26 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL 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. 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 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. REBUILDING AFTER CRISIS 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. 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 FOCUS A WORLD WITHOUT
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