A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from placing 2,200 employees of the US Agency for International Development on paid leave.
Carl Nichols, a US district judge and Donald Trump appointee, sided with two federal employee associations in agreeing to a pause in plans to put the employees on paid leave as of midnight Friday.
Forced leaves had already begun Friday when the court ruling came through as workers tried to halt the administration’s swift dismantling of the six-decade-old aid agency and its programs worldwide.
The hearing before the judge on Friday afternoon was told by lawyers for the plaintiffs that the administration lacks the authority to shut down an agency enshrined in congressional legislation.
“CLOSE IT DOWN,” Trump had said earlier on social media of USAid.
Crews in the morning used duct tape to block out the agency’s name on a sign outside its Washington DC headquarters and a flag was taken down. Someone placed a bouquet of flowers outside the door.
A group of a half-dozen USAid officials speaking to reporters Friday strongly disputed assertions from Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, that the most essential life-saving programs abroad were getting waivers to continue. With all but several hundred staffers forced out and funding stopped, the agency has “ceased to exist”, one official on the call said.
The Trump administration and billionaire ally Elon Musk, who is running a budget-cutting “Department of Government Efficiency”, have targeted USAid hardest so far in an unprecedented challenge of the federal government and many of its programs.
The administration told remaining USAid officials on Thursday afternoon that it planned to exempt 297 employees from global leave and furloughs ordered for at least 8,000 staffers and contractors, according to USAid staffers and officials.
Late that night, a new list was finalized of 611 employees to remain on the job, many of them to manage the return home of thousands of staffers, contractors and their families abroad, the officials said. Justice department lawyer, Brett Shumate, confirmed the 611 figure in court.
The USAid officials and staffers spoke on condition of anonymity due to a Trump administration order barring them from talking publicly.
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Some of the remaining staffers and contractors, along with an unknown number of 5,000 locally hired employees abroad, would run the few life-saving programs that the administration says it intends to keep going for now.
It was not immediately clear whether the reductions would be permanent or temporary.
Trump and Musk have spoken of moving surviving programs under the state department. Within the state department itself, employees fear substantial staff reductions following the deadline for the Trump administration’s offer of financial incentives for federal workers to resign, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. A judge temporarily blocked that offer and set a hearing Monday.
At USAid, among the programs officials said had not received waivers: $450m in food grown by US farmers sufficient to feed 36m people, which was not being paid for or delivered; and water supplies for 1.6m people displaced by war in Sudan’s Darfur region, which were being cut off without money for fuel to run water pumps in the desert.
