Rose Natabo needs to leave one of her starving sons behind. At dawn, she squeezes her firstborn goodbye, then wraps her youngest, Santo, to her back, his legs akimbo at her waist. Taking the hand of her middle child, James, she hurries away toward help, her pink plastic sandals clapping over the dry dirt.
A couple hours later, the trio are in the back of an ambulance speeding by soccer fields, slums and footpaths. They turn through an iron gate and into the only hospital in Kakuma, a sprawling refugee camp in Kenya’s northern desert. After running from wars and natural disasters, this camp, the third-largest in the world, is their home. They have nowhere else to go. Rose joins a crowd of other mothers checking into the pediatric malnutrition ward.
It is July 8. Rose ran out of food less than three weeks ago after the World Food Program cut rations across the camp. At the hospital, she learns why: WFP lost its funding from the United States, the program’s biggest donor. What she doesn’t know is that aid workers and government officials from both the U.S. and Kenya spent the previous months begging and warning Trump administration leaders that families like hers depended on that food to survive. But for months, nothing changed. So Rose and thousands of other mothers watched their children starve.
Trump’s aides say the funding cuts were necessary to reform America’s broken foreign aid system, and they’ve begun making new investments into Kenya. “What you’ve seen right now,” one senior official at the State Department explains, “is there’s always some period of disruption when you’re doing something that’s never been done before.”
For WFP, that disruption meant telling 300,000 refugees in Kakuma that a little more than half of them will receive a meager portion of rice, lentils and oil some time next month, in August. The rest will get nothing. Rose doesn’t know which group she’s in. And she doesn’t know if her sons will survive that long anyway, especially Santo, who is only 2 years old.
Under the fluorescent lights in the malnutrition ward, nurses try to get an IV into him. But Santo is so swollen with edema — a result of severe protein deficiency — they can only find a vein on his head. Drained of color, his skin peels off in patches like burns. They drip milk into his mouth because feeding too quickly can be fatal. “Their bodies have adapted to starvation,” a nurse explains.
At night, Rose and Santo lie on a small vinyl hospital bed surrounded by a mosquito net. The swelling abates after a few days, but the little boy shrinks to 14 pounds and disappears into a loose, unstrapped onesie meant for a 9-month-old. The nurses tell Rose that God has performed a miracle, but Santo is still a long way from recovery. This is not his first time in the malnutrition ward this year.
Days pass. On July 16, the hospital discharges James, her 5 year old with dark marble eyes. He has somehow overcome a bout of malaria, which can be nine times more likely to kill a severely malnourished child like him. Without other options, Rose decides to send him home to her eldest, 7-year-old Lino, who is still staying with neighbors and relatives, even though she knows they have little food to spare. She has to stay behind at the hospital just a little bit longer, she tells James. Santo needs her.
July turns to August, and Rose becomes a fixture in the clinic. Five-foot-nothing and soft-spoken, she often enters and leaves rooms without notice. Every day, she sees other panicked mothers come to the clinic with sick children, a dozen a day on average. Some leave alone, after their children die.
Rose does laundry, bathes Santo and tidies up around their bed to stay busy. She wonders who, if anyone, is looking after James and Lino and what, if anything, they are eating. She starts asking staff any chance she gets if today is the day they will discharge Santo.
Some of the other mothers are so desperate to check on their children they sneak out at night and walk hours back home. Others abscond altogether. At least one baby died this year after her mother took her from the clinic before she was ready.
Rose considers leaving, too. “I don’t want my kids to suffer alone,” she says as her fingers work over black and white beads of a necklace she’s making for Santo, a traditional charm popular in South Sudan. Rose separated from her husband, who she says abused her, and now raises her boys alone. She inflates her cheeks and presses her face nose-to-nose with Santo. She’s the only one who can make him laugh.
Rose fled her home for Kakuma as a teenager in 2018, after South Sudan’s civil war found her village and left few survivors. She’s now about 23 — she doesn’t know her exact birthday — but still feels like an orphan in need of help.
On Monday, Aug. 4, a young, gentle nurse named Mark Kipsang walks through the pediatric malnutrition ward with a clipboard. Medical staff had promised Rose before the weekend that she and Santo would be discharged soon.
When Kipsang reaches their bed, Rose sits the boy upright and encourages him to greet their visitor. Kipsang offers a hand for a high five, but Santo doesn’t budge. His little feet dangle from the bed, still swollen with edema. Kipsang is worried Santo’s condition will worsen at home and that he’d quickly end up back at the hospital. This year, Kipsang’s ward has seen about six relapses every week on average.
“Has he had diarrhea?” he asks, inspecting the loose skin on Santo’s backside.
“No,” Rose lies.
“Can he walk?”
Rose nods and places Santo on the cold concrete, his shirt slipping from his shoulders. When he stands motionless, Rose holds his hands above his head and wills him forward, his feet barely shuffling. Santo starts to wail, and Rose sighs and lifts him back into her lap.
Santo is not ready to leave. Just then, Kipsang looks at Rose sitting cross-legged and notices what she has kept to herself all this time. Rose is pregnant.
Kipsang sends her straight to the hospital prenatal offices. She pads across the courtyard clutching a worn purple book that shows her first and only checkup was months ago. Rose speaks three languages but cannot read or write. Staff take her blood and conduct other tests and then explain the results as they jot them down in the book. She is extremely anemic, which means she is at risk for fainting, strokes or a preterm birth.
A third of the women in the hospital’s maternity ward have life-threatening complications that could be treated simply with food. They suffer from anemia like Rose, as well as dangerously high blood pressure. Their babies are born early, weighing too little and with underdeveloped lungs.
Jane Atim, a solicitous nutrition counselor, tells Rose that in order to avoid a dangerous birth, she needs to address her iron deficiency. Rose nods but otherwise sits still on a plastic chair, her fingers laced together. Atim flips through a ledger of two dozen other pregnant women she had seen in recent weeks, all with the same problem. There’s a diagram of a balanced diet on her desk. “How many times a day do you eat?” Atim asks.
Three, Rose lies again. She wants to end the conversation and figures there’s not much point in being honest or complaining. Instead, she lists peas, greens and lentils as her typical daily fare.
Atim knows it isn’t true, but she doesn’t think it does much good to despair alongside the starving mothers. So she tells Rose what she tells everyone: “The best thing for you to do is eat.”
The next morning, three days shy of one month in the hospital, Rose comes apart. “I am leaving today,” she shouts to a group of hospital workers who had gathered around her. The other mothers turn on their beds to watch. Her face is wet with tears. She tells them she doesn’t know who’s taking care of her other kids.
Her doctor relents and signs the discharge papers. “This is not ideal,” he says. He’s worried Santo might have contracted tuberculosis as well. But he says it’s better to discharge Santo than let Rose leave against medical advice and risk her ignoring their recommendations for treatment at home.
