Trump Administration Live Updates: Almost All U.S. Aid Agency Employees to Be Put on Leave

“Smart move,” Dmitri A. Medvedev, a former Russian president who is currently the deputy chairman of the country’s security council, chimed in from Moscow, which for years had chafed at the U.S. Agency for International Development’s actions before forcing it out of the country in 2012.

In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is closely aligned with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, celebrated what he called an end to the funding of “globalist” organizations in a Facebook post on Tuesday. Mr. Orban’s political director said he “couldn’t be happier” with what Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump were doing. (Mr. Musk reposted the comment on Tuesday).

Nayib Bukele, the leader of El Salvador, who has embraced strongman tactics to crack down on gang violence, also struck out at the aid programs, saying in a post that funds had been “funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas and destabilizing movements.”

As protesters in Washington gathered on Monday in front of the U.S.A.I.D. headquarters to support the agency, leaders intolerant of dissent rejoiced. Mr. Trump’s administration was dismantling an agency they long have seen as a threat, often for pointing up their governments’ transgressions.

Agency grants to promote democracy, human rights and good governance have gone to support election monitoring groups, anti-corruption watchdogs, independent media outlets and human rights organizations — exactly the kind of oversight that leaders like Mr. Putin detest.

Democracy initiatives amounted to $1.58 billion of U.S.A.I.D. funding in 2023, a sliver of the agency’s annual budget. But they can attract outsize attention. Grant recipients often cross swords with the world’s authoritarian leaders, who view the activities as a threat to their power.

Mr. Orban — who met in December with Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk — and other foreign officials have persisted in asking the U.S. government to end such programs over the years.

“News of U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantlement will be celebrated by dictators around the world and lamented by democrats around the world,” said Thomas Carothers, a former State Department official who leads the democracy, conflict and government program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

Discontinuation of the democracy and human rights funding, he said, would have a significant impact on small organizations, which often find themselves waging David vs. Goliath battles.

“It means that anti-corruption activists trying to expose government theft are unable to do that,” Mr. Carothers said. “It means that independent news outlets that are struggling to stay free of government control don’t have the resources to do that. It means that lots of people fighting against repressive power will be less able to do that.”

U.S.A.I.D. has come under fire for wasteful spending in the past, particularly during the war in Afghanistan, when hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on botched projects, such as an incomplete road and a minimally used power plant. But Mr. Musk has said the entire agency needs to “die,” not just wasteful programs.

Much of U.S.A.I.D.’s work focuses on health and humanitarian assistance. In 2023, the agency provided more than $1.9 billion in food aid. The agency also delivers vaccines, H.I.V. treatment and childbirth care, and combats malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases.

The drive by Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk to unravel the agency is part of a wider campaign against almost all American foreign aid. Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 ordering a halt to the aid so that the government could review programs.

On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was taking over as acting administrator of U.S.A.I.D. That was followed on Tuesday night by an official memo posted online that said the entire global work force of the agency would be put on leave by the end of Friday.

Earlier, officials at a different aid agency, the State Department’s bureau for democracy, human rights and labor, issued stop-work orders to contractors.

Authoritarian leaders have criticized the bureau’s work, which includes significant democracy promotion programs, and they would welcome any erosion of its authority.

U.S.A.I.D. funding for those same kinds of initiatives has had significant impact abroad.

In Russia, for example, the election monitoring group Golos, which received the American grants, documented extensive voting irregularities during the 2011 parliamentary elections. Anger about those violations led to the biggest protests to date against Mr. Putin’s rule and galvanized a broader opposition movement led by the late Aleksei A. Navalny.

At the time, Mr. Putin likened foreign grant recipients to Judas. The following year, as he pushed Russia deeper into authoritarianism, he terminated all of the agency’s programs in the country.

In 2023, after Mr. Putin ordered a Russian invasion of Ukraine and led a broad crackdown at home, the co-founder of Golos, Grigory Melkonyants, was jailed. He is being tried for carrying out the activities of an “undesirable” organization, and has pleaded not guilty.

In nations once in Moscow’s orbit, including Ukraine, the top recipient of U.S.A.I.D. funds, a withdrawal of U.S. aid would benefit the Kremlin, some analysts say. Elsewhere in the world, particularly in nations where Washington and Beijing have been competing, China could fill the void.

