CV NEWS FEED // At least 56 senior officials at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) were placed on administrative leave Jan. 27 as part of an investigation into alleged efforts to circumvent President Donald Trump’s executive orders.
Jason Gray, USAID’s newly appointed acting administrator, issued an internal notice Jan. 27 stating that certain actions within the agency appeared to undermine the president’s directives, Fox News reported.
“We’ve identified several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the President’s Executive Orders and the mandate from the American people,” Gray said in an email, according to Fox News. “As a result, we have decided to put a number of USAID employees on administrative leave with full pay and benefits until further notice while we complete our analysis of these actions.”
USAID was violating the president’s executive orders halting foreign aid and eliminating discriminatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies in the federal workforce, according to an exclusive from Susan Crabtree of RealClearPolitics.
On his first day back in office, Trump issued an executive order mandating that all US foreign development assistance programs must pause new funding and disbursements to foreign countries, non-government organizations (NGOs), international organizations, and contractors for three months while their “programmatic efficiency and consistency with United States foreign policy” are reviewed.
Trump asserted that the country’s foreign aid industry is “not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.”
“They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries,” according to the President.
In a Jan. 22 executive order, Trump mandated a total halt to federal DEI policies and directed federal agencies to actively combat DEI-based discrimination in the private sector.
He described the order as a significant step in enforcing time-honored federal statutes and advancing the Constitutional principle of equality before the law, calling it “the most important federal civil rights measure in decades.”
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