Later, Rose collects all of their belongings into the plastic wash basin she’s been using for laundry: two dresses, blankets, soap in an empty powdered milk tin, the iron tablets the prenatal ward had given her and papers describing Santo’s treatment plan. She doesn’t know what the files say, but she organizes them into neat piles anyway. The hospital had prescribed Santo 11 ready-to-use therapeutic food bars, and Rose keeps the packaging of one he just finished. She saves the empty wrappers to prove Santo has eaten them. Some mothers resort to selling theirs.
Rose ties Santo to her back with a blanket printed with monkeys, balances the basin atop her head and cups her lower belly with her free hand. “God help you,” another mother says.
As Rose reaches her sister’s house, Lino and James bound around the corner, through an open gate and beneath a clothesline made of concertina wire. Flanked by a posse of other children all coated in a film of dust, the boys beeline for Santo. They coo over their little brother before liberating a nutritional supplement wrapper from his hands to lick it clean. Rose inspects Lino’s dirty fingernails and picks up James, his brittle arms reaching around her neck; his body feels like an empty bookbag. He has a bad cough.
They look rough, Rose thinks, but they are alive.
It takes more than an hour to walk back to their house. James lost his shoes at some point after leaving the hospital. He struggles to stand, much less walk under the blinding East African sun. “He became so thin this year,” says Rose, whose own sandals have broken. “He’s usually fat.”
Strapped to her back, Santo falls asleep. Rose agonizes over being a mother unable to feed her children, with a pain so deep that she feels something like remorse for having had them at all. “There’s no happiness in it,” she says later.
They walk past the occasional house stripped to a husk. Those families, Rose explains, sold their clothes, chairs and even roofs to afford a ride over the border to South Sudan — a place they had not long ago fled for their lives.
Kakuma once felt like her only possibility for a future. She hoped to go into business for herself, selling food of all things. She’d raise money in case she and the boys were ever granted asylum in the U.S., where her sons could receive a good education.
But she’s abandoned that plan. Now she instead imagines joining those returning to South Sudan instead. “This sickness that came upon her baby has broken her,” Rose’s sister Sunday says, using a camp colloquialism for malnutrition.
“The only time she scared me,” Sunday adds, “was when she told me she wanted to take her kids back to South Sudan.”
On the morning of Aug. 11, Rose disappears into a crowd of hundreds of refugees under a pavilion about the size of a basketball court. Children lie across concrete benches while their mothers crane their necks toward the front, struggling to hear over the din. There, a small team of Kenya Red Cross workers holding clipboards call names on a bullhorn. One at a time, the mothers come forward to lift their kids onto a scale.
This outdoor clinic is functionally a pediatric malnutrition referral center. Community health workers fan across Kakuma to measure the circumference of children’s arms. Any kids in the area with arms thinner than 13.5 centimeters below the shoulder are sent here. They’ve made almost 12,000 malnutrition referrals this year.
Rose sits with James and Santo on either side of her, both half asleep despite the noise. Behind a folding table at the front of the crowd is a harried young Red Cross nutritionist. He said on a previous visit that the turnout shows how far malnutrition has spread. “It’s worse than last year,” he added, “because the food has been cut.”
Rose plops Santo on the scale: about 15 pounds. James is 21. Both weigh more than they did last check up, but still far less than what healthy children would at their ages. Each of their arms measures less than 12 centimeters, meaning the aid workers should prescribe them both therapeutic food.
The nutritionist tells Rose to follow him. He unlocks a heavy steel door that opens into a vault typically filled with nutritional supplements. Now, save for a couple boxes torn open on pallets, the room is empty. “We don’t have Plumpy’Nut anymore,” he says. (U.S. funding cuts disrupted the global supply chain that moves therapeutic ready-to-use food all over the world, The New York Times reported, stranding it in warehouses and at shipping companies.) He hands Rose a few bars of what remains for Santo and a different, less dense, supplement for James. They head back home.
Rose gives birth to her first girl two months later, on Oct. 5. It’s a Sunday, which is what Rose names the baby.
Her family still struggles to get food, even though WFP has started giving out more rations after a recent grant from the U.S. She rests under a tree with the children outside their dark, squat home, watching them sit listless in the heat.
All three of her boys have backslid. Lino and James are even thinner. The color has again drained from Santo’s skin and the edema returned to his legs, arms and face. He has lost 1 pound since the August weigh-in with the Red Cross.
Still wearing the black-and-white necklace his mom made him, Santo can hardly open his eyes or sit upright. It’s clear he needs to go back to urgent care. But she’s afraid to risk bringing her newborn to the hospital, where she might catch an infection.
They’ll all stay at home for now. This time, Rose has to choose baby Sunday.
On July 18, a mild, overcast night in Nairobi, Kenya, a team of President Donald Trump’s top foreign aid advisers ducked into a meeting room at the Tribe Hotel, their luxury accommodations in the city’s diplomatic quarter, for a private dinner.
The visitors from Washington included Marcus Thornton, a former Border Patrol agent known for a series of public lawsuits against the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate; Kenneth Jackson, a former oil executive who had done a stint in government under the first Trump administration; and Laken Rapier, who’d previously managed communications for the city of Fort Worth, Texas. This year, all had been appointed to leadership roles in the U.S. Agency for International Development, the premier government humanitarian agency in the world.
Five months earlier, some of the visiting aides had celebrated USAID’s destruction over cake and speeches in Washington. With that job done, they’d embarked on a world tour of half a dozen cities, including the Kenyan capital. They were granted special permission to fly business class “to help ensure maximum rest and comfort,” according to an internal memo. Thornton alone received authorization to expense more than $35,000 in taxpayer money for the trip. The plan was to conduct exit interviews with USAID’s top experts, who were being forced out of the agency amid the administration’s stated commitment to austerity.
When the U.S. embassy in Nairobi learned of the visit, officials there arranged the dinner with a goal in mind. It would be their last opportunity to explain, face-to-face, the catastrophic impact of Trump’s drastic cuts to foreign aid.
A top concern: the administration’s failure to fund the World Food Program’s operation in Kenya, where about 720,000 refugees, among the most vulnerable people on earth, relied on the organization to survive. After providing $112 million in 2024, the U.S. abruptly cut off money in January without warning, leaving the program with no time to find adequate support or import the food needed for the rest of the year.
For months afterward, U.S. government and humanitarian officials warned Washington that the cutoff had led to increasingly dire circumstances. They begged Trump’s political advisers, including Thornton, to renew WFP’s grant and give the money it needed to avert disaster. The embassy in Nairobi sent at least eight cables to the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, explaining the situation on the ground and projecting mass hunger, violence and regional instability.
Those warnings went unheeded. Rubio, facing pressure from lawmakers and humanitarian groups, nevertheless publicly asserted that the agency’s mass cuts had spared food programs — even as the administration failed to fund WFP in Kenya behind the scenes. “If it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the freeze,” Rubio told reporters on Feb. 4. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.”