“Trump’s administration and Musk’s actions have created significant opportunities for China and other authoritarian regimes,” said Li Qiang, the founder of China Labor Watch, which seeks to end the forced labor and trafficking of Chinese workers. The group’s State Department funding has been frozen.

“The U.S. reduction in foreign aid and focus on economic development is essentially mimicking China’s successful model: prioritizing economic growth while neglecting human rights, environmental protection, and labor rights,” Mr. Li said.

The Trump administration has portrayed U.S.A.I.D. programs as an example of liberal culture run amok, and of government waste.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, on Monday accused the agency of wasting taxpayer money to promote diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in Serbia and Ireland, a “transgender comic book” in Peru and a “transgender opera” in Colombia.

Three of the four grants she cited were not in fact U.S.A.I.D. programs, according to a review of government records by The New York Times. They were initiatives funded directly by the State Department. The Biden administration expanded support for L.G.B.T. rights abroad and diversity initiatives, but the bulk of U.S.A.I.D.’s work is focused elsewhere.

Iran’s criticism of the agency has been more conspiratorial. It has accused the U.S. government of plotting covert operations aimed at overthrowing the Iranian leadership through funding Persian media outlets and human rights organizations focused on Iran. Iranian state media routinely have labeled these funds and groups as “C.I.A. operatives,” to discredit them.

Mr. Musk is using some of the same rhetoric, denouncing the agency as a “criminal organization” and amplifying conspiratorial posts.

Some of Mr. Musk’s comments were indistinguishable from those that Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the lower house of the Russian Parliament, made on Telegram on Wednesday, when he, too, called U.S.A.I.D. a “criminal organization.”

Humanitarian initiatives can enhance American “soft power,” supporters say, which can buy the United States good will and leverage in countries across the world for a comparatively small fraction of federal spending. In 2023, U.S.A.I.D. funding represented .07 percent of the U.S. federal budget. In 2021, before the war in Ukraine, it accounted for .04 percent.

The broadside against the agency in Washington has led some to wonder if European governments or private donors will step in to pay for the threatened initiatives.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the exiled Russian oil tycoon and Putin opponent, said in a message on Telegram on Monday that he and a fellow Russian businessman, Boris Zimin, would step in to fund “Russian-language media, human rights and analytical projects, as well as humanitarian projects operating in Ukraine.” But he cautioned they wouldn’t be able to help all grant recipients in full.

Zselyke Csaky, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform, calculated that the United States spends about $2 billion a year on direct democracy promotion programs, including both direct State Department funds and U.S.A.I.D. grants. Europe, she said, spends about $4 billion, and would need to spend about 50 percent more to make up the difference.

“I find that honestly quite unlikely,” Ms. Csaky said.

The immediate problem, she said, is the speed of the dismantling. “This is happening right now, and I know many organizations that will need to shut down,” she said.

“By the time European countries respond,” she said, “there may not be much of the ecosystem to save.”

Edward Wong contributed reporting from Bangkok, Farnaz Fassihi from New York and Linda Qiu from Washington.

The U.S. Department of Defense confirmed on Wednesday that an Air Force C-17 plane landed at about 3:30 a.m. Eastern in Amritsar, India.

Officials in the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who enjoys a close relationship with President Trump, have expressed confidence that India is better positioned than most countries to deal with the Trump administration, and they have publicly expressed a willingness to accept deportees.

But Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal, a minister in the state government of Punjab, where the plane landed on Wednesday, criticized Mr. Trump’s tough stance on illegal immigration and suggested that Mr. Modi’s government should do more to resist him.

“The Indian federal government must take this very seriously — after all, there are people from many Indian states who have been deported,” he said in an interview on Tuesday. “And what is their crime? They may have gone illegally, but it was for their livelihoods. I am greatly disheartened. President Trump must give these people another chance and, on humanitarian grounds, do a rethink of his decision.”

Mr. Dhaliwal said that he would be at the airport to receive the deportees and ensure that they were not treated as criminals.

The Pew Research Center estimated in 2022 that more than 700,000 undocumented Indian immigrants were living in the United States, more than from any country but Mexico and El Salvador. Recent reports in Indian news media said that just under 20,000 migrants were scheduled for imminent deportation.

