Usaid Workers Scramble For Answers After Trump Pulls Almost All Of Them Off The Job Worldwide

U.S. aid staffers around the world are scrambling Wednesday for answers and starting to pack up households or pull their children from school after a sudden Trump administration order yanking almost all of them off the job and out of the field.

In Washington, Democratic lawmakers and other supporters of the U.S. Agency for International Development planned rallies to protest the dismantling of the independent government agency established six decades ago. USAID has been one of the agencies hardest hit as the new administration and Elon Musk's budget-cutting team target federal programs they say are wasteful or not aligned with a conservative agenda.

U.S. embassies in many of the more than 100 countries where USAID operates convened emergency town halls for the thousands of agency staffers and contractors looking for answers. Embassy officials said they had been given no guidance on what to tell staffers, particularly local hires, about their employment status.

Despite the administration's assurances that the U.S. government would bring the agency's workers home as ordered within 30 days, many feared being stranded in the field and left to make their own way home. Their colleagues in Washington described reactivating employee networks that had helped in the past to bring local staffers out of danger zones.

The late-night order Tuesday to abandon USAID posts worldwide comes as many of the aid workers abroad are locked out of email and emergency communications with their own government. Most agency spending has been ordered frozen and most workers at the Washington headquarters have been taken off the job, making it unclear how the administration would manage and pay for the abrupt relocation of thousands of staffers and their families.