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Around 8 p.m. on Sunday, a USAID staffer pushed forward $78 million for food and shelter to Palestinians living in Gaza. Two hours later, that staffer and contractors working in over 100 countries were locked out of their email accounts. Then just past midnight, staff received an email from Gavin Kliger, a young engineer working for Elon Musk, announcing that headquarters was closed for business. By Monday morning, the U.S. government agency that sends assistance to tens of millions of the world’s neediest people “from the American people,” as its motto states, was effectively dead.
Over the past 72 hours, a dozen sources recounted the final days of the U.S. Agency for International Development before an effort led by Musk and supported by President Donald Trump crippled the agency and put it under the control of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is now acting director. It appears to be the first of an untold number of federal agencies that the Trump administration seeks to remake without the approval of Congress. Democrats have accused the administration of breaking the law.
As the agency began to crumble under an attack from its own government, staffers worked frantically to send money keeping hospitals and soup kitchens from Gaza to Sudan running, saying that people may die as a result of the chaos. As of Monday afternoon, they were trying to send $305 million to the World Food Program. “We’re blowing through all the normal processes to get this out as quickly as possible,” says one staffer. Employees couldn’t even tell their partner organizations, with which they were communicating regularly as recently as last week, how much money was coming. “I don’t think anyone has any idea what’s going on.”
“It felt like the scene on the Titanic where you have the musicians playing as the boat’s going down,” says another person. “People are freaking out, I’m trying to do work, and people are getting fired around me.”
With an annual budget of about $40 billion, USAID’s global role is so outsize that staffers feared the pause on U.S. assistance might collapse the international-aid sector worldwide, especially in places like Yemen and Sudan. At the end of last week, according to ProPublica, the administration furloughed 500 contractors from the humanitarian assistance bureau running disaster relief for millions, and it fired 400 more from its global health bureau. “We have beneficiaries whose 2,000 calories or 1,800 calories a day come from U.S. funding, and that was cut off,” says one recently fired contractor. “People are definitely going to die even if we turned everything back on today, which isn’t going to happen.”
The only reason that USAID was able to issue an exemption for the $78 million earmarked for Gaza is because the American government is obligated under the terms of the cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas negotiated in part by Trump envoy Steve Witkoff.
In Trump’s first term, the agency making up less than one percent of the federal budget operated largely out of sight. Under Samantha Power in the Biden administration, USAID’s role expanded as wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan created suffering for millions of civilians the U.S. sought to feed, shelter, and treat in hospitals. That drew the ire of the Heritage Foundation, which wrote plainly in Project 2025 that the next administration “should scale back USAID’s global footprint.”
On January 20, hours after he was sworn in as president, Trump issued an executive order declaring that “the foreign policy of the United States shall champion core American interests and always put America and American citizens first.” Another executive order banned DEI throughout the federal government, and USAID staff scrambled to tweak the descriptions of all of their programming. “It was just clownish,” one employee says. “We were all horrified, but also it’s sort of amusing because it’s so brazenly fascist. They gave us a list of words and concepts we can’t use anymore.” It’s impossible to stop gender-based violence, this person noted, when you can’t talk about gender.
Four days later, Rubio ordered an immediate pause on virtually all aid for three months. “We really did think it was a 90-day foreign-assistance review, and we wanted to do our best to comply,” a senior official tells me. “Why not?”
That was just the first week.
The following Monday, according to the Washington Post, senior USAID leadership were purged for actions that, as an official put it, “appear to be designed to circumvent the President’s Executive Orders and the mandate from the American people.” The agency official who executed the purge, which he said came from Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” tried to undo it and was purged too. It was then that the paranoia started setting in. Pages started disappearing from USAID’s website, including an anti-corruption initiative that was one of Power’s signature contributions.
On Tuesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said “there was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza,” a claim that was quickly debunked. Hours later, the Office of Personnel Management, equivalent to the federal government’s human-resources department now controlled by Musk acolytes, sent a message to all U.S. government employees enticing them to resign, entitled “Fork in the Road.”