Indians are among the migrants from around the world who have illegally entered the United States through Mexico in growing numbers in recent years. Last year, more than 25,000 Indians were arrested while trying to cross the southern border illegally, according to U.S. government data. Indian migrants also contributed to rising numbers of arrests at the northern border with Canada last year.

Hamed Aleaziz and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

Mr. Trump also withdrew the United States from the U.N.’s Human Rights Council and stopped funding the U.N. agency that aids Palestinians, UNRWA, which provides critical humanitarian assistance to millions of people in war-torn Gaza. Those moves were expected because Mr. Trump had withdrawn U.S. involvement from both organizations during his first term as president.

In addition, Mr. Trump’s order called for a review of U.S. involvement in UNESCO, which protects world heritage sites, on allegations that it had exhibited what the White House staff secretary, Will Scharf, called “anti-American bias.” In handing the order to Mr. Trump to sign, Mr. Scharf said it derived from “wild disparity and levels of funding among different countries” that Mr. Trump viewed as “deeply unfair to the U.S.”

In response to the executive order, Stéphane Dujarric, a U.N. spokesman, said U.S. support for the U.N. had advanced global security and that Secretary General António Guterres “looks forward to continuing his productive relationship with President Trump and the U.S. Government to strengthen that relationship in today’s turbulent world.”

The U.N. has been bracing for Mr. Trump’s second term, having already experienced a turbulent period during his first four years in office. Mr. Guterres managed the U.N.’s then-tense relations with Washington by mostly refraining from engaging in public spats with Mr. Trump.

On the first day of his second term, Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization and the Paris climate agreement.

“Trump’s attacks on UNRWA and the U.N. Human Rights Council were widely expected,” said Richard Gowan, the U.N. director of the International Crisis Group, a conflict-resolution agency. “But the knock-on effects of the administration’s aid freeze,” he added, “are making U.N. officials increasingly nervous.”

In addition to hosting the U.N. headquarters in New York City, the United States is also the agency’s top donor, contributing about 22 percent of its overall budget, followed by China (15 percent) and Japan (8 percent). For 2024, the U.S. contribution was estimated at about $3.6 billion, which goes toward the agency’s administrative and peacekeeping budget.

The United States is also a major donor to various U.N. agencies and the world body’s annual global humanitarian appeal for money to help populations during conflicts and natural disasters. In 2022, the United States contributed about $18 billion to the U.N. across the board. Last year, it paid for 47 percent, or about $14 billion, of the agency’s global humanitarian efforts.

But Mr. Trump on Tuesday criticized the U.N. for what he described as its inability to resolve conflicts raging around the world — ones that he said his administration was trying to address. The U.N. has been widely rebuked for not fulfilling its mandate to mediate and uphold peace in parts of the world.

The U.N. Security Council — a 15-member body responsible for mediating and ending conflicts — has been accused of failing to act on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza because of tensions among its five veto-holding permanent members: Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States. In the case of Ukraine and Gaza, for example, both Russia and the United States have blocked multiple resolutions that attempted to bring an end to the wars.

Mr. Trump, without naming any country, said on Tuesday that the U.N. had not been “fair to countries that deserve fairness.” He most likely meant Israel. Elise Stefanik, Mr. Trump’s pick to be the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said during her Senate confirmation hearing that the agency had an anti-Israel bias and accused it of antisemitism.

Mr. Trump also speculated, without evidence, that many countries would leave the U.N. if the organization did not change course. He added that the United States, as the top financial backer of the U.N., was not looking to take away money, but that it wanted to push the organization to operate more efficiently.

In practical terms, Mr. Trump’s decisions on UNRWA and U.N. Human Rights Council may not have much of an immediate effect.

The Biden administration stopped funding UNRWA after Israel accused the agency of being widely infiltrated by Hamas. Two U.N. investigations found that about nine of 13,000 of its staff members in Gaza were affiliated with the militant group, and they were fired.

As for the U.N. Human Rights Council, a spokesman said the United States was not currently among the Geneva-based council’s 47 voting members, therefore the decision to withdraw had little effect on the agency’s work. The council authorizes investigations, applies pressure to hold authoritarian governments accountable and debates violations in countries like Russia, Myanmar, Iran and North Korea.

The United States gave up its membership in the council at the end of 2024, under the Biden administration. But as an observer state, it was still entitled to participate in council deliberations and could still, if it chose to, play an influential role by speaking in debates and shaping the content of council resolutions.

