Washington – Changes in Trump Administration have accused the American agency of providing humanitarian aid to countries abroad, kept on leave by dozens of senior officials, closed thousands of contractors, and put a wide freeze on billions of dollars in foreign aid.
State Secretary Marco Rubio on Thursday defended a break on foreign aid and said that “the US government is not a donation.”
Assistance organizations say that funding freeze-and deeper confusion on US-funded programs should serve as a result-they have left to yearning whether they can continue operating programs such as they Extremely malnourished infants provide round-the-clock nutritional support and children, knowing that closing the doors means that many of those children will die.
Current and former officials of the US agency for the state department and international development say that employees were invited to submit requests to exemption some programs from foreign aid freeze, which was imposed by President Donald Trump on 20 January. Was and the Foreign Department expanded extensively how to execute January. ,
Three days later, at least 56 senior career USAID employees were suddenly placed on administrative leave.
Three officials said that many of them were lawyers on leave, involved in determining whether the programs could qualify for the waves, help in writing proposals and help present those discounts requests. Do it because they believed that they were invited to do.
The authorities spoke on the condition of anonymity not printing the name for fear of vengeance. Trump administration instructions that aid organizations explain organizations as a gag order have not prepared them publicly to speak publicly for fear of losing American funding.
In an internal memorandum on Monday about staffing changes, the new acting USAID Administrator Jason Gray said the agency “has identified several tasks within the USAID that designed to ignore the President’s executive orders and top Have gone. ”
“As a result, we have placed many USAID employees with full salary and profit on administrative leave, as long as we complete our analysis of these tasks,” Gray has written.
A former senior USAID official said that people on leave were helping the aid organizations navigate the “misleading process”, which were exempting aid for specific life-saving projects, such as in war areas Continuing clean water supply for displaced people.
Others were identified as being involved in diversity, equity and inclusion programming, which the administration has banned.
On Thursday, a USAID Human Resource Officer who tried to reverse the action, saying that there was no justification for this, was kept on leave himself, according to two officials who saw internal emails and they were authentic forms. Was verified in Reports of Propublica and VOX first reported email on X.
The state department and the White House did not respond to messages seeking comments about staffing changes.
New USAID leaders also suddenly put contractors, who made almost half of the workforce in the agency’s Humanist Bureau on Tuesday, excluded them from the system so that some people disappeared in the middle of the videoconcture, said the former senior official. Targeted institutional service contractors do everything from administrative and travel assistance to grant processing and data analytics.
Staffing changes were made by the state department three days after the state department issued a guidelines for implementing Trump’s executive order to implement Trump’s executive order for 90 days. The department says that it is reviewing the money that is spending to follow the United States administration policy.
The guidelines initially exempted military assistance to Israel and Egypt and emergency food programs, but also said that the program administrators and implementers can apply for exemption for programs that believe that they will meet the standards of administration .
On Tuesday, Rubio released a comprehensive discount for programs that provide other “life-saving” assistance, including drugs, medical services, food, and shelters, and the possibility of re-exemption again. Rubio on Thursday pointed a widespread discount in an interview with SeriusXM host Megin Kelly in an interview.
“We don’t want to see people dying,” he said.
Rubio said that a program-by-program would be reviewed, with projects “America safe, strong or more prosperous”.
Rubio said that the move to shut down American-funded programs during the 90-day review means that the US was “receiving too much cooperation” from humanitarian, development and safety support recipients “. “Because otherwise you don’t get your money.”
The State Department said that since assistance freeze came into force, it has approved dozens of waves, although many were returned as they did not include enough details. It states that exemption requests have been obtained for programs costing “billions of dollars” and it is being reviewed.
The department did not specify how many exemption requests were denied, but it said that its works have stopped spending more than $ 1 billion on programs and projects that “alliances with the first agenda of America Are not. ”
Even with exemption of exemption for life-saving care, uncertainty surrounds that American-funded programs can continue legally. Globally, hundreds of thousands of people are going without access to drug and human supply and clinics are not getting timely drugs because funding freeze, aid organizations have warned.