Judge puts brakes on Trump’s plan to fire USAID workforce hours before midnight purge

A federal judge in Washington, D.C. has put the brakes on Donald Trump’s plan to gut the United States Agency for International Development workforce.

District Judge Carl J. Nichols — who was appointed by Trump — granted a temporary restraining order Friday that blocks the Trump administration from placing roughly 2,200 USAID workers on administrative leave, hours before the administration was set to send them packing at midnight.

Unions representing nearly 2,000 USAID employees filed a lawsuit against Trump and administration officials Thursday night following an unprecedented attack against the global aid agency, which supports dozens of life-saving missions in more than 100 countries.

The administration intended to slash virtually all of USAID’s global staff to fewer than 300 people, according to a message to agency partners on Thursday.

The administration then backtracked, with plans to leave roughly 600 workers instead, according to Department of Justice lawyers.

Judge Nichols also has ordered the reinstatement of roughly 500 workers who had already been placed on leave while the legal challenge plays out.

In his written order, the judge said Department of Justice lawyers defending the Trump administration had no answer "beyond asserting without any record support that USAID writ large was possibly engaging in 'corruption and fraud.'"

While the hearing was underway, construction crews were seen removing signage and placing black tape across the agency’s name outside its headquarters in Washington.

USAID plaintiffs accused administration officials of “unconstitutional and illegal actions” that “have systematically dismantled” the agency, creating a “humanitarian crisis” and imperiling national security while jeopardizing thousands of jobs.

The complaint — filed by Public Citizen Litigation Group and Democracy Forward on behalf of the American Foreign Service Association and American Federation of Government Employees — stresses that “not a single one” of the administration’s actions received congressional approval.

A memo on the agency’s website earlier this week noted that nearly the entire USAID workforce would be put on “administrative leave” by the end of the week, with only a small number of “designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs” who would be exempt.

USAID workers abroad, which account for roughly two-thirds of the agency’s staff, will “be offered optional and fully reimbursed return travel to the United States within 30 days,” though “personnel are not required to accept Agency-sponsored travel or to return to the United States within any specific deadline,” according to the memo.

Rapidly escalating threats to the 63-year-old agency — which funds and supports health services, disaster relief and anti-poverty efforts around the world — have scrambled employees, leaving many in shock and disbelief as Elon Musk and his allies baselessly label USAID a “criminal organization” and a “radical-left political psy op.”

Musk, the unelected world’s wealthiest man at the center of Trump’s attempts to gut billions of dollars in federal spending, said this week that the administration was "in the process" of “shutting down” the agency, which supports life-saving projects abroad as part of its expansive mandate — from combatting HIV/AIDS and containing Ebola outbreaks to staffing field hospitals in war-torn regions.

In court documents, USAID workers detailed how the administration had effectively abandoned them over the last two weeks — a woman who is 32 weeks pregnant and due to be returned to the United States on medical leave was abruptly stranded abroad, aid workers were cut off from communication channels in war zones, stop-work orders have forced food to rot while hungry children in vulnerable areas starve.

The lawsuit warns “deaths are inevitable.”

Cutting off USAID work has stopped efforts to prevent children from dying of malaria, ended pharmaceutical clinical trials, and “threatened a global resurgence in HIV,” according to the lawsuit.

“Already, 300 babies that would not have had HIV, now do,” the lawsuit states. “Thousands of girls and women will die from pregnancy and childbirth. Without judicial intervention, it will only get worse.”

“I have never been treated so poorly in my entire life as I have been over the past two and a half weeks, from the threatening emails sent on nearly a daily basis to our entire staff to the utter disrespect for our work,” one worker wrote in court documents.

USAID manages global aid projects with a budget of roughly $40 billion. The agency spent roughly $38 billion in fiscal year 2023, or less than 1 percent of the total federal budget.