A critical test of the Trump administration’s intentions will come later this year, when the United States is due to undergo a council review of its human rights record, a process in which every U.N. member state has taken part. A U.S. decision not to partake in the next review, set for November, would deal a severe blow to the council’s credibility and open the way to dictatorial states to similarly avoid scrutiny.

Rights groups said that a complete withdrawal means the United States would be absent in these discussions, a notion that they said sends the wrong message.

“President Trump’s performative decision to pull the U.S. out of the H.R.C. signals to the rest of the world that the U.S. is happy to completely cede important decisions about human rights violations happening across the globe to other countries,” said Amanda Klasing, the national director of Amnesty International USA.

Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting.

A former prosecutor in Florida, Ms. Bondi, 59, has acted as a high-profile surrogate for Mr. Trump. She cast doubt on the results of the 2020 election, criticized prosecutors in other jurisdictions who charged Mr. Trump with crimes and defended him at his first impeachment, over whether he had improperly withheld military aid to Ukraine.

She takes the reins as the president has tossed vague accusations of criminal wrongdoing at his political rivals, and out-of-power Democrats warn that as attorney general, she may enable abuses of power.

Mr. Trump had made plain his intent to install an ally as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, vowing to eliminate what he calls his “deep state” rivals. The pledge has raised the possibility that he would seek to end a longstanding practice of Justice Department criminal investigations operating independent of White House direction.

The department has already begun making sweeping personnel changes in the career ranks — reassigning or dismissing scores of prosecutors, including those involved in the investigations into Mr. Trump.

Hours before the vote, F.B.I. officials turned over a lengthy list of information about agents who had worked on Jan. 6, 2021, riot investigations — a list that has provoked fears that it could be used to punish or fire hundreds of agents. Some agents filed a lawsuit on Tuesday seeking to stop the Justice Department from publicizing the names of the agents.

On the Senate floor beforehand, Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, warned that the “campaign of retribution” Mr. Trump had long promised was already underway.

“Top F.B.I. agents have been fired,” he continued. “Would she have defended these F.B.I. agents at the risk of her own job, as one senior F.B.I. leader has done? Of course not, and let us not pretend otherwise.”

The country “cannot afford,” Mr. Schiff said, an attorney general who believes their role is to defend Mr. Trump rather than the American people.

Senator Eric Schmitt, Republican of Missouri, called Ms. Bondi “supremely qualified for this job,” and the right person to take over “a Justice Department gone astray.”

In his first term, Mr. Trump had troubled relationships with his two attorneys general — both of whom he forced out of their jobs after they displeased him by not meeting his demands.

Ms. Bondi was the president’s second choice to run the department. Mr. Trump’s first choice, former Representative Matt Gaetz, withdrew from consideration as lawmakers pressed for more details about a sex scandal involving a 17-year-old girl.

At Ms. Bondi’s confirmation hearing, Republicans urged her to drastically overhaul the department and punish any employees who exhibited what they described as bias against conservatives. Democrats, in turn, questioned whether she would bow to Mr. Trump’s stated desire to seek vengeance.

Ms. Bondi refused to say explicitly how she would handle such pressure from Mr. Trump, but insisted that “politics will not play a part” in her investigative or prosecutorial decisions.

At the hearing, which took place before Mr. Trump was sworn into office, Ms. Bondi also downplayed the suggestion by Democrats that the president would issue sweeping pardons to all of those convicted or charged with crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol.

“I’m not going to speak for the president, but the president does not like people who abuse police officers either,” she said. Days later, Mr. Trump pardoned or granted clemency to everyone charged in that melee — nearly 1,600 people, including those who assaulted the police.

She echoed Republican grievances, criticizing how the department had been run during the Biden administration, saying it “has been weaponized for years and years and years, and it has to stop.”

Pressed about a past vow that “the prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” Ms. Bondi doubled down, replying, “None of us are above the law.”

In 2010, Ms. Bondi emerged from a crowded Republican primary to win the Florida attorney general’s race. Over her eight years in the job, Ms. Bondi became a national figure in the battle against opioid addiction. Since her nomination, she has focused on that part of her résumé and her prosecutions of violent criminals as her chief credentials for the job.

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.”