated in accordance with the formal reduction in force process.
“To put a 27-year-old, with zero meaningful government, foreign policy or development experience, in charge of this process is insulting to the career staff around the world with decades of experience,” Julianne Weis, who was a senior adviser in the U.S.A.I.D. global health bureau and also received a termination letter on Friday, said of Mr. Lewin. “It’s also dangerous for America’s global standing, national security and foreign policy.”
A request for comment sent to U.S.A.I.D. received an automatic reply directing all inquiries to the State Department’s press office. An identical request sent there was not immediately responded to.
Amy Schoenfeld Walker contributed reporting.
