Emily, a career foreign service officer, and her partner are seven and a half months pregnant with a high-risk pregnancy. Over the past five days, they’ve been in the emergency room multiple times trying to manage the complications.
And then their world fell out from beneath them. On Tuesday, the Trump administration ordered nearly all of the United States Agency for International Development’s direct hires globally to be put on administrative leave.
For personnel abroad, the government is “preparing a plan” to return them to the U.S. within 30 days, as well as terminate the contracts of personal services contractors and institutional support contractors not deemed “essential.”