A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The Trump administration is telling all employees of the United States Agency for International Development to stop doing their job.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Yeah. The workers are told to go on administrative leave by Friday at 11:59 p.m., according to a new directive sent to agency staff globally and posted on the website. This comes after more than two weeks of chaos at the agency, as the president and Elon Musk said they were in the process of shutting it down.
MARTÍNEZ: NPR global health correspondent Fatma Tanis joins us now to tell us all about this. So who exactly signed off on this?
FATMA TANIS, BYLINE: Well, it was a short note. It was not signed by any official, and it said that there would be some exceptions, that essential personnel expected to continue working would be notified by Thursday afternoon. Now, around 10,000 people work for USAID. Most of them are serving overseas, and they've been given 30 days to pack up and come back home. The note ended with the words, thank you for your service.
MARTÍNEZ: So what are you hearing from the people who work there?
TANIS: Well, they're shocked and gutted. I spoke to several officials at the agency who didn't want to be named because they're not authorized to speak publicly. And they said that this is effectively a shutdown of the agency, and they called the process inhumane. Now, for staff who are overseas, there are other concerns. People have kids in school, spouses who have jobs, they have pets.
It's going to be hard to uproot their lives in 30 days, and many are expecting the next step to be mass layoffs. I also heard concerns about what this means for the U.S. I spoke with Susan Reichle, a retired USAID official, and here's how she put it.
SUSAN REICHLE: This is taking away a critical element of our national security, and it's affecting people's lives from not just a humanitarian perspective, but we're leaving a huge vacuum for China and Russia.
MARTÍNEZ: I mean, it seems like the Trump administration wants to get rid of this agency. Why would they want to do that?
TANIS: Well, President Trump has been saying that USAID is too independent, that it is full of, quote, "radical left lunatics," and that its programs are not in line with his America First policy. Now, people who work in the agency, they say their allegiance is to the Constitution and not to any political party. Many of them served under multiple administrations, and they say that everything they do, down to the countries and the issues that they work on, is approved by Congress.
Now, since Congress chartered USAID, legal experts say the administration doesn't have the authority to abolish it on its own, but there are still a lot of questions about how this is going to play out.
MARTÍNEZ: And they have programs all over the world. So what happens now to all of those things?
TANIS: Well, for now, most programs receiving U.S. foreign aid have been halted. And you know, there are multiple disease outbreaks going on, Ebola in East Africa, there's a different hemorrhagic fever in Bolivia. These are part of USAID's work overseas. Here's Matt Kavanagh, the director of Global Health Policy at Georgetown University.
MATT KAVANAGH: The USAID team was literally preparing to respond to these new outbreaks that occurred literally as the president was being inaugurated, and now that's stopped.
TANIS: So have distributions of HIV medication and pox vaccines, a therapeutic food for malnourished kids. Millions of people around the world aren't getting those services anymore.
MARTÍNEZ: All right. So a lot still up in the air. That's NPR's Fatma Tanis. Thank you very much for letting us know about all this.
TANIS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
