When Foreign Minister Marco Rubio announced last month that rescue humanitarian labor would be excluded from the freezing of foreign aid, global health workers strangled a collective sigh.
But a new directive has put such exceptions on waiting.
Several senior employees at the USAID Bureau of Global Health received an email on Tuesday, telling them to “please keep other approvals” waiting for further instructions by the staff leader, according to a copy reviewed by the New York Times.
Senior officials at the Humanitarian Aid Office received similar instructions during a meeting this week, according to a person familiar with what happened.
For weeks, USAID employees and organizations, contractors and advisers who work with them have struggled to continue the type of work that Mr Rubio has promised to maintain – “Basic Medical Rescue, Medical Services, Food, Refugees and Assistance substances ”.
Some deviations have been issued in programs that fall under Mr Rubio’s definition of “salvation” aid, but the payment system called Phoenix that USAID is based on disbursement of financial aid was inaccessible for weeks. This means that even programs that have received exemptions have struggled to continue, according to many USAID officials and partners -based organizations.
The Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comments on this article.
On Tuesday, Elon Musk, the billionaire technology entrepreneur authorized by President Trump to combat the organization, told reporters at the Oval Office that the administration had “activated funding for the prevention of Ebola and the prevention of HIV”. But in fact, Ebola’s funding and almost all the funding of HIV prevention remains frozen, according to two USAID employees and several help groups.
The new engineers who worked for Mr Musk took control of the organization’s payment system as they took over in recent weeks. And as part of the disassembly supervised by Mr Musk, the Foreign Ministry recently released plans to reduce USAID staff by about 10,000 employees to 611 who were considered key staff.
Without access to funding, organizations working with USAID were unable to pay employees and their suppliers for projects depending on US government funding.
The Norwegian Refugee Council, which supports humanitarian labor in about 20 countries, said it was unable to benefit from exemptions because the organization’s payments had stopped.
“We currently have millions of dollars in pending payment applications to the US government,” the team said in a statement, noting that citizens in conflict zones such as Ukraine, Afghanistan and Sudan will suffer if they stopped their work. “Without an immediate solution, we can, at the end of February, be forced to stop the US -funded humanitarian programs.”
Young politicians appointed to the Foreign Ministry and USAID put other obstacles in place.
In a mission to Asia, officials received exemptions for three programs, including one for eliminating malaria, but then told them that they needed exemptions for individual projects in the context of these programs, a person said with a deadlock.
USAID staff members said the week of resignation was a sign that the end of their lives and other projects may be near.
Agency officials were informed this week that about 350 awards would be canceled. It was not immediately clear how many of these contracts were on a list released last week, finding about 800 possible cancellations.
Unlike previous notifications, the emails sent to staff on Wednesday warning them to some of the latest cancellations did not encourage them to check for possible exceptions.
People developed by Mr Trump and Mr Musk have accused USAID officials of delaying and trying to undermine efforts to end the programs by conducting their own contract revisions to ensure that the work is not canceled. However, these reviews would need to give up the resignations promised by Mr Rubio.
As reductions are underway, trade unions representing USAID staff as well as companies and organizations working with the Aid Service have tried to promote cuts through a series of pipelines. Some have managed to obtain temporary restraint orders against the president’s efforts to disassemble the organization.
The plaintiffs argued that the reduction measures were unconstitutional and illegal, as Congress had the funds for the organization and, by law, approve their withdrawal.
In a lawsuit filed by companies that had USAID contracts for world programs, a development company said that $ 250 million was stuck in transit or “broke into warehouses around the world” due to stops accompanying it freeze. The business, Chemonics, had to fly about two -thirds of its US -based staff in recent weeks.
Lawyers for Trump’s administration supported a response to one of the lawsuits that “the president has a wide discretion to set the terms and conditions” on assistance.
As legal battles wear, drastic changes to the US government’s top foreign aid service continue.
On Tuesday, Trump’s administration shot USAID Inspector General Paul K. Martin, just a day after the release of an report that warned that staff cuts and spending freezes risk abuse and waste hundreds of millions of dollars According to three people familiar with dismissal.
The report documented the confusion about resignations. He warned that nearly half a billion dollars for food at risk were in danger of being destroyed and that the reduced capacity of veterinarian partner organizations had difficulty ensuring that US money could not get to terrorism.
Also, on Tuesday, the organization made another round of cuts to contractors, the last one on USAID to be forced to leave.
And the General Service Administration, a federal service that oversees leases and other contracts, in recent days has finished the USAID lease in the seat of the Ronald Reagan building in downtown Washington. The General Services administration said in a statement on Tuesday that it took the signs of the aid service and that the 570,000 square feet will “redefine for other government needs”.
USAID officials in the building lobby on Monday said they saw officials from other organizations, including US customs and border protection, by examining the office space. Employees learned on Tuesday that they had lost parking privileges because the organization’s leases had been canceled, according to a copy of an internal email received by the New York Times.
Almost all employees of the Agency have been banned from entering their headquarters for more than a week, although some of them have received access to their email accounts this week to prepare for their departures.
Foreign service employees working for the Agency abroad have been ordered to abandon their positions and return to the United States this month as part of a move that puts the vast majority of direct recruitment on administrative license. The order was temporarily delayed by a federal judge who will then hear arguments in the case on Thursday.
Employees say they expect that most of the USAID workforce will be fired or pushed out and the few who remain absorbed in the Foreign Ministry. Both Mr Trump and Mr Musk, who has published dark conspiracy theories about the Social Media Platform, X, has called for his collapse.