“Everyone expected budget cuts,” says a contracting officer at USAID.
The White House rhetoric kept escalating. “We looked at USAID as an example. Ninety-eight percent either donated to Kamala Harris or another left-wing candidate,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN.
“Only when staff started getting escorted by security out of buildings and their badges, government-issued phones, and laptops were taken from them did we realize, Oh, this is real,” says the senior official. Inside the Ronald Reagan Building where USAID headquarters is located, staffers were crying, hugging each other good-bye, and exchanging personal info so they could stay in contact. Someone passed out, presumably from the stress, and security was called to help.
Last Wednesday, employees got a peculiar message from IT: “The USAID Google Drive is now accessible on the Department of State (DoS) OpenNet.” For years, USAID used Google Docs while State used Microsoft Office, symbolic of the agency’s independence from the larger department it collaborates closely with.
Meetings were getting canceled, and no one wanted to put anything into writing. “I know people who have worked at the agency a long time who are telling me to take things to Signal, and I’m surprised people know what Signal is,” says the contracting official.
On Friday, employees logged on to find Gemini, Google’s AI feature, was running on their systems (as happened everywhere else Google Workspace is used). During a Google Meet session between a few dozen employees located in Washington and worldwide, the person running the meeting said Gemini was recording them. “Everything you say in front of the device is captured, transcribed, and sent somewhere to some server,” the senior official recalls hearing. Once they logged off, leaders offered a quiet directive: “Just be very mindful and very professional in everything you say. Everything is being watched.” Overnight at the Reagan building, USAID signage and even photographs from the walls had been taken down. Everyone presumed it had been DOGE.
The rumor mill churned on Friday, with people expecting an executive order that would shutter the agency. By that point, such an order would hardly have been needed. So many staff had already been fired, and USAID’s work had in effect been halted. The death blow would arrive in a different form.
On Saturday morning, USAID’s website was taken offline by DOGE staffers. “At this time there is no update on when the site will be available,” the IT department reported. That night, according to CNN, DOGE representatives tried to access the agency’s systems containing personnel files and classified information but were opposed by USAID’s head of security and chief of staff, who threatened to call law enforcement. They were immediately suspended. Thousands of email accounts were deactivated. Staff spent the weekend downloading their pay stubs and performance reviews. Musk’s lieutenants now had complete control of the agency’s nervous system.
By Sunday, as employees worked to get money out before they feared Musk would stop it, untold numbers of contractors working in conflict zones received a sign-on error when they tried to log into their emails and accounts. The real fear was for employees and contractors working abroad in dangerous circumstances, now unable to access a security app especially designed to be used in case of emergencies, as Ken Klippenstein reported. “Reckless,” the senior official texted me, the sentences getting more staccato. “Most have either secret or top secret clearance. Diplomatic passports. Experts in their fields. A real tragedy.”
“This means that even if we are still implementing ‘life-saving humanitarian assistance’ there might as well be no staff to oversee it,” as the contracting officer puts it.
Through it all, Musk has been mocking his prey, tweeting on Sunday “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” One staffer told me grimly, “Honestly, that’s sick. I should get that on a T-shirt.”
Rubio told lawmakers on Monday that the agency may be absorbed by his department and “abolished” as an independent agency. “In many cases USAID is involved in programs that run counter to what we’re trying to do in our national strategy with that country or with that region,” he told reporters in El Salvador on his first foreign trip as secretary of state. “That cannot continue.”
According to three USAID sources, the $78 million sent out to Gaza on Sunday night still faces a final step of approval. It is not clear if the money will be released. One of the recipients is International Medical Corps, a nonprofit group running two large field hospitals treating Palestinians. Without immediate U.S. funding, the group said last Wednesday, “We will be unable to sustain these activities beyond the next week or so.”
“At this rate, the hospitals are barely running,” one USAID official tells me of the situation in Gaza. “I’m having nightmare thoughts on when generators run out of fuel and those NICUs shut down. Where will they go? No one has an answer for that. They will be left high and dry and left for dead, and that will be on the U.S. government.”