By the spring, WFP still had not received funding, ran low on supplies and would be forced to stop feeding many of Kenya’s refugees. In Kakuma, the third-largest camp in the world, WFP cut rations to their lowest in history, trapping most of the 308,000 people in the camp with almost nothing to eat.
They began to starve, and many — mostly children — died because their malnourished bodies couldn’t fight off infections, ProPublica found while reporting in the camp. Mothers had to choose which of their kids to feed. Young men took to the streets in protests, some of which devolved into violent riots. Pregnant women with life-threatening anemia were so desperate for calories that they ate mud. Out of options and mortally afraid, refugees began fleeing the camp by foot and in overcramped cars, threatening a new migration crisis on the continent. They said they’d rather risk being shot or dying on the perilous route than slowly starving in Kakuma.
To press the urgency of the situation in East Africa at dinner, the embassy officials enlisted Dragica Pajevic, a WFP veteran of more than two decades. Pajevic arrived at the Tribe Hotel early. She brought props. The bag slung over her shoulder held a collection of Tupperware containers with different amounts of dry rice, lentils and oil.
As they ate, she placed each container on the table. The largest represented 2,100 daily calories, what humanitarians like her consider the minimum daily intake for an adult. The next container showed 840 calories. That is what a fifth of refugees in Kakuma were set to receive come August. Another third would get just over 400 calories. Then she showed an empty container. The rest — almost half of the people in Kakuma — would get nothing at all.
Pajevic ended her presentation by relaying a truism that she said a government official in Liberia had once told her: The only difference between life and death during a famine is WFP and the U.S. government, its largest donor.
“The one who’s not hungry cannot understand the beastly pain of hunger,” Pajevic said, “and what a person is willing to do just to tame that beastly pain.”
The response was muted, according to other people familiar with the dinner. Jackson, then USAID’s deputy administrator for management and resources, said the decision to renew WFP’s grant was now with the State Department, and gave no indication he would appeal on the organization’s behalf. Thornton, a foreign service officer who ascended to a leadership post under Trump, did not speak. Instead, he spent much of the meal looking at his cellphone.
The dinner plates were cleared and the visitors headed to the airport. “They just took zero responsibility for this,” one of the attendees said, “and zero responsibility for what’s going to happen.”
The details of this episode are drawn from accounts by six people familiar with the trip, as well as internal government records. Most people in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. This year, ProPublica, The New Yorker and other outlets have documented violence and hunger due to the aid cuts in Kenya’s camps. But the scale of suffering throughout Kakuma — and the string of decisions by American officials that contributed to it — have not been previously reported.
The camp had seen similar spikes in pediatric malnutrition in recent years, but they were tied to natural causes, such as malaria outbreaks, extreme drought or COVID-19, according to staff of the International Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that operates Kakuma’s only hospital.
This was something different: an American-made hunger crisis. So far this year, community health workers have referred almost 12,000 malnourished children for immediate medical attention.
“What has come with Trump, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” said one aid worker who has been in Kakuma for decades. “It’s huge and brutal and traumatizing.”
In response to a detailed list of questions, a senior State Department official insisted that no one had died as a result of foreign aid cuts. The official also said that the U.S. still gives WFP hundreds of millions a year and the administration is shifting to investments that will better serve both the U.S. and key allies like Kenya over time. “We just signed a landmark health agreement with Kenya,” the official said, pointing to recent endorsements by government officials there. “That’s going to transform their ability to build their domestic capacity, to take care of their populations, to improve the quality of health care in Kenya.”
The day of the dinner, 370 miles from the Tribe Hotel, Mary Sunday sat on a vinyl bed in the pediatric malnutrition ward of Kakuma’s hospital, cradling her 7-month-old baby, Santina. The name means “little saint” in Italian, and Mary could only pray that God would save her baby’s life.
Slender, with close-cropped hair and arresting eyes, Sunday had rushed Santina to the hospital four days earlier after the infant developed severe diarrhea. Her husband, Juma Lotunya, had stayed behind to care for their 2-year-old, Grace.
Devout Christians in their early 20s, the couple fled to Kakuma together from South Sudan. They considered parenthood a sacred responsibility — especially Sunday, whose own mother died when she was young. As their family grew, Lotunya had hoped to start a small shop so he could afford to send their daughters to school. “I had that simple dream,” he said.
But in June, when Santina was 6 months old, WFP cut the camp’s food rations. Families like theirs were allotted just a small amount of rice and lentils — 630 daily calories per person — which they were expected to make last until August. Sunday and Lotunya stretched it as long as they could, eating one small meal per day. But the food ran out before the end of June. Sunday stopped producing enough breastmilk to feed Santina, and their chubby baby began to waste away. By the time they arrived at the hospital, Santina weighed only 11 pounds. Staff noted in her charts that she was severely malnourished, her eyes sunken.
Sunday watched helplessly under the clinic’s fluorescent lights as hospital staff pumped her baby with medicine and tried to reintroduce more calories.
On the clinic’s walls, next to decals of butterflies, monkeys and seahorses, loomed dry-erase boards with columns of data tracking how many children and babies had died in the room this year. Sunday spoke no English, but she knew what the numbers meant: One row listed admissions to the pediatric malnutrition ward — about 400 per month on average, including the highest number of edema cases, a key marker of severity, in years.
Another row on the whiteboards tallied those who never left the clinic: At least 54 children have died in the hospital with complications brought on by malnutrition in 2025 alone, including a surge in the spring when families first began rationing their food because of the USAID cuts. Worldwide, this year is the first in decades that early childhood deaths will increase, the Gates Foundation recently reported. Researchers said a key factor is the cuts to foreign aid.
In the hospital’s courtyard, another mother, 20-year-old Nyangoap Riek, leaned against a tree with her two children at her feet and said she was considering an extreme solution. “The thing I think about is committing suicide,” she told ProPublica, “because I heard the U.N. takes care of the kids when the parents are gone.”
Kakuma has been a sanctuary in East Africa since the United Nations and Kenyan government began accepting refugees there in 1992. People have come fleeing deadly violence in some two dozen countries — mainly from South Sudan like Sunday and Lotunya — but also as far away as Afghanistan. Covering an area about half the size of Manhattan, Kakuma is a loose constellation of head-high mud and thatch neighborhoods and corrugated metal slums, like a macabre oasis in a desert, stitched together by rutted motorcycle trails.
Its sheer scale has drawn political figures, Olympic gold medalists and Hollywood celebrities on humanitarian visits. Movies have been made, including a documentary about the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a group of unaccompanied minors escaping war and conflict. Angelina Jolie opened a school there.
A high-ranking Republican-appointed diplomat from the U.S. once called Kakuma the hottest, driest land on earth, “a place that is very close to the edge of Hades.”
“We are sustaining life,” she said, “by helping fund the World Food Program.”
