WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Agency for International Development has lost almost all ability to track $8.2 billion in unspent humanitarian aid following the Trump administration’s foreign funding freeze and idling of staffers, a government watchdog warned Monday.
The new administration’s rapid dismantling of the agency has left oversight of the humanitarian aid “largely nonoperational,” the agency's inspector general’s office said. That includes a greatly reduced ability to ensure no aid falls into the hands of violent extremist groups or goes astray in conflict zones, the watchdog said.
The Trump administration’s actions have “significantly impacted USAID’s capacity to disburse and safeguard its humanitarian assistance programming,” said the watchdog, which also cited the risk of hundreds of millions of dollars in commodities rotting after staff was barred from delivering it.
The inspector general, however, also noted that it has “longstanding concerns about existing USAID oversight mechanisms.”
Meanwhile, the administration and billionaire ally Elon Musk continued their swift dismantling of the aid agency. The General Services Administration, which manages government buildings, told The Associated Press that it had stripped USAID from its lease on its Washington headquarters.
Staffers who tried to enter the building to work Monday were barred from entering. “Go home,” a man who has identified himself as a USAID official told some. “Why are you here?”
The eviction from the building, which USAID had occupied for decades, comes as a court late Friday temporarily blocked a Trump administration order that would have pulled all but a fraction of workers off the job worldwide.
A steady stream of agency staffers — dressed in business clothes or USAID sweatshirts or T-shirts — were turned away Monday. Some were denied entry to their offices to retrieve belongings.
Two workers’ groups that sued over the targeting of USAID asked the court to find the Trump administration in violation of the judge's order. Despite the judge’s instructions, some workers were still locked out of USAID’s system, the organizations said.
Moreover, the government’s steps immediately before and since the order suggest “the government intends to continue taking potentially irreversible steps to dismantle the agency” before the court can issue a final ruling in the case. Another hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
Even as Trump and Musk, who runs what is billed as a cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, have taken aim at other government agencies, USAID has been hit hardest so far. Both have targeted agency spending that they call wasteful and accuse its work around the world of being out of line with Trump’s agenda.
The president signed an executive order freezing foreign assistance, forcing U.S.-funded aid and development programs worldwide to shut down and lay off staff. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had sought to mitigate the damage by issuing a waiver to exempt emergency food aid and “life-saving” programs.
Despite the waiver, neither funding nor staffing has resumed to get even the most essential programs rolling again, USAID officials and aid groups say.
The Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the largest humanitarian groups, called the U.S. cutoff the most devastating in its 79-year history and said Monday that it will have to suspend programs serving hundreds of thousands of people in 20 countries.
“The impact of this will be felt severely by the most vulnerable, from deeply neglected Burkina Faso, where we are the only organization supplying clean water to the 300,000 trapped in the blockaded city of Djibo, to war-torn Sudan, where we support nearly 500 bakeries in Darfur providing daily subsidized bread to hundreds of thousands of hunger-stricken people,” the group said in a statement.
In an interview aired Sunday with Fox News host Bret Baier ahead of the Super Bowl, Trump suggested that he might allow a handful of aid and development programs to resume under Rubio’s oversight.
“Let him take care of the few good ones,” Trump said.
Aid organizations say the damage that has been done to programs would make it impossible to restart many operations without additional substantial investment.
A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked a Trump administration order that would have put thousands of USAID staffers on administrative leave that day and given those abroad 30 days to get back to the United States at government expense.
While the judge ordered the administration to restore agency email access for staffers, the order said nothing about reopening USAID headquarters. Some staffers and contractors reported having their agency email restored by Monday, while others said they did not.
Some staffers said they came to the USAID offices because they were confused by conflicting agency emails and notices over the weekend about whether they should go in. Others expected they would be turned away but went anyway.
A USAID email sent Sunday night, saying it was “From the office of the administrator,” told employees that what it called “the former USAID headquarters” and other USAID offices in the Washington area were closed until further notice. It told workers to telework unless they are instructed otherwise.
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