The Trump administration on Friday detailed its plans to put the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government’s main agency for distributing foreign aid, fully under the State Department and reduce its staff to some 15 positions.
An email to U.S.A.I.D. employees informing them of the impending layoffs, titled “U.S.A.I.D.’s Final Mission” and sent just after noon, detailed an elimination in all but name that the administration had long signaled was coming. It arrived over protests from lawmakers who argued that efforts to downsize the agency were illegal, and from staff members and unions who sued to stop them.
The agency employed about 10,000 people before the Trump administration began reviewing and canceling foreign aid contracts within days of President Trump’s return to the White House. By Sept. 2, the email said, “the agency’s operations will have been substantially transferred to State or otherwise wound down.”
The cuts are in keeping with the administration’s plan to use foreign aid as a tool to further its diplomatic priorities. This month, recipients of U.S.A.I.D. funds were asked to justify their value to the administration through questionnaires that asked, among other things, whether their programs helped to limit illegal immigration or secure rare earth minerals.
In a statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio praised the forthcoming cuts.
“We are reorienting our foreign assistance programs to align directly with what is best for the United States and our citizens,” he said, calling U.S.A.I.D. in its previous form “misguided and fiscally irresponsible.”
He pledged that “essential lifesaving programs” would be among those preserved under the State Department. In plans shared with Congress, however, the administration signaled that the U.S.A.I.D. programs it was ending included one that funded vaccines for children in poor countries, as well as some funding for combating malaria.