Despite cuts, “there has been no impact on our ability to perform those duties,” Bruce said.

But it was also Friday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and a former associate of Elon Musk now in a senior position at USAID, Jeremy Lewin, notified staff and Congress they were firing most remaining USAID staffers and moving surviving agency programs under the State Department.

The Trump administration, working with Musk’s teams, has gutted foreign assistance since Trump took office on Jan. 20. Mass firings and forced leaves and thousands of abrupt contract terminations have thrown much of the global aid and development work into crisis, with U.S. partners scrambling to fill the hole left by USAID and the billions of dollars owed for past work.

After an earthquake in 2023 in Turkey and Syria, USAID-backed civilian teams from Los Angeles County and Fairfax County, Virginia, skilled in urban search and rescue scrambled to the scene to help recover any survivors from rubble.

Those teams normally can be on their way within as few as 24 hours, Charles said.

But while intervention by lawmakers and others kept the contracts for the civilian search-and-rescue teams intact, contracts for the special transport needed to get the search teams, dogs and heavy equipment to a disaster area are believed to have been cut, Charles said.

Meanwhile, staffing cuts at USAID have “decimated” the teams that normally would be coordinating with allies to target rescue and response efforts in the field, Charles said.

Other foreign assistance contract cuts by the administration have hit disaster-response emergency services with the United Nations and others.

Remaining USAID staff fired, Trump says Myanmar will still get earthquake aid

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s administration told Congress on Friday it would cut nearly all remaining jobs at the U.S. Agency for International Development and shut the agency, even as Trump promised that the U.S. would provide assistance to Myanmar following a devastating earthquake.

Humanitarian aid experts expressed alarm at the new cuts to an agency whose humanitarian aid has gained Washington influence and saved lives across the globe for more than 60 years. USAID plays a major role in coordinating earthquake assistance.

Thousands of USAID staff and Foreign Service officers assigned to the agency learned in an internal memo that all positions not required by law would be eliminated in July and September.

The memo reviewed by Reuters was sent to staff by Jeremy Lewin, the agency’s acting deputy administrator and a member of billionaire Elon Musk’s job-cutting Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE oversaw a first round of cuts to USAID last month.

The State Department notification to Congress of the job cuts, also seen by Reuters, said USAID missions worldwide would be closed and the agency’s remaining functions would be folded into State.

Cuts at the agency have thrown humanitarian efforts around the world into turmoil. The latest notice came on the day that a powerful earthquake hit Thailand and Myanmar, toppling buildings and killing scores of people. USAID has historically played a major role in coordinating disaster relief efforts.

A U.S. appeals court on Friday ruled that Musk and DOGE can keep making cuts to USAID while they appeal a lower court order that had barred them from doing so.

U.S. Representative Gregory Meeks, top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement that closing USAID was illegal and aimed at withdrawing the U.S. “from its global leadership role with as much cruelty and disruption as possible.”

FIRINGS INCLUDE FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICERS

The exact number of personnel being fired was not immediately available. As of March 21, there were 869 U.S. direct hire personnel on active duty and working, while 3,848 others were on paid administrative leave, according to Stand Up for Aid, a grassroots advocacy group.

The terminations also included thousands of Foreign Service officers on assignment to USAID around the globe, according to a source familiar with the matter.

In his memo, Lewin said agency personnel worldwide would shortly receive emailed termination notices giving them the choice of being fired on July 1 or September 2.

Over the next three months, the State Department would assume USAID’s remaining “life-saving and strategic aid programming,” he said, adding that USAID personnel will not automatically be transferred to the department, which would conduct “a separate and independent hiring process.”

Trump in January ordered a 90-day freeze of all U.S. foreign aid and a review of whether aid programs were aligned with his policy. He claimed without evidence that Musk had found fraud at the agency, which he said was run by “radical left lunatics.”

Musk and DOGE gained access to USAID’s payment and email systems, froze many payments and told much of its staff they were being placed on leave. On February 3, Musk wrote on X that he had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”

On Friday, a statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department had notified the U.S. Congress of its intent to reorganize USAID, saying the agency had “strayed from its original mission long ago.”

“We are reorienting our foreign assistance programs to align directly with what is best for the United States and our citizens,” Rubio said.

‘A TOTAL ABDICATION’

The decision to cut the remaining USAID jobs sparked concern among humanitarian aid experts, who said the firings and funding cuts would prevent a concerted U.S. response to the earthquake that hit Myanmar and Thailand.

In a post on X, Jeremy Konyndyk, a former USAID official who is president of Refugees International, called the move “a total abdication of decades of US leadership in the world.”

He said the firings will cut “the last remnants of the team that would have mobilized a USAID disaster response” to the earthquake.

Trump on Friday said he had spoken with officials in Myanmar about the earthquake and that the U.S. would provide assistance.

State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said the changes at USAID would not affect the administration’s ability to deploy a Disaster Assistance Response Team, or DART, adding she could not give a timeline.

The former USAID disaster response chief told Reuters the Trump administration’s massive personnel and funding cuts have “kneecapped” the agency’s ability to send disaster response teams to Thailand and Myanmar, opening the way to China and other U.S. rival countries.

“I suspect we will see very shortly Chinese teams showing up, if they haven’t already, possibly Turkish, Russian, Indian teams really making their presence known in support of people that are really suffering right now in Thailand and Burma, and the U.S. won’t be there,” said Sarah Charles, who served as assistant USAID administrator for humanitarian affairs until February 2024, using the former name of Myanmar.

Charles said contracts with urban search and rescue teams from Los Angeles and Virginia had been “turned back on” after being cut.

But, she said commercial contracts for transporting those teams remained cut and non-governmental aid groups that normally would provide emergency water, sanitation and medical help had laid off staff or run out of funds due to Trump’s foreign aid freeze.

“It’s really devastating to watch in real time,” she said.

Rubio said earlier this month that more than 80% of all USAID programs had been canceled.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey, Doina Chiacu, David Brunnstrom, Brendan Pierson and Jonathan Landay and Daphne Psaledakis; Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal and Erin Banco; Editing by Don Durfee, Lisa Shumaker, Bill Berkrot and David Gregorio)