WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration will present an unforgiving argument for dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development to a federal judge Wednesday: USAID is rife with “insubordination” and must be shut down for the administration to decide what pieces of it to salvage.
The argument, made in an affidavit by political appointee and deputy USAID administrator Pete Marocco, comes as the administration confronts a lawsuit by two groups representing federal employees.
USAID staffers deny insubordination and call the accusation a pretext to break up the more than 60-year-old agency, one of the world’s biggest donors of humanitarian and development assistance.
Accounts of USAID staffers filed Tuesday in support of the lawsuit revealed new details of the destruction of the agency.
That includes a sworn statement from a USAID staffer describing a specific leader in billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency teams allegedly directing USAID staffers on Monday in the immediate termination of about 200 USAID programs without proper authorization or process.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, an appointee of President Donald Trump, dealt the administration a setback Friday in its dismantling of the agency, temporarily halting plans to pull all but a fraction of USAID staffers off the job worldwide.
Nichols is due to hear arguments Wednesday on a request from the employee groups to keep blocking the move to put thousands of staffers on leave as well as broaden his order. They contend the government has already violated the judge’s order, which also reinstated USAID staffers already placed on leave but declined to suspend the administration’s freeze on foreign assistance.
Trump and Musk’s cost-cutting DOGE have hit USAID particularly hard as they look to shrink the size of the federal government, accusing its work of being wasteful and out of line with Trump’s agenda.
In the court case, a government motion shows the administration pressing arguments by Vice President JD Vance and others questioning if courts have the authority to check Trump’s power.
“The President’s powers in the realm of foreign affairs are generally vast and unreviewable,” government lawyers argued.
USAID staffers and supporters call the aid agency’s humanitarian and development work abroad essential to national security.
They argue each step of the administration’s breakup of USAID has been unnecessarily cruel to its thousands of workers and devastating for people around the world who are being cut off from clean water, life-saving medical care, education, training and more since Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 freezing foreign assistance.
“This is a full-scale gutting of virtually all the personnel of an entire agency,” Karla Gilbride, attorney for the employee associations, told the judge last week.
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.
In an affidavit ahead of Wednesday’s hearing, Marocco, a returning USAID political appointee from Trump’s first term, presents without evidence a description of agency workers stalling and resisting the administration’s orders to abruptly cut off funds for programs worldwide and subject each one to a rigorous review.
In the face of “deceit,” “noncompliance” and “insubordination,” USAID’s new leaders “ultimately determined that the placement of a substantial number of USAID personnel on paid administrative leave was the only way to … faithfully implement the pause and conduct a full and unimpeded audit of USAID’s operations and programs,” Marocco stated.
Staffers deny resisting the funding freeze. They argue that the cutoff of money and resulting collapse of U.S.-funded programs abroad, the shutdown of the agency’s website and lockout of employees from systems made it impossible for those reviews to take place.
Nichols also agreed last week to block an order giving thousands of overseas USAID workers who were being placed on administrative leave 30 days to move back to the U.S. on government expense.
Both moves would have exposed the workers and their spouses and children to unwarranted risk and expense, the judge said.
Nichols pointed to accounts that the Trump administration had cut off some workers from government emails and emergency alert systems they needed for their safety.
“Administrative leave in Syria is not the same as administrative leave in Bethesda,” the judge said last week, referring to the Washington, D.C., suburb.
Nichols cited statements from agency employees who had no home to go to in the U.S. after decades abroad, who faced pulling children with special needs out of school midyear and other difficulties.
