As USAID was dismantled, these agency employees banded together to build a support network for their entire community. This is what they learned along the way.

BY LAURA PAVLOVIC

On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that U.S. foreign aid was “not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values” and pausing all U.S. foreign development assistance. What followed was swift and devastating. Within days, thousands of institutional support contractors received termination notices as their employers—USAID contractors—went bankrupt or significantly curtailed operations.

By February 2025, the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had closed USAID headquarters and placed more than 1,400 staff members on administrative leave.

By March, most of our 1,200 U.S. personal services contractor (PSC) colleagues had been fired.

In August, 5,000 Foreign Service Nationals (FSNs), who worked all over the world to further U.S. interests, were also fired.

By September 2, the Trump administration had terminated nearly all USAID staff. Nearly every one of the 16,000 members of USAID’s workforce—career public servants who had built schools, fought disease, upheld democratic values, and prevented crises on behalf of the American people—lost their livelihoods. USAID was rendered functionally extinct.

Navigating what that meant for USAID’s workforce required an urgent collective effort. The organization “Our USAID Community” (OUC) grew out of that effort.

The administration’s dismantling of USAID has been catastrophic. It has cost hundreds of thousands of lives around the world.

The administration’s dismantling of USAID has been catastrophic. As Impact Metric Dashboard and others have demonstrated, it has cost hundreds of thousands of lives around the world. It disbanded the largest, best-trained, and most effective development and humanitarian assistance agency the world has ever seen. It devastated U.S. capacity to address conflict, disease, and other global challenges. It decimated the networks, partnerships, and trust that USAID had built over 60 years—relationships most often developed and sustained by an unparalleled cadre of FSN staff and thousands of local partners. Those connections, that cooperation, and the trust they built cannot be easily reconstructed. USAID’s closure makes the world more vulnerable and weakens U.S. soft power.

The impact has also reverberated at home. I spent 20 years working on democracy, anticorruption, and rule of law issues at USAID—much of that time in countries where corruption, political purges, and patronage hiring cripple public institutions. We were familiar with the consequences: economic instability, failing schools, unsafe infrastructure, hollowed-out health systems, and a collapse in public trust. We also know that U.S. institutions function as well as they do because nonpartisan civil servants are (or were) protected by rules that shield them from partisan interference.

What happened to USAID is continuing to happen across the federal government. We are losing the capacity to deliver the policies, programs, services, and resources that the American people depend on on a nonpartisan basis—and this further erodes public faith in government institutions and, ultimately, in democracy itself.

Building OUC

USAID’s workforce was global and diverse. In 2024 we numbered approximately 16,000—but fewer than 5,000 were career Foreign Service or Civil Service officers. The majority were institutional support contractors, Foreign Service Limited, FSNs, PSCs, and U.S. national PSCs, whose employment protections varied enormously depending on their hiring mechanism, regardless of their years of service or experience. When USAID was dismantled, it affected all of us—but it did not affect all of us in the same way.

In the early days of the dismantling, small groups of USAID staff began researching the regulations governing administrative leave, reductions in force, and federal benefits, and organizing what they found into resources their colleagues could actually use. We shared these materials widely, creating a growing “clearinghouse” to help our colleagues understand their rights and support one another through the chaotic separation process.

Today, OUC has more than 2,400 members and is open to anyone who held a usaid.gov email address, regardless of hiring mechanism. Our core mission is to empower our members to defend their rights, navigate the complex administrative and legal landscape created by USAID’s dismantling, and remain connected to a community that understands what they have lost and what they are fighting for. We provide legal, administrative, personnel, and other support and resources, send weekly updates and host monthly member meetings to offer analysis of the evolving legal landscape, explain the impact of ongoing litigation on our community, and share practical guidance on navigating the process of separation and advocating for our rights.

U.S. institutions function as well as they do because nonpartisan civil servants are (or were) protected by rules that shield them from partisan interference.

Our work includes ensuring that career Foreign Service and Civil Service members—many of whom have had to represent themselves in administrative proceedings—are not left to navigate those processes alone. More than 2,200 of our colleagues have filed individual appeals to defend their rights at the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). Hundreds more who are excluded from the MSPB’s appeal system are pursuing claims in other fora. We partner with our unions, legal support organizations, and volunteer lawyers to provide pro bono and “low bono” legal support to colleagues who need it most and have raised more than $30,000 to date to support USAID alumni legal action. This is a great start—but we recognize that the road ahead is long and that we will need more financial support.

Everything OUC has accomplished over the past year—the legal resources curated, the guidance shared, the administrative services obtained, the connections made, the funds raised, the appeals supported—has been done entirely by volunteers. Former USAID staff, who had just lost their own jobs and a mission that defined them, turned around and built a support system for 2,400 of their colleagues. That is not a bureaucratic achievement. That is a community. And it tells you everything you need to know about who the USAID workforce is.

Lessons for the Future

Whatever form U.S. foreign assistance takes going forward—whether USAID is reconstituted in some form, merged into State, or replaced with something new—the experiences of the past year have surfaced lessons that cannot be ignored.

First, the statutory and institutional guardrails that were supposed to protect the federal workforce were not built for what happened. The Civil Service Reform Act and the Foreign Service Act were not designed to guide the adjudication of the wholesale dismantling of an agency. Administrative fora like the Merit Systems Protection Board were not built to handle a caseload of more than 20,000 appeals. Unions were not resourced or staffed to advise entire agency workforces simultaneously severed from service—while also fighting to maintain their bargaining rights.

Volunteer organizations like OUC have stepped in to help fill this gap, but we know that we are helping former federal employees navigate a system that is increasingly stacked against them. Before the outstanding public servants who lost their livelihoods can feel protected enough to return to federal service, the statutes and institutions that form the foundation of the modern federal workforce will need to be reformed and their guardrails reinforced.

Second, the inequities embedded in USAID’s own staffing model must be addressed. USAID never had the operating budget to sufficiently staff its programs and operated through a patchwork of hiring mechanisms. When the dismantling came, your rights were entirely determined by how you had been hired—not by your years of service, your expertise, or your contributions. Before the United States can rebuild a foreign assistance workforce, whether within a reconstituted USAID or elsewhere, those inequities must be corrected. A workforce built on a two- or three-tier system of rights is not a workforce built for the long term—or for the challenges USAID took on every day.

Third, any effort to rebuild a foreign assistance workforce—or, for that matter, the broader federal workforce—must build from the ground up, learning from the people who sustained their communities through transition and crisis. OUC was built by former federal workers for former federal workers, in real time. The legal explainers we curated, the administrative resources we organized, the connections we made between members and across the federal workforce—none of this existed on the day USAID’s headquarters was shuttered. It was built because it had to be.

The lesson is not simply that this community infrastructure is critical in times of crisis, but that the people who built and sustained this infrastructure through the worst professional experience of their careers could do it because they are the subject matter experts about what the workforce needs, what the system failed to provide, and what any future institution must do differently. Who better to be at the table when the rebuilding begins than them?

Laura Pavlovic

Laura Pavlovic began her USAID career at USAID/East Africa in 2005, and also served in Kyiv, Belgrade, and the Regional Development Mission for Asia in Bangkok. She served as the inaugural senior deputy assistant administrator of USAID’s Democracy, Rights, and Governance Bureau and as senior deputy assistant administrator at USAID’s Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization. In 2025 she co-founded Our USAID Community, a volunteer network of more than 2,400 former USAID colleagues working to protect a nonpartisan federal foreign assistance workforce. The views expressed are solely those of the author in her personal capacity.

 

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