In the past, USAID gave WFP’s global operations billions every year, including the funds to feed refugees at camps in Kenya. The aid is one end of a bargain to bring stability to the region. Countries like Kenya take in refugees from a host of other countries fleeing violence, famine or natural disasters. In exchange, the U.S., along with other wealthy nations vested in saving lives, help foot the bill for essential services. Without food, experts say, refugees would likely spill out of Kenya into other countries. Conflicts may last longer, claim more lives and create new refugees.
USAID has been ubiquitous in Kakuma for so long that it’s a literal building block in the camp; millions of old cans of cooking oil bearing the agency’s letters have been flattened and repurposed as lattice fencing.
When the Trump administration froze thousands of USAID programs during a putative review of the agency’s operations in January, Rubio insisted food programs would be spared.
But then Rubio’s lieutenants failed to extend WFP’s Kenya funding, blowing up the typical timetable the organization needed in order to ship food to Kakuma by summer.
WFP was blindsided. The organization’s leaders had received no notice ahead of the cuts and no communication about whether the Trump administration would ever renew their grant. “There was zero plan, except causing pain,” said one U.N. official. “And that is not forgivable.”
Even before the second Trump administration, funding shortfalls in recent years had forced the organization to drop rations by around 20% to 40% throughout the camp. To adjust for the long term, WFP was planning to reform its model in Kenya to make sure the small minority of people with some income, like small-business owners, didn’t receive food.
Thousands of Refugee Families in Northwest Kenya Starved After USAID Funding Cuts
In August, food rations were cut to historic lows. Almost half the Kakuma camp got nothing at all.
Note: Rations and population sizes represent an Aug. 11 food distribution in Kakuma. ProPublica extrapolated the 100% ration amounts from the 20% ration. Amounts vary between distributions. Source: Documents obtained by ProPublica. Chris Alcantara/ProPublica
But this year, WFP’s leaders were forced to stretch their remaining supplies from last year. They made the drastic decision to cut rations to their lowest in Kakuma’s history. They also reduced distributions to once every other month instead of monthly.
In August, the handouts would become even more austere, as WFP rushed to prioritize families based on need. They determined only half the population would receive food. Most people learned which half they were in from a number stamped on the back of their ration card.
Across the world in Washington, the fate of places like Kakuma was in the hands of a select few political appointees, including Thornton, who was named the agency’s deputy chief of staff on March 18. Thornton first worked beneath Peter Marocco, Rubio’s head of foreign assistance, and later under Jeremy Lewin, initially an Elon Musk hire. Besides Rubio, none of them were subject to Senate confirmation.
As pleas poured in from government officials in Washington and abroad to restart aid operations in Africa, including WFP in Kenya, the appointees often failed to act, records and interviews show.
On March 18, USAID’s political leadership invited career government aid officials from the agency’s major bureaus to pitch the handful of programs they thought were most critical. It was the only time the agency’s Africa bureau had an opportunity to make a full-throated case for its development programs across the continent. They had just 45 minutes to do it.
In the room was Thornton, a member of the Ben Franklin Fellowship, an organization that champions “the primacy of American sovereignty.” Thornton said in podcast appearances that his campaign against President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal workers introduced him to a government bureaucracy “that is not reflective of the values of the people that it serves” and requires “fear and accountability” to come to heel, Mother Jones reported.
As part of the meeting, Brian Frantz, acting head of USAID’s Africa bureau and a diplomat with nearly 25 years of experience, pitched Kenya as an important trade and national security partner. At one point when discussing another country, Frantz mentioned the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, using the acronym TDA. Thornton perked up, according to two attendees. Then he asked: Was TDA a reference to the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua?
The USAID officials were stunned. “That was the one thing he said in that meeting,” one of the attendees recalled. “There was just zero interest in the subject matter.”
In a blistering memo circulated around the agency before he was laid off in late summer, Frantz upbraided political leaders. He detailed how they had prevented lifesaving programs from coming back online by refusing to pay for services already rendered and restricting access to USAID’s payment systems. He said they had frequently changed the process for how to appeal program terminations, burying their subordinates in paperwork for months.
“We were given make-work to keep us spinning our wheels,” another former official recalled.
Months before the last-ditch appeal at the Tribe dinner, embassy staff in Nairobi had also tried unsuccessfully to get funding restored to WFP. In March, Marc Dillard, the acting U.S. ambassador, went to Kakuma for a tour of the hospital where Sunday and Santina would later check in.
After seeing the stakes firsthand, Dillard signed a series of cables to Washington documenting the chaos and death in Kakuma and other camps caused by the sudden funding cuts to WFP. On May 6, the embassy wrote that declining food assistance had “already contributed to several deaths and could result in escalating instability in Kenya.”
At one point, a group of teenagers and young men in Kakuma splintered off from a protest and set fire to WFP’s tents. Kenyan police responded by shooting at them, wounding at least two, including a teenager who was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the head. Ordinarily considered among the most peaceful refugee camps in Africa, Kakuma went into lockdown. Aid workers hid inside their compounds.
Sexual assault, violent protests and other crimes would only increase without aid, Kenyan government officials warned the embassy, according to another cable. They predicted the cuts could destabilize one of America’s closest allies in Africa, “undermining Kenyan willingness to host thousands of refugees, many of whom would likely otherwise join the illegal migration flows bound for Europe and the United States.”
At a roadside staging area, some of those fleeing Kakuma hired smugglers to take them the 70 miles to the South Sudan border — the same country where they had escaped violence. As many as two dozen women, children and babies contorted inside cars with their belongings piled on the roof. “It’s hunger that chased us,” one woman said through the cracked window of a car about to depart. “It’s hunger that’s making us leave.”
In mid-May, USAID’s humanitarian assistance bureau in Washington delivered a memo again requesting the political appointees approve funding for WFP Kenya. “Without this additional assistance,” the appeal stated, “the WFP-provided food rations will reduce from normal levels of 60% to 20%, putting nearly 1 million people at risk of starvation and death and likely triggering additional insecurity within the refugee camps.”
Records show seven advisers in the chain of command signed off on more funding for WFP in Kenya. When the request got to Thornton, who by then had been promoted to USAID’s chief of staff, he did not. No money went through at that time. “Thornton became a real road block,” a former USAID official said.
Thornton did not respond to a request for comment. In response to questions about episodes like this, the senior State Department official said the Office of Management and Budget, not USAID or the State Department, has ultimate authority to approve new foreign aid money. They said they worked closely with OMB to review all of the funding requests. “In order to make an obligation like that,” the official said, “you need to have apportioned funds from OMB.”
When ProPublica asked about the funding delays and the State Department’s explanation, OMB’s communications director Rachel Cauley said in an email, “That’s absolutely false. And that’s not even how this process works.” She did not clarify what was false.
Santina declined rapidly in the days after arriving at the clinic. Hospital staff tried everything. They gave her IV fluids, put her on oxygen support and updated the diagnosis to marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition where the body starts to eat itself. Pneumonia gripped her lungs. Santina’s color faded and she struggled to breathe. She became unresponsive to pain.
