A federal judge ordered a temporary block Friday on Trump administration orders that would have placed thousands more workers of the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave, and would have given agency workers abroad just a 30-day deadline to return to the U.S, reports AP.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, agreed with arguments by two government employee associations that both orders exposed U.S. aid and development workers abroad to unwarranted risk and hardship.
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 workers off from many of the ways they needed to reach the U.S. 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.
But the judge declined the employee groups’ request to grant a temporary block on a Trump administration funding freeze that has shut down the six-decade-old agency and its work, pending more hearings on the workers’ lawsuit.
Nichols stressed in the hearing earlier Friday on the request to pause the Trump administration’s actions that his order was not a decision on the employees’ request to roll back the administration’s swiftly moving destruction of the agency.
The American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees argue that Trump lacks the authority to shut down the six-decade-old aid 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 duct tape to block it out on a sign and took down USAID flags. Someone placed a bouquet of flowers outside the door.
The Trump administration and billionaire Elon 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.
Administration appointees and Musk’s teams have shut down almost all funding for the agency, stopping aid and development programs worldwide. They have placed staffers and contractors on leave and furlough and locked them out of the agency’s email and other systems. According to Democratic lawmakers, they also carted away USAID’s computer servers.
“This is a full-scale gutting of virtually all the personnel of an entire agency,” Karla Gilbride, the attorney for the employee associations, told the judge.
Justice Department attorney Brett Shumate argued that the administration has all the legal authority it needs to place agency staffers on leave. “The government does this across the board every day,” Shumate said. “That’s what’s happening here. It’s just a large number.”
Friday’s ruling is the latest setback in the courts for the Trump administration, whose policies to offer financial incentives for federal workers to resign and end birthright citizenship for anyone born in the U.S. to someone in the country illegally have been temporarily paused by judges.
Earlier Friday, a group of a half-dozen USAID officials speaking to reporters strongly disputed assertions from Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the most essential life-saving programs abroad were getting waivers to continue funding. None were, the officials said.
Among the programs they said had not received waivers: $450 million in food grown by U.S. farmers sufficient to feed 36 million people, which was not being paid for or delivered; and water supplies for 1.6 million people displaced by war in Sudan’s Darfur region, which were being cut off without money for fuel to run water pumps in the desert.
Bd-pratidin English/Tanvir Raihan
