A group of 37 U.S. senators sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio Tuesday asking dozens of questions about the Trump administration’s “brazen and illegal attempts to destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development,” including through massive furloughs and stop-work orders, which they said disregard laws and harm U.S. national security.
“Every Administration has the right to review and adjust ongoing assistance programming. However, attempting to arbitrarily turn off core functions of a critical U.S. national security agency, without Congressional consideration or any metric-based review and absent legal authority to do so, is unprecedented and deeply disturbing,” the letter, from the group of Democratic senators, reads.
On Tuesday evening, after the senators’ letter was sent, USAID announced it was placing all direct hire personnel on administrative leave globally as of Friday, “with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs.” The notice was posted to USAID.gov website.
About the author
Adva Saldinger@AdvaSal
Adva Saldinger is a Senior Reporter at Devex where she covers development finance, as well as U.S. foreign aid policy. Adva explores the role the private sector and private capital play in development and authors the weekly Devex Invested newsletter bringing the latest news on the role of business and finance in addressing global challenges. A journalist with more than 10 years of experience, she has worked at several newspapers in the U.S. and lived in both Ghana and South Africa.
