28 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2026 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL 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. 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? n
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