An Update on the Temporary Remnant of Samantha Cooper and Maria Carrasco at the Department of H.I.V./AIDS

Samantha Cooper, a contractor whose employment was terminated, had been working in maternal and child health and nutrition at the aid agency, and was set to begin a new job this past Monday in the Office of H.I.V./AIDS. She was excited about the upcoming career milestone, but she soon realized she had to scrounge up the money to stay afloat.

Maria Carrasco, who had worked for the aid agency or projects abroad that it had funded for the last 25 years, was terminated last week while she was still employed by other contractors. “We are people who put our sweat and tears in to these organizations, because we believe in the ultimate goal of helping people. Now it has been completely erased.

There were some who speculated that the number of people retained might go up slightly as bureau and regional leaders worked to keep as many jobs as possible.

It was not clear how many employees were essential. On Thursday afternoon, senior U.S.A.I.D. leaders were told that the Trump administration planned to reduce the agency’s staff to about 290, according to three people informed directly about the details of the call. The number of retained employees was told to senior agency officials by Friday morning, according to two people familiar with the internal guidance.

“This is your formal notification that you are expected to keep working, effective immediately, and until notified otherwise,” the emailed notification said, according to a copy reviewed by The New York Times.

The work force and the aid industry depend on funding from the U.S.A.I.D. On Saturday, the employees affected by the order were advised that no one else would be suspended with pay while they were on leave. Employees could have to wait for weeks or even months for a verdict. The jobs may not exist again, as the case which was brought on behalf of unions representing workers is expected to go to the Supreme Court.

He, like many others, spoke on the condition of anonymity, as those still on the agency’s payroll have been instructed not to publicly discuss the changes underway. Employees fear that flouting the order could jeopardize whatever benefits they might still be eligible for, such as pensions and severance pay — though it was unclear if the Trump administration would honor such obligations.

“Two weeks ago we were two gainfully employed people with onward assignments, and now we’ve seen the entire industry decimated and we’re returning to the U.S. without jobs,” he said.

Mr. Marco used his authority to convince people to apply for waivers to delay travel in order to reduce fears about the Trump administration disrupting their personal lives.

Many employees had to decide between leaving their families behind until the end of the year or immediately pulling their children out of school. Some with medical conditions, including late-stage and high-risk pregnancies, worried about the dangers of traveling and the status of their health care. Several agonized over what to do about pets, because it was not possible to procure the paperwork necessary to enter the United States in just a few weeks.

The announcement gave Foreign Service officers just 30 days to depart their posts and return to the United States if they wanted the U.S. government to pay for their relocation, forcing nearly the entire diplomatic staff to plan the sort of swift exit that normally only takes place during coups and wars.

On Friday evening, just hours before the vast majority of them were set to have been suspended with pay or laid off, a court issued a limited, temporary order against the Trump administration’s moves to shut down the agency.

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Security Questions Swirl After Musk Team Views Treasury Data: What Other Skills Do I Have? A Foreign Service Officer in Asia explains how she is dealing with crisis and famine

The thousands of people who work for the U.S. government’s main agency for humanitarian aid and disaster relief have been on the front lines of efforts to fight famine, contain virulent infectious diseases like H.I.V. and Ebola, and rebuild infrastructure in impoverished and war-torn countries.

“I’m having to file for unemployment, which doesn’t even cover rent; food stamps, which — that’s fine, it at least gets me groceries,” she said in a telephone interview. Her medical coverage ended last week.

“I have co-workers that are going through I.V.F., and they’ve lost all their benefits; people going through cancer treatments and with parents on hospice — and they were the breadwinners,” she said. I feel fortunate to say this is what I am going through. I know there are so many others having to deal with that, and it is literally going to break them.”

That was the fear for one Foreign Service officer in Asia who discovered this week that an immediate family member needed to be evacuated for a life-threatening health condition, only to be told by superiors that amid the dissolution of U.S.A.I.D., there was no funding available for emergency medical travel. The officer was told that they had to leave their belongings and pets behind and return to the United States, where they have nowhere to live.

She worried that she and her husband would have to live off savings if they both lost their jobs, since they both work in development.

“It just feels like the entire sector is sinking, and so how am I going to find a job?” For fear of being retaliated against, she said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “All I know is development, all I know is public health — I’ve dedicated my life to this. What other skills do I have?”

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The Time for USAID to Die: A Case Study in the Failure of the U.S. Agency for International Development during Biden’s First World War

Employees of nongovernmental organizations and companies that rely on U.S.A.I.D. funding said they had effectively been blocked from accessing any funding through the agency’s accounting system, and in some cases, had months of expenses with no guarantee that the federal government would reimburse them.

An example of a small company taking a large hit is Resonance, a development consulting firm that has 150 people around the world. The firm did about 75 percent of its business with U.S.A.I.D. before the contraction. It has bills going back to November that the agency has yet to cover, Steve Schmida, its co-founder, said in an interview.

“We’re being forced to carry a huge amount of cost with no clarity if and when we will get paid or reimbursed,” Mr. Schmida said, adding that he had to lay off almost 90 percent of his U.S.-based staff. He decided to go without pay for three months to free up money for his business.

The United States spends less than 1 percent of its federal budget on foreign aid, but that still makes the country the largest aid donor in the world by far. It takes a quarter of all global humanitarian aid for the United States Agency for International Development to distribute between $60 billion and 40 billion per year. The agency distributes billions of dollars to Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asian countries in order to promote food security, health and Sanitation, and education.

The elimination of the United States Agency for International Development by Donald Trump has focused mainly on global public health projects that have received bipartisan support, while the effort threatens billions of dollars meant to combat climate change. Low-income countries can use the funding from the US Agency for International Development to build renewable energy and adapt to natural disasters. During Joe Biden’s administration, USAID accelerated its climate-focused efforts as part of an ambitious new initiative that was supposed to last through the end of the decade. That effort now appears to have come to an abrupt end as USAID contractors around the world prepare to abandon critical projects and lay off staff.

On Sunday Musk stated that the USAID is a criminal organization. “Time for it to die.” The agency is codified into federal law, and it is likely that court challenges will argue that Musk’s actions are themselves illegal.

The agency’s website has been shut down, employees have been locked out of their email accounts, and the Washington office has been closed.

As part of a broad effort to bypass Congress and unilaterally cut government spending, Donald Trump’s administration has all but shut down operations at the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, the independent federal body that delivers humanitarian aid and economic development funding around the world. On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order pausing all USAID funding, and the agency subsequently issued a stop-work order to nearly all funding recipients, from soup kitchens in Sudan to the global humanitarian group Mercy Corps.