Cradling her baby, Sunday thought about her oldest daughter back at home. Two-year-old Grace wore a little bell around her ankle because she was prone to wandering off. Sunday thought: What will Grace eat today? Tomorrow? Will she end up here too?
Just after 5 a.m. on July 21, hospital staff pronounced Santina dead.
A doctor and nutrition specialist with the International Rescue Committee said Santina almost certainly would have survived if she weren’t malnourished. To Lotunya, the cause was clear: After starving for weeks, his wife could no longer breastfeed, which is why Santina had become so tiny and weak. “That is why she died,” he said.
Santina was transferred to the hospital’s morgue, a squat concrete building at the edge of the compound. Lotunya borrowed $10 to bury his daughter in Kakuma’s cemetery, just on the other side of the hospital fence.
Once proud to be the mother she’d grown up missing, shame washed over Sunday. “I felt I wasn’t mother enough,” she said later, nearly in a whisper.
In early August, Sunday came home after helping to harvest the sallow greens a neighbor was growing out of dry, cracked earth. In exchange, they had given her a few handfuls of the vegetable wrapped in fabric. It was the family’s only food.
The August food distribution was supposed to come any day; the camp was tense. WFP’s new rankings determined that only half of Kakuma would receive food, a decision most refugees deeply opposed. Lotunya, Sunday and Grace were among those who would get nothing.
Someone had stolen the roof off the family’s single-room mud house, so Lotunya had used tarp and cardboard for a makeshift cover, which was disintegrating in the hot sun. Grace played on the dirt patio, the bell on her ankle chiming as she moved between her parents, clinging to their legs and crawling into their laps.
Doting on her, they said, was the only way to cope with losing Santina. They have just one picture of their youngest child: a fuzzy, black-and-white image on the family’s refugee registration. “But,” Sunday said, looking at her oldest daughter asleep on Lotunya’s shoulder, “I have Grace.”
In late September, the State Department signed an extension to WFP’s Kenya operation. This year, the U.S. gave $66 million, which is 40% less than it received last year and, critically, the funds arrived nine months into the year.
WFP has told refugees it plans to provide food through at least March. Even then, most families are set to receive between one-fifth and three-fifths of the recommended minimum daily calories.
Sunday, Lotunya and Grace would each get the equivalent of 420 calories a day.
This story was originally published by ProPublica.Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license.The original has additional imagery which is worth checking out as well.
On the one-month anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, a group of his appointed aides gathered to celebrate.
For four weeks, they had been working overtime to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, freezing thousands of programs, including ones that provided food, water and medicine around the world. They’d culled USAID’s staff and abandoned its former headquarters in the stately Ronald Reagan Building, shunting the remnants of the agency to what was once an overflow space in a glass-walled commercial office above Nordstrom Rack and a bank.
There, the crew of newly minted political figures told the office manager to create a moat of 90 empty desks around them so no one could hear them talk. They ignored questions and advice from career staff with decades of experience in the field.
Despite the steps to insulate themselves, dire warnings poured in from diplomats and government experts around the world. The cuts would cost countless lives, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the other Trump officials were told repeatedly. The team of aides pressed on, galvanized by two men who did little to hide their disdain for the agency: first Peter Marocco, a blunt-spoken Marine veteran, and then 28-year-old Jeremy Lewin, who, despite having no government or aid experience, often personally decided which programs should be axed.
By the third week in February, they were on track to wipe out 90% of USAID’s work. Created in 1961 to foster global stability and help advance American interests, USAID was the largest humanitarian donor in the world. In just a month’s time, the small band of appointees had set in motion its destruction.
In a corner conference room, it was time to party. They traded congratulatory speeches and cut into a sheet cake.
Days later, on a remote patch of land in South Sudan, a 38-year-old man named Tor Top gathered with his neighbors outside the local health clinic. Surrounded by floodwaters, their hamlet of thatch and mud homes had been battling a massive outbreak of cholera, a deadly disease spread by poor sanitation. Around the country, it had infected 36,000 people in three months, killing more than 600, many of them babies. Top’s family lived in the epicenter.
The clinic, one of 12 in the area run by the Christian, Maryland-based humanitarian organization World Relief and funded by USAID, provided a key weapon in the fight: IV bags to stave off dehydration and death. The bags cost just 62 cents each, and in three months, the clinics had helped save more than 500 people.
Now, Top, who lived with his wife, children and mother in a one-room house less than 50 feet from the clinic, listened as World Relief staff shared grim news: The Trump administration had stopped USAID’s funding to World Relief. Their clinic, their lifeline, was closing.
Top’s usual gentle demeanor broke down. Why would the U.S. just cut off their medical care in the middle of a deadly outbreak?
By now the broad story of USAID’s ruin has been widely told: The decree handed down by Trump; Elon Musk, who led the new Department of Government Efficiency; and Russell Vought, who holds the purse strings for the administration as the head of the Office of Management and Budget, to scuttle the agency and undo decades of humanitarian work in the name of austerity. Publicly, the administration tried to temper international backlash by promising to keep or restore critical lifesaving programs.
But that promise was not kept. Instead, a cast of Trump’s lesser-known political appointees and DOGE operatives cut programs in ways that guaranteed widespread harm and death in some of the world’s most desperate situations, according to an examination by ProPublica based on previously unreported episodes inside the government as well on-the-ground reporting in South Sudan. In some cases, they abandoned vital operations by clicking through a spreadsheet or ignoring requests in their inboxes.
The abrupt moves left aid workers and communities with no time to find other sources of funding, food or medicine. Borrowing from a phrase used to describe the U.S.’ overwhelming military campaign during the Iraq War, political appointee Tim Meisburger told senior USAID staff that the strategy was “shock and awe.” (Meisburger declined to comment.)
Tibor Nagy, a veteran diplomat who was Trump’s acting undersecretary of state for management until April, has long been a critic of the vast networks of nonprofit organizations funded by American taxpayers. But he told ProPublica the administration never cared to differentiate between the “fluff” and vital humanitarian programs. “It was the most harebrained operation I’d seen in my 38 years with the U.S. government,” Nagy said, referring to the methods used this year. “Who knows how much damage was done.”
In public statements and congressional testimony, Rubio has repeatedly insisted that no one died because of cuts to U.S. foreign aid and that his staff had reinstated lifesaving operations. But ProPublica found that those claims were a charade: Lifesaving programs remained on the books, but the flow of money didn’t restart for months, if at all. Lewin blocked funding requests for programs like tuberculosis treatment in Tajikistan and emergency earthquake response in Myanmar, records show.
This meant that dozens of supposedly “active” operations were dormant throughout most of the year. Rubio’s advisers let other critical programs, which typically run on one-year grants, expire without renewing them.
Few places were hit harder than South Sudan, the youngest and poorest country in the world, as well as one of the most dependent on American aid.
