Uncertainty and turmoil gripped the U.S. Agency for International Development for a second day, as employees locked out of their offices braced for potential cuts to the work force, while Democrats denounced the Trump administration for what they said was an illegal power grab.
Secretary of State Marco 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,” and that the goal had been to reform the agency.
“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 U.S.A.I.D. 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 New York Times. They were given less than an hour to furnish the lists.
The email was the latest sign that Mr. Rubio and Pete Marocco, the State Department’s foreign assistance director whom Mr. Rubio named as his deputy to run day-to-day operations at the agency, plan to drastically scale back the operations of the government’s lead agency for humanitarian aid and international development.
Many of the agency’s senior staff were put on leave last week, after representatives of Elon Musk, the tech magnate whom President Trump has empowered to run a cost-cutting task force, entered headquarters and began to take over its operations. On Saturday, the agency’s two top security officials were put on administrative leave after they tried to prevent Mr. Musk’s representatives from entering secure spaces and getting access to classified materials for which they lacked the proper security clearances.
On Monday, most of the agency’s contractors and direct civil service hires lost access to their email and other systems, and were told by senior officials that they should take that as an indication that they had been placed on administrative leave. By Tuesday, rumors were circulating that employees in missions overseas might be called home, as contractors reliant on U.S.A.I.D. funding for projects slashed staff to continue their work.
As U.S.A.I.D. operations were being ground to a near halt, Mr. Musk took to social media to decry the agency as “evil” and a “criminal organization,” while Mr. Trump said it was run by a bunch of “radical lunatics.”
Mr. Rubio did not endorse Mr. Musk’s view of the agency during his Fox interview, insisting that there were some programs that ought to be preserved, even as he defended efforts to pause most of the agency’s operations. Mr. Rubio did not specify which programs he thought had merit.
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.
“I find it wholly insufficient on the law and devoid of any rationale for the drastic, abrupt action the administration has taken, with no prior notice to Congress,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement.
Democrats were buoyed 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, Republican of Idaho and the chairman of the Senate 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 in a way that better serves U.S. national security interests,” he added.
On Tuesday, questions also swirled around the future shape of the State Department’s democracy, human rights and labor bureau. On Monday, the department told companies that employ the bureau’s 60 or so contractors that it was issuing stop-work orders on the contracts. Some of the companies could try to push back on those orders, and the fate of the dozens of contractors is unclear. In the crisis involving U.S.A.I.D., federal stop-work orders have led to contracting companies firing hundreds of contractors.
The bureau has had an annual budget of $150 million to $200 million in recent years, and it oversees about $3 billion of active grants. Its contractors are area specialists and tech experts who help enact programs around the globe to try to expand democratic practices and civil rights, including in China, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba, among the world’s most repressive nations.
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