American Personnel Abroad Face Chaos and Confusion as USAID Shuts Down
President Trump’s moves to close down the agency have left U.S. government employees living in remote areas or war zones struggling to get home
Updated Feb. 7, 2025 The Wall Street Journal
As President Trump dismantled the leading U.S. foreign aid agency in Washington, its staffers working in Africa were under attack.
On Jan. 28, rioters in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, blamed Western governments for fueling a rebel group’s advances. They set fires near the American Embassy and broke into the home of the mission director of the U.S. Agency for International Development there. USAID officials said the director, retreating to a safe room, called for an armed crew to extract him and his wife to safety.
The State Department ordered a near-total evacuation from the country, but USAID was already in disarray. Earlier that morning, the administration put dozens of the agency’s senior officials on administrative leave and froze spending for its programs to comply with a Trump-signed executive order.
The effects stretched all the way to Kinshasa, USAID officials said, as staff fleeing in vans and boats to the neighboring Republic of Congo were unsure their agency would reimburse costs incurred during the escape.
The chaos and confusion in Kinshasa unfolded as Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Elon Musk purposefully shrank USAID, throwing the vast network of U.S. foreign assistance into crisis. The administration has sought to slash USAID’s 10,000-person worldwide staff to 600 full-time employees, officials said, and to cancel most of its $40 billion in programs, which includes work that tracks and prevents diseases, provides maternal and neonatal care, and delivers food to the hungry.
USAID officials serving abroad have been ordered to come home and have been told they will only receive financial and logistical help if they return within 30 days. Some live in places so remote or in war zones so dangerous that they might need the military to evacuate them, officials said.
Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin, who was deputy head of communications for USAID in East Africa, said he resigned in protest on Monday. Knowles-Coursin, who has two young children and a wife without a job, said he couldn’t in good conscience speak on behalf of an administration that was, in his view, abandoning its humanitarian principles.
“There are some people that will just become lackeys to whatever the administration wants, without thinking,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “I just got fed up.”
On Friday, the USAID sign outside its headquarters in downtown Washington was covered over. “CLOSE IT DOWN!” Trump wrote on social media hours earlier.
A USAID official said Musk, who heads the Department of Government Efficiency, speaks often with Rubio about how to wind down USAID’s operations. “Elon wants to go faster, and Rubio wants to go slower,” the official said. “Trump agrees with Elon more on what to do with USAID than he does with Rubio.”
The White House, DOGE and State Department didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, USAID officials abroad have described being cut off from internal networks needed to receive assistance to return home, and rushing to figure out where they will live in the U.S. and how to enroll their children in school.
The administration’s efforts to drastically downsize the agency’s staff was called into question Friday, when a Trump-appointed federal judge issued a temporary restraining order halting the State Department’s plan to put 2,200 people on administrative leave. He said he would publish a written order before midnight on Friday that would address the accelerated relocation of USAID personnel stationed abroad back to the U.S., as well as their access to computer systems that provide them information about risks to their safety.
Despite legislation that makes USAID an independent entity, the Trump administration has folded its remnants into the State Department, which has promised a 90-day review of the agency’s work before reauthorizing paused efforts. Certain programs that have received waivers still can’t use frozen funds to pay staff on the ground, according to U.S. officials, and projects that support maternal care, immunizations, food deliveries and other assistance in vulnerable places remain suspended.
“I’d have preferred not to do it this way,” Rubio told reporters in the Dominican Republic on Thursday. “We’re not trying to be disruptive to people’s personal lives. We’re not being punitive here.”
But Rubio, who as a senator often praised USAID for boosting America’s global image and countering Chinese influence, said that turning off the tap was the only way to ensure U.S. aid was aligned with Trump’s foreign policy priorities.
For weeks, Trump, Rubio and Musk have accused the agency of corruption, criminality, and insubordination, leading some personnel to say they fear for their safety. During an emotionally charged meeting on Friday, Kenyans who work for USAID expressed concerns about their personal safety, given remarks by Trump and others accusing the agency of stealing money.
USAID staffers elsewhere in Africa say they were despondent when orders came to freeze their programs and prohibited them from telling counterparts what happened. The host country’s health ministry repeatedly called the U.S. Embassy seeking information, but no one was allowed to answer the phone, a USAID official said.
On Friday, the U.S. mission in Somalia sent a message, viewed by the Journal, asking the administration to reconsider closing down the aid agency. Its local program helped to counter al Qaeda and its affiliates in the Horn of Africa, the message read, arguing that cutting off funding—and recalling all but one USAID officer from the 32-person team—would harm U.S. national security.
“I haven’t seen morale this low since our terrible evacuation from Afghanistan,” said another USAID official in Africa.
For years, Republicans and Democrats have called for significant changes at USAID, but the Trump administration’s determination to permanently close the agency and align foreign assistance strictly with U.S. national security could lead to repercussions at home, officials say.
With USAID officials on leave or laid off, many deliveries of U.S. food aid supplied by American farmers have been suspended. The funding freeze has left in limbo over 500,000 metric tons of food, ranging from corn meal to wheat, with much of it stuck at U.S. ports or at sea, said lawmakers and aides. For example, 235,000 tons of wheat was stranded in Houston since there were no USAID workers to coordinate its transportation or ensure security for it, a congressional aide said.
Farmers will start to feel the squeeze if funding for these programs is permanently cut off or dramatically reduced, said Nick Levendofsky, executive director of the Kansas Farmers Union.
Growers are already struggling with low commodity prices, high costs for fertilizer and equipment and looming tariffs, he added.
Sen. Jerry Moran (R., Kan.) urged Rubio on social media to distribute the U.S.-grown food. “Time is running out before this lifesaving aid perishes,” he wrote.
Other suspended projects also threaten U.S. national security interests, according to officials and others who have worked with USAID.
In South America, for example, many of the now-paralyzed projects center on tackling migration and crime. In the Colombian city of Medellín, Yexica Marcano says her small, female-run Venezuelan Volunteering Corp. helps Venezuelan migrants find jobs and social services. USAID approved $29,000 for their latest project, which ends in March.
In Ukraine, where Trump hopes to broker an end to the war with Russia, the aid pause has affected programs expanding school education, delivering fuel and generators to help during blackouts, distributing seeds and fertilizer to farmers and providing mental health support to veterans, service members and their families.
Deliveries of building materials to the city of Mykolaiv is one of the many suspended projects. The materials helped speed up the process of patching up walls and replacing shattered windows, helping Ukrainians return to homes that had been damaged or destroyed during Russian strikes.
“We lack reserves of these materials,” said Serhiy Korenyev, deputy mayor of Mykolaiv, in an interview. “We were counting on the help of USAID.”
Vera Bergengruen, Laura Kusisto, Ryan Dubé, Kejal Vyas, Jane Lytvynenko, Jan Wolfe and Alan Cullison contributed to this article.