A federal judge dealt US President Donald Trump and billionaire ally Elon Musk their first big setback in their dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, ordering a temporary halt to plans to pull thousands of agency staffers off the job.
Trump previously claimed that USAID, is an inefficient use of taxpayer funds and has expressed a desire to dismantle it.
He intends to place nearly all of the agency’s 10,000 employees on leave, except for 611 workers. Approximately 500 staff members had already been placed on administrative leave, and another 2,200 were scheduled to join them at midnight on Friday.
US District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, also agreed to block an order that would have given the thousands of overseas USAID workers the administration wanted to place on abrupt administrative leave just 30 days to move families and households back to the US on government expense.
Both moves would have exposed the US workers and their spouses and children to unwarranted risk and expense, the judge said.
The judge’s temporary order will stay in effect for one week, lasting until midnight on February 14.
Nichols pointed to accounts from workers abroad that the Trump administration, in its rush to shut down the agency and its programs abroad, had cut some workers off from government emails and other communication systems they needed to reach the US government in case of a health or safety emergency.
“Administrative leave in Syria is not the same as administrative leave in Bethesda,” the judge said in his order Friday night.
In agreeing to stop the 30-day deadline given USAID staffers to return home at government expense, Nichols cited statements from agency employees who had no home to go to in the US after decades abroad, who faced pulling children with special needs out of school midyear, and had other difficulties.
The judge also ordered USAID staffers already placed on leave by the Trump administration reinstated.
“CLOSE IT DOWN,” Trump said on social media of USAID before the judge’s ruling.
The American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees argue that Trump lacks the authority to shut down the agency without approval from Congress.
Democratic lawmakers have made the same argument.
Trump’s administration moved quickly Friday to literally erase the agency’s name. Workers on a crane scrubbed the name from the stone front of its Washington headquarters. They used tape to block it out on a sign and took down USAID flags.
The Trump administration and Musk, who is running a budget-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, have made USAID their biggest target so far in an unprecedented challenge of the federal government and many of its programs.
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