After Trump’s inauguration, career USAID and State Department staff spent months warning top officials that the funding cuts would exacerbate a historic cholera epidemic ripping through the country. They needed less than $20 million to fund lifesaving health programs, including cholera response efforts, for three months at the beginning of the year — an eighth of what Trump recently approved to buy private jets for one cabinet secretary and just 3% of USAID’s budget in South Sudan last year. But Rubio, Marocco and Lewin failed to heed their own agencies’ assessments, according to internal records and interviews.
As a result, people in South Sudan died.
By denying and delaying those funds for months, Trump’s appointees incapacitated the fragile nation’s emergency response systems at the very moment when doctors and aid workers were scrambling to contain cholera’s spread. “We had to start rationing lifesaving interventions,” said Lanre Williams-Ayedun, the senior vice president of international programs for World Relief. “To have something like this happen in a place like this, where there aren’t mechanisms for backup, just means people are going to die.”
Villages and towns that had been reining in the outbreak suddenly lost essential services. Cholera came roaring back. “The trend was going down,” said a former U.S. official. “When we stopped the funding, it just surged.”
This summer, ProPublica journalists hiked and boated across Rubkona County, the epicenter of South Sudan’s outbreak and home to the country’s largest refugee camp, to interview families that the U.S. cut off from help. We collected medical files, diaries, meeting notes and photographs documenting cholera’s devastation after essential services stopped.
ProPublica also interviewed more than 100 government and aid officials and reviewed enormous caches of previously unreported memos, correspondence and other documents from inside the Trump administration. Many were granted anonymity due to fears of reprisal.
In response to a detailed list of questions, a senior State Department official said fast, drastic changes to foreign aid were necessary to reform a “calcified system.” The world, especially U.S. interests, will be better for it in the long run, the official said, despite “some disruptions in the short term.”
The official also said that Rubio was the final decision-maker for all aid programs. They also contended that they had a limited budget to work with, “which required some tradeoffs on what programs to continue,” saying OMB has ultimate control over new humanitarian funds.
The official maintained that nobody died as a result of the funding cuts. “That’s a disgusting framing,” the official said. “There are people who are dying in horrible situations all around the world, all of the time.”
“Who is responsible for the suffering of the people of South Sudan?” the official added. “The South Sudanese [government leaders] who take their oil revenues and buy private jets and fancy watches and don’t see to their own people? Or the United States? Are we responsible for every poor person all around the world?”
Officially, the death count in South Sudan is nearly 1,600, making it the worst cholera epidemic in the country’s history. But that toll is a dramatic undercount. ProPublica found newly dug, unmarked graves alongside roads and in backyards. In one town, community leaders showed reporters an informal cemetery with at least three dozen people who they said did not make it to medical facilities in time.
Tor Top’s mother, Nyarietna, was one of the uncounted. In March, the clinic doors had been padlocked for two weeks when she developed vomiting and diarrhea. Top bundled her into a rented canoe and began paddling toward the nearest hospital, eight hours away. Less than halfway into the journey, long after they had stopped reassuring one another that she would be OK, Nyarietna died.
Top turned the canoe around and made his way back home, where he buried his mom in their backyard. Now he alone tends the small garden where she grew corn and okra for their family. “If there was medicine here,” he said later, “maybe her life would have been saved.”
Aid to South Sudan
For years, Sudan’s Arab-led central government waged a campaign of brutal violence against its Christian minority in the south. Their persecution became a cause celebre of the American Evangelical movement, which convinced President George W. Bush’s administration to help broker a peace agreement that led to independence 15 years ago. Since then, the U.S. has given the fledgling nation nearly $10 billion in aid, according to federal data. That money subsidized virtually every corner of the health care system, among other institutions.
Still, South Sudan remains undeveloped. Political instability, corruption and dysfunction are rampant. The transitional government hasn’t paid public employees’ salaries for most of the last two years. U.S. officials had long been on alert to South Sudanese aid workers siphoning resources. Deadly political violence — left over from the civil war and threatening a new one — besets much of the country.
Well before Trump took office this year, the international community had broadly agreed that it was necessary to end the nation’s dependence on foreign aid, and U.S. officials were working on strategies to force its leaders to take responsibility for its citizens.
Some of the most vulnerable among them live in Rubkona County, an oil and cattle hub larger than Rhode Island near Sudan’s border. There, a refugee camp formed in 2014 during the nation’s civil war when thousands of people fled behind a United Nations peacekeeping mission to escape a massacre in the nearby town of Bentiu. As South Sudan’s political turmoil continued to spiral, tens of thousands more fled to the camp. In 2020, Rubkona was hit by a series of catastrophic floods that submerged the majority of the county. Generations of people are now essentially trapped there with nowhere else to go.
Previously, USAID gave the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration $36 million for work in South Sudan, which included keeping the Bentiu camp habitable and making critical repairs to the dikes that surround the camp and hold back the rising floodwaters. The group maintained the drainage system and paid people to pick up garbage and clean the latrines — essentially performing sanitation services for 110,000 people.
Despite those efforts, cholera began spreading late last year as new refugees poured in from neighboring Sudan. Rubkona County quickly became the outbreak’s epicenter. In a matter of days, hundreds of infections turned to thousands and the death toll mounted. U.S.-funded organizations raced to set up treatment units in the camp and surrounding communities.
The situation was dire, and people had few viable options to leave Bentiu, U.S. Ambassador Michael Adler reported back to Washington after USAID staff visited the camp to assess the outbreak in early December. The U.S.-funded cholera clinics and other programs were necessary given the “explosivity” of the illness’ spread, he wrote.
It was the kind of routine crisis response that USAID was renowned for handling. The last cholera outbreak in Rubkona, in 2022, lasted seven months, and government statistics say that just one person died while about 420 were sickened. An aggressive sanitation campaign, largely funded by the U.S., was crucial to containing the disease.
Now faced with a new outbreak, the embassy’s staff rushed to get the aid organizations in Rubkona more money, according to the organizations and former officials. By early January, humanitarians were preparing to expand operations. World Relief planned to expand its mobile clinics, Williams-Ayedun said. USAID told Solidarités International, which repaired water pipes, provided sanitation services and distributed soap, to aggressively spend the money it had to combat cholera, with the understanding that the agency would immediately review a proposal for more funds, according to two former officials. An additional $30 million for the U.N.’s migration office — which planned to use the money to continue maintaining the refugee camps — was already committed.
Then Trump took office, signing an executive order on day one to freeze all foreign aid pending a review of whether it aligned with the administration’s stated values.
It wasn’t true. Behind the scenes, Marocco and his lieutenants repeatedly obstructed USAID’s Africa, humanitarian aid and global health bureaus from restarting programs critical for responding to disease outbreaks, according to interviews and memos obtained by ProPublica. The money aid organizations in South Sudan were expecting by February didn’t come. Meanwhile, the appointees suspended nearly all of USAID’s staff, and those remaining said their bosses blocked payments even for approved programs.
