Recently fired US Agency for International Development (USAID) staff scrawled messages on boxes full of their personal belongings Friday — and several ex-employees were seen beaming as they were cheered on by supporters on their last day in the office.
“You can take the humanitarians out of USAID but you can’t take the humanity out of the humanitarians,” read one upbeat message on a former worker’s box that held a large plant among other items.
“We are abandoning the world,” read another note on the container of a different ex-federal employee’s belongings.
The axed employees were applauded by former USAID staffers and supporters during a sendoff outside the all-but-shuttered agency’s offices in Washington, DC.
USAID’s 10,000-person workforce is expected to be slashed to just around 300 after President Trump moved to gut the agency after imposing a 90-day pause of foreign aid.
The downsizing followed shocking findings of USAID waste by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Earlier this month, Trump announced that Secretary of State Marco Rubio would serve as USAID’s acting director with the end goal of folding the agency’s remaining operations into the State Department.
A federal judge on Friday cleared the way for the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID after he refused to extend a temporary stay that blocked the government’s plan to remove all but a small fraction of USAID staffers from their posts in the US and around the world.
