US Agency for International Development

President Trump signs executive order EO 14169 that places a 90-day halt on foreign aid, but it’s unclear to USAID staff if that applies to just new disbursements or existing grants.

An unnamed USAID official receives an angry late-night phone call from Peter Marocco, the newly appointed Director of Foreign Assistance at the US State Department, accusing employees of trying to subvert the President’s executive order imposing a 90-day pause on all foreign aid.

Senior USAID staff meet with Trump administration officials to explain that USAID is not defying a freeze on all foreign aid, but that payments in progress can take a while to be processed. They hope this explanation will satisfy Peter Marocco.

The State Department issues a memo written by Peter Marocco and signed by Marco Rubio that not only puts a halt to future foreign aid but also insists on stop-work orders for ~6200 current grants and contracts at USAID.

Treasury Chief of Staff Dan Katz sends an email stating that DOGE staff need to be given immediate access to pause USAID payments issued from Treasury.

Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, and Jeremy Lewin detailed from GSA to USAID

Clayton Cromer and Gavin Kliger detailed from OPM to USAID

Still convinced that USAID is deliberately committing insubordination against the executive order, Peter Marocco arrives at USAID with DOGE staffers Luke Farritor, Edward Coristine and Clayton Cromer to audit USAID’s accounts.

After the arrival of DOGE in the agency, senior staff are summoned to a meeting with Gavin Kliger and Luke Farritor. The DOGE team then presented agency leadership with a list of 57 employees involved with payments to be placed on immediate administrative leave and locked out of system access. The list reportedly made little sense and involved many staff not involved with payments.

The White House press secretary reports the astounding statistic that USAID spent $50 million on condoms for the Gaza Strip. This figure was actually for a variety of family planning services (largely birth control medication) and, more importantly, it was for the Gaza province in Mozambique.

After USAID’s director of labor relations pushed back against the push to suspend and fire the employees, he threatens to report it to the Office of Special Counsel and emails the employees saying he has no grounds to keep them on leave. As a result, Clayton Cromer commands security staff to forcibly remove him from the building.

Luke Farritor and Gavin Kliger demand that all senior managers at USAID be stripped of their power to authorize payments - and that they alone become the only authorizers.

DOGE presents their evidence that the employees should be placed on leave based on a single email analysis made by Luke Farritor and sent to other DOGE members. “I could be wrong. My numbers could be off.” he writes, but the conclusions are not questioned or checked.

Jeremy Lewin and Elon Musk order the acting head of USAID to comply with orders to lock every USAID employee worldwide out of all email and other communication systems. He refuses, stating that a sudden loss of access could get aid workers killed.

Peter Marocco starts at USAID.

DOGE staff arrive at USAID HQ hoping to work within the administrator’s suite at USAID, but their badges were not properly coded to provide access. The DOGE staff reportedly concluded this meant agency staff were keeping them out and could not be trusted.

Approximately 2000 USAID email accounts are deactivated without warning.

The acting head of the USAID, Jason Gray, is removed and replaced by Marco Rubio. Rubio then resigns and names Peter Marocco the Acting Deputy Administrator for the agency, giving him absolute power to force his demands.

THe USAID Director of Security and their deputy are placed on administrative leave for reportedly trying to prevent DOGE from accessing personnel files and classified data.

The main USAID website and 6 other related websites are taken offline by DOGE.

Elon Musk posts a series of tweets calling USAID evil and saying it is “time for it to die.”

Marco Rubio starts as Acting Administrator at USAID.

Elon Musk tweets that he and President Trump are shutting down USAID, bragging he had fed the agency “into the wood chipper”

All USAID staff are informed by email they will soon be placed on indefinite administrative leave. The message is sent from the USAID email address of Gavin Kliger.

All USAID staff are placed on indefinite administrative leave, as a way of locking them out of systems and keeping them out of the way of DOGE’s activities at the agency.

DOGE posts a tweet boasting about the removal of signage on the headquarters for USAID.

Using their admin access, Gavin Kliger and Luke Farritor completely disable accounts for all other USAID staff on the agency’s system for creating and tracking payments. They now have absolute control.

The USAID Inspector General is fired by the White House after releasing a report critical of DOGE’s actions at the agency.

In a meeting on foreign aid at OMB, Russell Vought stuns staffers by asking them to cut foreign aid to the greatest extent possible. When told that the cuts will lead to more people dying, he reportedly nonchalantly replied “you could say that about any of these cuts.” He also inquires about dismantling the USIP completely. When told it was independent and funded by Congress, he replied, “we’ll see what we can do.”

A USAID official under Trump testifies that “changes in the process by which payments can be made and approved by the Agency over the past weeks” in the payment system were causing certain allowance statements to be delayed.

Trump political appointees and DOGE staffers hold an impromptu celebration of their work on the one-month anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, complete with a celebratory cake, in the agency’s new temporary offices where senior staff are isolated from the remaining career employees by a “moat” of 90 empty desks.

Employees at USAID receive emails with a “Specific Notice of a RIF” effective in 60 days and signed by Peter Marocco. Many employees had already been placed on administrative leave.

In a meeting the day after a federal judge ordered USAID to release funding for humanitarian operations, Jeremy Lewin, not yet in charge of programs at the agency, told senior staff that he viewed the legal rulings as a license to dispense with some of the formal reviews for unfreezing operations. One of the attendees took his remarks to mean he had no intention of unfreezing anything.

