Nearly the entire global work force of the main American aid agency, known as U.S.A.I.D., will be put on leave by the end of Friday, according to an official memo the agency posted online Tuesday night.
The notice said only a small subset of “designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs” would be exempt.
Employees designated as direct hires will be put on paid leave, and those posted abroad will be expected to return to the United States within 30 days, the notice said, adding that the agency would “arrange and pay for return travel.” Contractors will be laid off if they are not deemed essential.
The notice was posted on the agency’s website, which had been dark since Saturday. It stated that exceptions would be considered on a case-by-case basis, including for reasons of “personal or family hardship, mobility or safety concerns.”
About 10,000 people around the world work for the agency.
In an internal email to its membership of career diplomats that was obtained by The New York Times, the American Foreign Service Association denounced “the unnecessary and drastic action” and said it was “exploring legal avenues” to protect its members.
Lawmakers, aides and some aid agency employees say that it appears the Trump administration plans to dismantle U.S.A.I.D. and put it under the State Department, run by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Democratic lawmakers stress that the aid agency was created through congressional mandate, and that such a move could be illegal.
The public notice came just hours after about 1,400 U.S.-based staff members were informed that they had been put on indefinite administrative leave effective immediately, according to two people with knowledge of the order. About 100 senior staff members had already been put on administrative leave, while several hundred contractors had been let go through stop-work orders.
Pete Marocco, the divisive State Department official put in charge of the aid agency’s day-to-day operations, said the leave for those 1,400 employees would remain in place until they were “otherwise notified,” according to a copy of the note that was viewed by The Times.
The Tuesday night announcement sent ripples of anxiety around the globe, as employees of the agency, the United States Agency for International Development, scrambled to understand the scope of the mandate and begin figuring out how they would uproot themselves and their families. The employees were in the middle of projects that were frozen late last month after President Trump issued an executive order to halt all foreign aid.
Many children of aid agency employees are enrolled in schools that are in the middle of the academic year. The public notice says managers might consider allowing families to stay overseas longer in these cases, as well as for pregnancies and medical needs.
The American government has not recently undertaken such a large effort to move thousands of employees and their family members back to the United States from abroad, and the cost of the operation would be enormous. Some U.S.A.I.D. employees would need to be moved out of countries where wars or conflicts are raging, and that would most likely require military evacuation flights.
Adding to the confusion is the fact that many agency employees in Washington who would help arrange for transportation and temporary housing in the United States have been put on administrative leave. Employees overseas are trying to figure out who to contact in Washington. Trump administration political appointees ordered the U.S.A.I.D. headquarters to physically shut down this week and locked many employees out of their email accounts and internal systems.
The shutdown at headquarters came after days in which young men on a task force run by Elon Musk, the billionaire adviser to Mr. Trump, made wholesale changes to the technology infrastructure in the building and tried to gain access to classified material in a secure area. That led to a confrontation between the young men and the two top security directors at the aid agency, and those directors were then forced to go on leave. A political appointee who had begun work as chief of staff resigned.
Mr. Trump’s political appointees and Mr. Musk, labeled a “special government employee” by the White House, are aiming to cut most of the $60 billion to $70 billion of annual foreign aid money that is allocated through congressional mandates and legislation. The amount is less than 1 percent of the annual federal budget. The budget for U.S.A.I.D. makes up most of the total foreign aid money.
The sweeping effort has affected the State Department as well. On Monday, the department issued a stop-work order to companies employing about 60 contractors in Washington who work on democracy and human rights issues and focus on authoritarian states.
The notifications come after more than a week of chaos at the agency. Senior staff members have been put on leave, and the vast majority of contractors and direct civil service hires were fired, put on leave or blocked from gaining access to their official system. On Monday, Mr. Rubio appointed Mr. Marocco to oversee operations.
The vast nature of the latest announcement exacerbated fears that have been swirling in recent days that most, if not all, of U.S.A.I.D.’s humanitarian and development operations around the globe might soon be shuttered.
Mr. Rubio, who took control of U.S.A.I.D. as its acting administrator on Monday, insisted during a Fox News interview that night that the takeover was “not about getting rid of foreign aid.” He added that the goal was to reform the agency, which had functioned largely independently for decades.
“But now we have rank insubordination,” he said, adding that U.S.A.I.D. employees had been “completely uncooperative, so we had no choice but to take dramatic steps to bring this thing under control.”
On Monday night, most senior officials at the agency received an email from Erica Y. Carr, the acting executive secretary, asking for the “leanest essential personnel numbers” they would need “in order to provide essential services only,” according to a copy viewed by The Times. They were given less than an hour to furnish the lists.
Many agency employees took that as a sign that the Trump administration planned to drastically scale back the operations of the agency.
Senate Democrats have rejected Mr. Rubio’s stated reasons for taking over U.S.A.I.D., which he also laid out in a letter on Monday to the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate and House committees on foreign affairs and related appropriations. In the letter, Mr. Rubio warned that a review of U.S.A.I.D. programs could lead to “the suspension or elimination” of programs, projects, missions, bureaus, centers and offices, or the abolition of the entire agency.
Democrats were buoyed on Monday by a new report from the Congressional Research Service, which determined that Mr. Trump did not have the authority to order structural changes to the agency without congressional approval.
“Because Congress established U.S.A.I.D. as an independent establishment (defined in 5 U.S.C. 104) within the executive branch, the president does not have the authority to abolish it,” the report states. “Congressional authorization would be required to abolish, move or consolidate U.S.A.I.D.”
Still, leading Republicans welcomed Mr. Trump’s moves.
“I’ve said for years that the greatest national security threat Americans face is our skyrocketing national debt,” Senator Jim Risch, an Idaho Republican who chairs the chamber’s Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement, arguing that the idea of merging U.S.A.I.D. and the State Department was not new.
“I’m supportive of the Trump administration’s efforts to reform and restructure the agency,” he said, “in a way that better serves U.S. national security interests.”