THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2026 57 That same weekend, public statements began to circulate from senior officials in the new administration describing USAID as a criminal organization, calling for it to be destroyed, to be “fed into the wood chipper.” For these FS members—parents and children who had just spent 20 hours on a plane after evacuating under threat of violence from a high-threat posting in service to their country— the words were not abstract. They were a direct betrayal of the contract of support and protection from the organization and the country they had spent their careers serving, just when they needed that support most. No senior political leadership within USAID was willing to engage with the newly arrived evacuees, and requests directed to both State and USAID were met with silence. USAID families began accumulating significant debt to pay for food and temporary lodging, with no assurance that any of it would be reimbursed. Real fear began to set in: Did evacuees still have jobs? Were they facing liability for housing leases that would never be reimbursed? How would they enroll their children in school? Were they perhaps even facing homelessness? The few USAID Washington employees who heroically worked to support people and keep them informed had almost no information to share. They explained, honestly, that they were reading the same news headlines and court filings as everyone else, trying to understand what was happening to the agency. e Only after a direct appeal from the U.S. ambassador in Kinshasa did the State Department agree to extend evacuation subsistence and related allowances to USAID staff—initially promised for one month only. Even then, USAID’s internal payment systems had been largely locked, and reimbursement processing was repeatedly interrupted. Financial staff occasionally managed to regain temporary access to the system and began to process payments, but that access would again be revoked within a day or two. Staff waited months for reimbursement. Several entrylevel officers and contractors faced the genuine prospect of bankruptcy. For weeks at a stretch in February and March, evacuees did not know whether they were authorized to work. Communications from Washington were cryptic by design, calibrated more to intimidate than to inform. Within a week of the evacuation, it was apparent that USAID itself was being systematically dismantled. Evacuated staff faced the threat of immediate termination as well as the real possibility that the agency would not support their return to post to retrieve household effects abandoned in their rush to escape ahead of the rioting mobs. e As USAID mission director, I remained in Kinshasa while my wife was evacuated with the rest of the families. I left for the United States about one month later, returning to the DRC that summer with my deputy mission director, contracting officer, and deputy executive officer. Like so many others at missions around the world, we oversaw the closure of a $1.3 billion annual program for the Central Africa region and managed the termination of approximately 250 Congolese and regional staff. The evacuation from Kinshasa was, technically, a success: Everyone got out, no one was hurt in the process, and the logistical machinery of river boats, airplanes, consular officer support, and host-country cooperation performed largely as designed. But the USAID personnel who boarded that plane tell a different story, one of deliberate abandonment by the institution they had served, financial precarity, professional erasure, and the particular cruelty of being told, after risking everything, that their service had not mattered and their agency did not deserve to exist. The emotional accounting of that year is harder to measure than the financial one, and it is far from complete. n Evacuees on the bus with their dog headed to the port in Kinshasa. COURTESY OF JOHN DUNLOP
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