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The Trump administration's appointees, which run the leading US aid agencies, are hundreds of people managing responses to emergency humanitarian crises around the world, according to two recent officials and four recent employees. A person has been fired.
The shootings added to doubts about whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio is allowing employees of the U.S. International Development Agency. All foreign aid from the US government.
Trump's appointees have fired or put in the thousands of USAID employees a task force of young engineers who work for Elon Musk, a billionaire technology businessman who advises President Trump. Email account. Musk has posted a dark conspiracy theory on social media about USAID, claiming there is no evidence that it is a “criminal organisation” and is “time to die.”
The latest firing occurred Friday night. On Friday night, hundreds of people working for agency departments for humanitarian assistance received an email saying their work had been completed. Two employees who received the email said it was odd as they didn't specifically state the title of the job and didn't have the recipient's name in the “to” field. They were common emails sent in big waves.
The New York Times obtained copies and reviewed their descriptions. Employees who agreed to speak for this story did so on condition of anonymity because they did not wish to risk the 15-day pay they would receive after a notice of termination. Two US authorities feared retaliation.
Additionally, 36 people have been fired from the Transition Initiatives Bureau, a force of the Transition Initiatives Bureau, an agency specialising in supporting political transitions and democratic initiatives, according to U.S. officials and recent agency employees. The member said.
US officials said about 400 people have been fired from recent humanitarian positions. Of those, about 200 were contractors for the Department of Humanitarian Aid, officials said. Another 200 people said they were part of a unit called the Support Relief Group, a collection of crisis experts who helped the bureau respond quickly to natural disasters and armed conflicts. Now only about 12 people remain in that group.
The fired employees were contractors employed directly by the US government. Some people worked for USAID in various abilities for 25 years.
Many of the support relief group contractors worked for agents in war zones, including Ukraine, Syria and Afghanistan. They often lived in different parts of the world, spending weeks or months in areas of crisis. An employee who received the email on Friday said he was back home from an overseas diplomatic mission next week.
Another fired employee said hundreds of fire means that aid agencies only have skeleton crews to respond to the humanitarian crisis.
The appointee who runs daily business at USAID is Pete Marrocco, a State Department official who oversees foreign aid, a divisive figure in the first Trump administration's government agencies and other government departments. Earlier this month, Rubio announced that he would take over the aid agency as proxy administrator.
Rubio said all foreign aid remained suspended for 90 days during the review process. However, staff and contractors working in foreign aid said that most of the aid is expected to be cut forever and more employees will be fired, with most of the USAID being folded to the State Department. . The USAID was created by Congress, and lawmakers allocated government funds for government foreign aid this year, but Republican lawmakers have rarely challenged aid freeze and work cuts.
Foreign aid accounts for less than 1% of government budgets.
Rubio said at the end of January that employees could apply for a waiver program, particularly to allow “life-humanitarian assistance.” However, few programs have received exemptions. And even those with the exemption could not operate it as the USAID payment system known as Phoenix was discontinued. This means that the partner group could not obtain funds.
Leken Lapier, a political appointee for the State Department and USAID, is said to be a spokesman, did not reply to an email requesting comment on the story.
