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Trump administration appointees running the main United States aid agency have in recent days fired hundreds of employees who help manage responses to urgent humanitarian crises around the world, according to two U.S. officials and four recent employees of the agency.<\/p>\n
The firings add to doubts raised about whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio is allowing employees for the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., to carry out lifesaving humanitarian assistance, as he had promised to do late last month during a blanket freeze<\/a> of almost all foreign aid from the U.S. government.<\/p>\n Trump appointees have fired or put on paid leave thousands of employees of U.S.A.I.D. A task force of young engineers working for Elon Musk, the billionaire tech businessman who is advising President Trump, has shut down many technical systems in the aid agency and barred employees from their email accounts. Mr. Musk has posted dark conspiracy theories about U.S.A.I.D. on social media, asserting with no evidence that it is a \u201ccriminal organization\u201d and that it was \u201ctime for it to die.\u201d<\/p>\n The latest round of dismissals occurred on Friday night, when hundreds of people working for the agency\u2019s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance<\/a> got emails saying their jobs had been terminated. Two employees who got the emails said they were strange because they did not state any job titles specifically and did not have the recipients\u2019 names in the \u201cto\u201d field. They were generic emails sent out in a large wave.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The New York Times obtained a copy and confirmed those descriptions. The employees who agreed to speak for this story did so on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to jeopardize the 15 days of pay they were scheduled to receive after being given a termination notice. The two U.S. officials feared retaliation.<\/p>\n In addition, 36 people were fired from the Office of Transition Initiatives<\/a>, a unit in the agency\u2019s conflict prevention bureau that specializes in helping partner countries with political transitions and democratic initiatives, said the U.S. officials and recent agency employees.<\/p>\n About 400 people were fired in recent days from humanitarian assistance positions, one U.S. official said. About 200 of those were contractors for the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, the officials said, and another 200 were part of a unit called the Support Relief Group, a collection of crisis experts who helped the bureau in responding quickly to natural disasters and armed conflicts. Now only about a dozen people remain in that group.<\/p>\n The fired employees were contractors who were employed directly by the U.S. government. Some had worked for U.S.A.I.D. in various capacities for 25 years.<\/p>\n Many of the contractors for the Support Relief Group had worked for the agency in war zones, including in Ukraine, Syria and Afghanistan. They often lived in different places around the world and spent weeks or months at a time in crisis areas. One employee who got the email on Friday said they were being flown home next week from a U.S. diplomatic mission overseas.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Another fired employee said the hundreds of dismissals meant that the aid agency now had only a skeleton crew to respond to humanitarian crises.<\/p>\n