Marocco was meant to be “the destroyer, and then someone else would come in to rebuild,” one former official said a senior political appointee had told her. “I guess the one thing happened, but not the other.” (Marocco did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
The cuts were so frenetic that, for a brief time, the U.S. government stopped paying for the fuel that ran the electricity for the American embassy in Juba, including the security compound, just as violence was surging throughout South Sudan, according to former senior officials.
In response to questions about the episode in Juba, the senior State Department official denied it was a mistake or that Rubio’s review wasn’t careful. “Going back and looking at things again doesn’t mean that you’ve made a mistake,” the senior official said.
At one point in February, Marocco tried ordering the immediate return of foreign service officers stationed abroad. Several senior USAID officials protested, citing safety and logistical concerns for staff in war zones. During one meeting that month, Lewin responded, “You don’t want to get to know the lobsters. Just throw them in the pot,” according to an attendee and meeting notes.
Lewin joined the government via Musk’s DOGE and later took over for Marocco. He seldom came to the USAID office or met with his own staff experts, officials said. Publicly, he called the agency an “unaccountable independent institution” where secrets leak so quickly “we have to hand-walk memos around like we’re in the ’40s.”
In the weeks that followed, DOGE and Trump appointees forbade those who remained at USAID from communicating with aid groups and discouraged discussion internally, telling staff abroad not to approach ambassadors to advocate for programs, emails show.
Senior staffers said they were prohibited from meeting with congressional delegations to share basic information, which was critical to Congress’ oversight capabilities. The government’s health experts feared that taking any action to save lives could be a fireable offense.
Still, some spoke out.
“The consequences on lives lost and funding squandered will grow exponentially and irreversibly in many cases,” Nicholas Enrich, then an acting assistant administrator at USAID, warned in a Feb. 8 email to agency leaders, including Joel Borkert, the chief of staff, and Meisburger, who led the humanitarian affairs bureau. They did not respond to his plea, and Enrich was later put on administrative leave.
Crucially, even when USAID’s new bosses did approve organizations to resume lifesaving work, they at times denied requests for the money that would allow them to do so, internal records show. Other proposals to fund existing grants or reverse terminations languished in limbo.
The official responding on behalf of the State Department said Trump’s OMB ultimately has more control over approving new grants and extensions, but that it was never the administration’s intention to keep all of the lifesaving programs forever.
When ProPublica asked about the funding delays and the State Department’s explanation, OMB communications director Rachel Cauley said in an email, “That’s absolutely false. And that’s not even how this process works.” She did not clarify what was false, and the State Department did not address when Lewin sought funds from OMB for South Sudan’s cholera response.
In early February, embassy staff in South Sudan provided Adler, the ambassador, with a list of the most critical operations there, warning that funds had not been released and lifesaving programs would cease when their money ran out.
A career foreign service officer appointed to his post by the Biden administration, Adler had long been critical of the government of South Sudan for ongoing violence and deserting its own people, according to embassy cables and interviews with people familiar with his thinking.
Still, early on he appeared to recognize that without U.S. intervention, the most vulnerable people in the country did not stand a chance against cholera. In a Feb. 14 memo addressed to the leadership of the State Department’s Africa bureau, Adler asked the administration to release money to keep people alive.
“Lifesaving medicine and medical care, as well as emergency water and sanitation services, play a critical role in controlling disease outbreaks,” the embassy wrote, “notably a severe cholera outbreak in South Sudan’s border regions hosting the greatest number of refugees.”
Adler declined to meet with ProPublica in South Sudan and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.
Death by Spreadsheet
As humanitarian groups racked up unpaid bills, they began to file lawsuits challenging the foreign aid freeze. A federal judge ordered the administration to reimburse the organizations. But on Feb. 26, the Supreme Court temporarily paused the lower court’s order.
In a meeting with senior agency staff the next day, Lewin, who at that time was not yet in charge of USAID programs, indicated that he interpreted the recent legal decisions as a potential license to dispense with one of the key review processes for unfreezing operations, according to two attendees and meeting notes. One of those attendees took Lewin’s remarks to mean that “he had no intention to review contracts or implement lifesaving programs.”
In response, the senior State Department official told ProPublica, “No one meant that or said that.”
The next night, a Friday, staff at the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, the division of USAID that dealt with emergencies and ran nearly all of the programs in South Sudan, were working late, scrambling to keep emergency programs operational. Suddenly, they noticed Borkert making changes to a key spreadsheet.
To create the spreadsheet, DOGE had sidestepped career staff, pulling information from databases made for project management. It was so rudimentary that it was often impossible to tell what a program did from descriptions as vague as “extension No. 4” or “allocation of funds,” according to people who saw the spreadsheet.
Rubio and his aides had already terminated hundreds of programs in preceding days. Staff were bracing for another round of cuts, but many of the line items remaining in the file were for programs that provided food, clean water or essential medicines.
Veteran USAID officials watched as Borkert scrolled down the spreadsheet, turning rows red, yellow or green every few seconds, never asking a single question. Realizing the red programs were slated to be cut, they frantically started editing descriptions so that Borkert would at least know what those programs did. Within minutes, he’d flagged dozens of them for termination. (Borkert declined to comment.)
A senior staff member in the group raced upstairs and begged Borkert to reinstate them, according to two officials familiar with the episode. He relented on several. But the next day, Marocco and Lewin told the group they’d kept far too many programs, emails show. Lewin ordered 151 additional awards terminated, writing that he would “have strong objections to these awards being turned on.” Marocco followed up by email at 11:30 p.m. saying the reactivations were “far too broad,” indicating several more line numbers and writing “sound like terminations,” next to them, ultimately canceling even more programs.
On March 10, Rubio announced on X that the review was over. In response to lawsuits, Trump officials told the courts that the review was a careful examination of USAID’s operations.
More than 5,000 programs had been canceled, and fewer than 1,000 remained — a figure that many officials told ProPublica was arbitrary but binding. In reality, the administration still wasn’t releasing money and many of the surviving programs had no funds, according to interviews with humanitarian groups and government officials, as well as memos and spreadsheets documenting those decisions.
When asked about the current status of the 1,000, the senior State Department official criticized USAID’s former vetting procedures and said the administration is in the process of creating new programs.
Soon after the review ended, the cholera response in South Sudan came crashing down.
“God Is With Us”
Rebecca Nyariaka and Koang Kai were shrouded in grief throughout the upheaval in Washington. Their only child, 4-year-old son Geer, had been one of the first victims when cholera inundated the Bentiu camp in December.
The couple met in secondary school at a refugee camp in Kenya and got married after they’d both returned to their homeland in 2013. After violence broke out, they fled to Bentiu, finding occasional jobs working with health clinics.
Now, in early March, they prodded one another to stay hopeful: 28-year-old Nyariaka was once again pregnant.
