It’s the end of an era for USAID foreign service officers and their colleagues from the host countries who worked alongside them.
In the wake of the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the agency’s career diplomats have been ordered to return to the United States, with their families, by Aug. 15th — with some ordered to leave sooner than that.
For many, this is an uprooting of the lives they’ve built abroad and a feeling of abandoning the communities they’ve served — after the Trump administration slashed the majority of USAID’s global programming, much of which saved lives. USAID’s entire workforce has been fired, the agency has been dismantled, and the State Department will absorb its remaining programs.