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#Trump appointees have fired or put on paid leave thousands of employees of #USAID A task force of young engineers working for #ElonMusk [#DOGE] has shut down many technical systems in the #aid agency & barred employees from their email accounts. #Musk has posted dark #ConspiracyTheories about USAID on social media, asserting with no evidence that it is a “criminal organization” & that it was “time for it to die.”

The latest round of dismissals occurred on Friday night, when hundreds of people working for the agency’s Bureau for #Humanitarian Assistance got emails saying their jobs had been terminated. Two employees who got the emails said they were strange because they did not state any job titles specifically & did not have the recipients’ names in the “to” field. They were generic emails sent out in a large wave.

In addition, 36 people were fired from the Office of Transition Initiatives, a unit in the agency’s conflict prevention bureau that specializes in helping partner countries with political transitions & #democratic initiatives, said US officials & recent agency employees.

~400 people were fired in recent days from #humanitarian assistance positions…. ~200 of those were contractors for the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, …& another 200 were part of a unit called the Support Relief Group, a collection of #crisis experts who helped the bureau in responding quickly to #NaturalDisasters & armed conflicts. Now only about a dozen people remain in that group.

The fired employees were contractors who were employed directly by the #US govt. Some had worked for #USAID in various capacities for 25yrs.

Many of the contractors for the Support Relief Group had worked for the agency in #war zones, including in #Ukraine, #Syria & #Afghanistan. They often lived in different places around the world & spent weeks or months at a time in #crisis areas. One employee who got the email said they were being flown home next week from a US diplomatic mission overseas.

Another fired employee said the hundreds of dismissals meant that the #aid agency now had only a skeleton crew to respond to #humanitarian crises.

The appointee running day-to-day operations at #USAID is #PeteMarocco, a #State Dept official overseeing foreign aid who was a #divisive figure at the agency & other government departments in the first #Trump administration. Early this month, #MarcoRubio announced he was taking over the aid agency as acting administrator.

#MarcoRubio has said all foreign #aid will remain halted for 90 days during a review process. But ofcls & contractors working in foreign aid said they expected most of the aid to be cut permanently & many more employees to be fired, & what little remains of #USAID to be folded into the #State Dept. Although USAID was created by #Congress & lawmakers appropriated govt money for foreign aid this year, few, if any, #Republicans have raised objections to the freeze & the job cuts.

@Finnhits @Nonilex

Contractors likely have none absent contract clauses that might require notice &/or full payment provisions; no idea what existing law/regulations require or disallow.

Civil service employees have a good bit, but exercising those protections can take years.

Separately, the firings and dismantling of agencies created by Congressional statute is unconstitutional under current Supreme Court precedent.

Getting federal courts to issue injunctions based on that is not easy.