USAID staff working late and trying to keep programs operational notice changes being made to a spreadsheet of USAID operations, with an agency head Joel Borkert marking rows as green, yellow and red. Given the recent program cuts, staff interpreted this to mean he was looking for more programs to eliminate. The spreadsheet was assembled by DOGE staff by querying program management databases and had little detail about what the programs actually accomplished. USAID staff raced upstairs and convinced Borkert to save a few programs from termination.

Reviewing the spreadsheet, Jeremy Lewin orders that 151 additional awards must be terminated, writing that he would “have strong objections to these awards being turned on.” Emailing later at 11:30pm, Peter Marocco also states the reactivations were far too broad and indicating more programs to be terminated.

Posting from his account on X, Marco Rubio announces that the 6-week program review at USAID had concluded and 83% of programs (approximately 5200 contracts) had been cancelled. Only about 1000 awards were being continued.

Kenneth Jackson and Jeremy Lewin start at USAID.

Peter Marocco leaves role at USAID

Peter Marocco says that he will be succeeded at the agency by Jeremy Lewin and Kenneth Jackson, serving in deputy roles.

The IT department at USAID has been reduced from 100 to only 5 staffers – 3 IT operations employees, a project manager, and a single contracting officer. All employees focused on compliance and security are on administrative leave and a team to coordinate the transfer of IT assets from USAID to the Department of State was disbanded by Jeremy Lewin.

Almost all of the remaining 900 USAID employees are terminated by email from Jeremy Lewin with RIFs that will go into effect either in July or September.

After Rubio and the Trump administration promised to keep many lifesaving humanitarian grant programs active, almost all of them are slashed over the weekend. Some of the cut programs are then restored later. In one example, Peter Marocco ordered staff to comply with White House orders to stop all funds to Afghanistan. In other cases, Jeremy Lewin appears to have been involved with the alterations. USAID staff are not informed directly of these changes but find out from aid organizations whose funds have been affected.

CFPB leadership under Russell Vought uses the opening granted by the appeals court to attempt another massive RIF. Emailing from his USAID email account, Jeremy Lewin kicks off the process by providing Gavin Kliger and Adam Martinez with a letter to use for RIFs at the CFPB.

Gavin Kliger begins working with Adam Martinez of CFPB and Jeremy Lewin at USAID on the infrastructure to automate a massive RIF at the CFPB. This includes scripts to send termination letters to each employee.

Jeremy Lewin has a followup Teams call with CFPB chief legal counsel Mark Paoletta to plan for the upcoming massive RIF at the CFPB

Noah Peters at OPM denies the CFPB request made by Adam Martinez as well as Jeremy Lewin and Gavin Kliger to conduct an “emergency” RIF at the CFPB which would only give employees 30 days before their termination.

Jeremy Lewin overrides many objections by staffers reviewing the grant and rushes a grant of $30 million for the month of June to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation only five days after its funding request was submitted. The request was also handled by Kenneth Jackson and accumulated over 58 objections from USAID staffers that GHF failed both technical and financial requirements for aid recipients. GHF was hastily formed in February 2025 and has been faulted for forcing Palestinians to navigate crowded militarized zones to receive aid. This has resulted in multiple mass killings near GHF sites.

Under the direction of Marco Rubio, USAID officially ceases all operations for foreign aid. A study in the medical journal Lancet suggests that the end of USAID will lead to 14 million deaths worldwide by 2030, with 4.5 million of those being children under that age of 5.

Months after the destruction of USAID and folding in some of its staff and responsibilities into the US Department of State, the Trump administration incinerates 500 million tons of emergency food biscuits worth $800,000 rather than sending it to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where it could have fed 1.5 million children for a week because it was due to expire. Marco Rubio had promised the House Appropriations Committee that he would ensure food aid is distributed before expiration, but the government eliminated all aid to Afghanistan and refused to divert the food to other emergency crises. The cost of destroying the biscuits will be $130,000 making this nearly a $1 million dollar loss incurred by DOGE (not to mention lives that will be lost).

Congress passess a $9 billion recissions package that codifies DOGE cuts to foreign aid and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, despite concerns from Democrats and two Senate Republicans that its cuts are purposefully vague and undermine Congress’ role in the budget process.

Russell Vought starts as Acting Director at USAID.

Marco Rubio leaves role as Acting Administrator at USAID

Marco Rubio announces on TruthSocial that Russell Vought has been named as the new Acting Administrator of USAID to “oversee the closeout” of the agency after much of its staff was fired, certain responsibilities were absorbed into the State Department and grants were slashed

Acting on his own, Chief Justice John Roberts issued an administrative stay blocking a lower court ruling that ordered the Trump administration to immediately pay out $4 billion in funds appropriated by Congress for foreign aid. This case will be taken up by the full Court, but there is the risk of the Trump administration practicing a “pocket recission” to eliminate the funding.

Greg Barbaccia starts as Acting Chief Information Officer at USAID.

In a move that apparently hasn’t been publicly announced everywhere, Federal Chief CIO Greg Barbaccia is listed as the Acting CIO for USAID on the CIO.gov page

A federal judge ruled that Elon Musk and senior State Department officials must sit for depositions about their roles in dismantling USAID. The judge cited the lack of documentation and no cooperation from other State Department staff as the reason there was “no alternative” to ordering the depositions.

An appeals court blocked a ruling by a judge that would have compelled Elon Musk and other senior officials at USAID to testify under oath, finding that the lower court had “abused its discretion” in ordering the testimony.