Forced into retirement, ex-USAID staffers face long pension delays

Nearly eight months after the first round of USAID officials were terminated as part of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the agency, the most fortunate among them — those who were eligible for retirement benefits at the time they were pushed out — have yet to receive their first pension check. Some are struggling to get by. “After the career that I've had, how hard I’ve worked and the sacrifices I've made, to find myself without any income, without being able to pay for the upfront medical costs for my kids, and not knowing if I'm going to be able to pay my rent next month — I just never thought I'd be in this situation,” said Blake Chrystal, a former USAID foreign service officer who was forced into retirement in July after nearly 20 years at the agency. For both the USAID foreign service and civil service, eligibility for retirement benefits was determined by a combination of age and number of years served. Foreign service officers, for the most part, could retire with benefits at 50 years old with 20 years of service. For most civil service officers, the cutoff was either 25 years of government service or being 57 years old with 10 years of service. “When we realized that this thing had really blown up and none of us were going to come back from it, I kept thinking, well, at least I'm lucky enough that I'll have some source of income once I retire,” said Chrystal. Now the widower and father of three, whose career with USAID sent him to Afghanistan, Botswana, and Australia, among other places, is facing close to a year without any income. Chrystal — who currently resides in Paraguay — told Devex that having to tell his kids to forgo basic expenses and worrying about whether he could afford upfront emergency health care costs has piled additional stress on top of losing a job that was core to his identity. “That just makes me feel like I’m not a good father,” he said. “That’s hard, and regardless of what happens, we're going to be in this situation at least for another couple months.” Chrystal said he believes his delayed annuity payments add up to between $60,000 to $70,000. The reason pension payments are taking longer than they did before USAID’s dissolution is not a mystery. What was already a multistep bureaucratic process has been overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who were forced into retirement in the last year. The agency office in charge of processing retirement benefits went from handling roughly 15-30 retirements a year to a sudden influx of over 700 in 2025 due to the Trump administration’s massive “reduction in force,” according to Randy Chester, the USAID vice president at the American Foreign Service Association. Before 2025, it usually took 30-45 days for the State Department to issue retired foreign service officers their first annuity check, once the department had received their packages from USAID, said Chester. “Now we're looking at 90 to 120 or maybe even 150 days from when State gets it to when you receive your first annuity check,” he said, adding that the delay shows that political appointees were “unprepared” for the consequences of dismantling USAID. “It's just one insult after another insult,” he said. “They just had no clue as to what they were doing other than living up to their dream of causing and inflicting pain to everyone they could, and that's what they were successful at, but nothing else.” The remaining USAID staff who are responsible for processing retirement packages are making significant progress, having whittled down the number of pending files to less than 300, multiple sources told Devex. “I think HCTM, honestly, is trying,” said Chester, referring to USAID’s Human Capital and Talent Management team, which continues to operate inside what little is left of the agency. But USAID’s sign-off is just the first step. From there, foreign service officer retirement packages have to be approved again by the State Department, which is also absorbing its own increase in retirements. Packages for civil service officers — who mostly served domestically and were part of the broader U.S. federal workforce — undergo a different process, handled by the White House Office of Management and Budget. The payments also require processing by a little-known office called the National Finance Center, which is housed inside the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Meanwhile, former USAID officials and their union representatives told Devex it is very difficult to extract information at each stage of the process. “We have a ton of people that are just spinning, and it looks like it will be many more months before they see anything,” said Mike Henning, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 1534, a labor union representing employees at the State Department and USAID. A second USAID official who is eligible for retirement but has not received their first annuity check told Devex they are wary of even discussing the payment delays because so many of their former colleagues will not receive them at all. Many of the roughly 10,000 USAID officials who lost their jobs did not qualify for retirement benefits. Some were months away from retirement eligibility, only to see the future financial security they had expected from a career in public service wiped away by the Department of Government Efficiency. “I don’t even talk about it as an issue, because I feel very lucky that someday I will get money,” said the second official, who requested anonymity. Chrystal — who served as USAID’s deputy mission director in Kabul during the COVID-19 pandemic — said a career spent coordinating assistance programs in some of the world’s poorest places also puts his current situation in perspective. “I gotta sometimes just take a step back and remember that even if everything continues to go as badly as it's gone up to this point, I'm not going to be as bad off as so many people in this world,” he said.