“I don’t know if they have fired me or not”

The discomfort among federal workers began with an email. “They asked us to point out our colleagues who had been applying terms related to inclusion or equality policies (DEI). It generated quite fear among the team, ”explains Emily, who asks to use a fictional name to maintain anonymity. Until Monday I worked for Usaid, the United States Agency for International Development: “Now I don’t know if I have a job. I do not know if they have fired me or not, only that I am temporarily suspended, ”he says.

The mail was sent by the Donald Trump administration. That the president took measures like this was something “expected,” according to Emily. What ever imagined is that Elon Musk, without any elected position in the government – beyond leading the Doge working group – would pounce against the agency where she worked.

USAID has become the test field of Musk’s incursion within federal agencies. After assaulting the Humanitarian Cooperation Agency, Musk collaborators have extended throughout the Administration: within the Treasury, Education and Agencies that supervise the health programs of Medicare and Medicaid.

In the treasure the “Muskovitas“-As call Musk collaborators- they managed to access the payment system, which includes sensitive information such as the social security number of thousands of Americans. Instead, when they wanted to enter the Labor Department on Wednesday, they found a protest of federal workers.

For days the USAID website is closed and you can only read a message that reports on the suspension of workers. The text, initially, said that midnight on Friday, it would end up deciding which were the officials that were considered essential and which were placed on administrative license. The new self -proclaimed director of the agency, the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, advanced to the promised date and on Thursday night The New York Times He published that of the more than 10,000 employees around the world, only about 290 would remain.

No panic button

A USAID person explained to Eldiario.es on Tuesday, under condition of anonymity, that the suspensions had left many workers in war regions without access to vital tools for their safety, such as the panic button or notifications on which places to avoid In real time. This person was in contact with them to try to help them contact the administration, since they had also been expelled from internal communications and cannot notify the US government if necessary.

This Tuesday, the Administration notified workers for the world that they had a period of 30 days to return home if they were not considered essential. Uncertainty is such that they do not know if they continue to have the protection of the United States.

95% of the workforce had to end an administrative license, if not because on Friday a federal judge temporarily blocked the suspension of some 2,000 workers. The strip and loosen between Musk and the courts has only started. The judicial brake was announced while in Washington the letters that labeled the agency’s headquarters were being removed. Other unions related to USAID and foreign issues have also presented legal resources arguing that the cuts are “unconstitutional and illegal.”

Fear has become the new reality of USAID workers, who try to maintain anonymity for fear of being the white of reprisals. Emily not only asks to change her name, but also prefers not to give details of the programs she was working with. Like three other people linked to the agency who have talked to eldiario.es, they all want to avoid the use of certain communication platforms for what may happen. They speak of a “technological fear” in reference to Trump’s alliances with the billionaires of the bigtechas Musk with X and Mark Zuckerberg with WhatsApp.

The official version is that Musk wants to close the agency to cut expenses, despite the fact that the federal budget for foreign aid, within which Usaid is included, only represents between 0.7% and 1.4% of the total . According to the Pew Research CenterDuring the fiscal year of 2023 USAID had a budget of around 43.8 billion dollars.

The truth is that the UltraConservador Project 2025 program suggested to start the purge of the official dismantling USAID. The document presented the remodeling of the agency as a test to then redesign the federal government on a large scale. The objective would be to lose the agencies and ensure that federal employees had more flexible conditions that would facilitate dismissal. “The USAID programs and structures must be destroyed and based on the conservative reforms implemented by the Trump administration,” says the text.

The beginning of chaos

For Emily, it all began to truncate with the mail that the Trump administration sent on January 23 asking the people employed by the Government to indicate those colleagues who had applied equality or inclusion policies. “Regardless of your political orientation, it is really questionable that they ask you to inform you about your colleagues and friends, who is loyal and who is not. That does not seem to take place in our democratic system. It’s crazy, ”says Emily.

A day after the mail, the news jumped that Trump ordered to freeze all foreign aid, something that affected both the promoted programs and the USAID independent agency. In this freezing, the first to fall were employees as Emily, who work via contractor companies. Beyond officials (civil servants), A good thickness of USAID are outsourced employees via companies. It is a reality that occurs both within Washington’s headquarters and in all projects around the world.

Emily remembers those days with uncertainty and concern about what could happen to her work “we were losing access to all kinds of information intermittently,” he says. Just when a week of freezing was completed, he was notified that he would be temporarily suspended as of this Monday. In Emily’s company there were about 500 people. “Almost everyone is temporarily suspended.”

Expelled from the system without notification

After the contractors, this Tuesday was when it was the turn of USAID officials. A federal worker found that he no longer had access to government mail or anything of the system. Simply, they had disconnected it and had not been notified. “I don’t even think it’s legal because we have to notify us at least 15 days in advance,” he said. This person explained that he did not know what was going to happen and that he had lost communication with the administration.

Another person from within USAID explains that to fire a federal official it is necessary to go through a process and that it will not be so easy to say goodbye. In fact, on Thursday a judge paused the deadline Trump had given to officials to decide whether they agreed to renounce their place in exchange for seven months of salary, or they were exposed to being fired. The offer is a strategy of the president to pave the way for Musk in his task of cutting the workforce, if the officials do not voluntarily renounce, the Doge are waiting for months of legal battles.

This same person also recounts as those USAID workers who had not yet been temporarily discharged, had tried to contact their classmates who had already been suspended with human resources. Many have been trying more information about their situation for days. Having closed the website and having expelled workers from the system, it is impossible to obtain information about their employment situation.

“A criminal organization”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is carrying a discrediting campaign and misinformation against the Humanitarian Cooperation Agency. The White House sent a statement on February three full of false statements about Usaid’s work, linking the expense of federal programs that the agency had not even carried out. For example, he cited that they had spent $ 70,000 in a “Musical Dei”, when the musical in reality was actually paid by the State Department.

For its part, Musk has been pointing out the agency in the networks for days. “Usaid is a nest of vipers of radical left -wing Marxists who hate America,” he wrote in one post, and in another, the agency accused of being “a criminal organization.” He even hinted that workers who protested on the outskirts of federal buildings, near the Capitol, should be arrested.