In the refugee camp, the couple could see the signs of the funding cuts everywhere. Uncollected garbage barricaded the drainage ditches that encased their neighborhood. Human waste spilled out of the overflowing communal latrines near Nyariaka’s house and into the fetid water filling the culverts. Toilets crawling with rats, maggots and flies became so noxious that neighbors began defecating on the surrounding dirt roads. The stench was overwhelming. “Those who washed the latrines have gone,” Kai said. “And we are left here all alone.”
The U.N.’s new sanitation contract had been committed before Trump took office, but it hadn’t received any money since last year. On March 12, USAID staff in the region sent Washington field notes about the conditions in the camp, where health services faced “closure or severe cutbacks” because of the funding shortfall. Officials at the organization pleaded behind the scenes as well. They repeatedly called and met with embassy leaders to request help, to no avail. “What we have now is survival of the fittest,” one U.N. official told ProPublica.
WhenNyariaka gave birth to a healthy baby boy, cholera was rampant throughout the camp. Neighbors were dying around them, and Kai was worried for his wife and new baby. “When cholera enters your home, you know the chances of survival are very low. Very few people survive it,” he said later.
Nyariaka named the baby Kuothethin, “God is with us.” In her first days back from the hospital, her body still healing, the new mom used the bathroom frequently, teetering back and forth to the overflowing latrines close to her house. She soon developed violent vomiting and diarrhea, the hallmark symptoms of cholera.
Kai, tall and muscular, picked her up in his arms and raced to the camp hospital, but it was too late. Nyariaka died just after they arrived.
She had been nowhere except her house and the latrines since coming home from the hospital, Kai said. He’s certain the toilets are to blame for her death. Depressed and unable to care for their newborn, he sent the baby across the floodwaters to live with his mother-in-law on another side of the state.
Kai and Nyariaka had been best friends for years before they started dating, their lives intertwined for nearly two decades. “Her whole way of life was good. She loved our children and cared for them,” Kai said. “I am heartbroken.”
As the disease ripped through the camp, more services shut down, including transportation for the dead. Kai’s neighbor, John Gai, lost his father to cholera. Gai had to take him to the cemetery himself in a wheelbarrow, his father’s head bobbing at his knees. “Nobody should have to carry a dead body among the living,” Gai said.
“Gross Neglect”
On March 28, Rubio notified Congress that he was officially shuttering most USAID operations and transferring programs that survived his review, including several in South Sudan, to the State Department.
Staffers spent the next weeks repeatedly appealing to Lewin — who by then had replaced Marocco as Rubio’s top foreign aid official — for authority to perform the mundane tasks needed to keep the programs operating. In late April, the agency’s humanitarian bureau submitted a blanket request to fund grants that Lewin had already approved. Lewin refused, records show, and the humanitarian bureau had to submit country-specific proposals for consideration. That process dragged on for months.
In June, just before USAID was shut down for good, Lewin finally approved some of the funding the staff had advocated for. But by then it was too late. The officials had run out of time to transfer money already appropriated by Congress to remaining programs.
On June 26, R. Clark Pearson, a supervisory contracting officer at USAID, sent a scathing email to USAID offices around the world in response to an email from the top procurement officer for the agency listing the hundreds of programs that were meant to be active. He said there was no one who could manage the awards, which he called “gross neglect on an astonishing level.”
“In a time of unimaginable hubris, gross incompetence and failures of leadership across the Agency, this has to be one of the most delusional emails I have seen to date,” Pearson wrote. “Lives depend on these awards and for the [U.S. government] to simply not manage them because of an arbitrary deadline is inexcusable.”
That same day, a senior humanitarian adviser informed Adler that payment extensions for several programs, with the exception of food aid, weren’t processed because the “approval was received late.”
In September, the Supreme Court issued another emergency ruling that let the administration withhold nearly $4 billion that Congress earmarked for foreign aid.
Later that month, OMB released some new foreign aid funds. That’s when World Relief finally began to receive funding, allowing the clinic in Tor Top’s community to reopen, even though the administration claimed the program had been “active” for almost seven months.
The U.N.’s migration program has not received a new South Sudan grant. The organization will run out of money for dike maintenance in Bentiu by February, after months of some of the most severe flooding in years.
A spokesperson for the U.N.’s migration program said the organization was still in discussion with the State Department and “continues to engage with donors about the critical humanitarian needs in South Sudan.”
The Uncounted
During the first months of the cholera outbreak, a mobile health team run by the International Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that works in crisis zones around the world, visited Nyajime Duop’s remote village on the edges of Rubkona County twice weekly. The team brought soap and transported sick people to IRC’s nearby clinic for care.
At 27, Duop’s youthful face belied a life marked by war and poverty. She had arrived just a few months earlier, fleeing violence in Khartoum, Sudan, with an infant and toddler in tow, when Trump officials terminated IRC’s $5.5 million grant.
The IRC suspended its operations in the village in the spring. When Duop’s 1-year-old baby, Nyagoa, fell ill with cholera in July, on a day IRC would have visited, there was no one to help her. By the morning, Nyagoa was unconscious. She died that day, the Fourth of July.
Cholera has spread to nearly every corner of South Sudan, infected at least 100,000 people and killed 1,600, though cases began abating this fall. The true death toll is impossible to know, in part because clinics that would have cared for people and counted the dead were shuttered. The Trump administration also cut funding to the World Health Organization, which helped the South Sudanese government gather accurate data on the outbreak.
In a pasture a short walk from IRC’s clinic, ProPublica found at least three dozen mounds covered in sticks — the makeshift graves, village leaders said, of those who died of cholera before reaching the clinic. The clinic’s security guard told reporters he saw one man collapse and die just yards from the front gate.
“There are many more cases,” said Kray Ndong, then acting minister of health for the area, “many more deaths.”
The Trump administration recently announced a new era of foreign aid, where the U.S. will prioritize “trade over aid.” South Sudan, with a gross domestic product one-tenth the size of Vermont’s, has little to offer.
“The administration says they are committed to humanitarian needs,” one aid official in South Sudan said. “But we don’t know what that means, only that it will be transactional.”
First, let’s dispense with the theater: the question of whether DOGE “still exists” as a formal entity completely misses the point. The always-misleadingly-named “Department of Government Efficiency” was never really about efficiency. It was Elon Musk’s excuse to gain access to the federal government’s fundamental systems and wreak havoc, Twitter-style—smashing anything that got in his way, enriching his allies, and dismissing any consequences with a wave of his hand.
The “headline” from a recent Reuters piece is the claim that DOGE has been disbanded eight months before its scheduled demise. Except that appears not to be true. The White House later disputed this story:
The spokesperson, in response to written questions, confirmed DOGE still exists as a temporary organization within the U.S. DOGE Service, and that Amy Gleason remains the acting administrator of USDS.
But, of course, most of this is just semantics, just as the “DOGE” name has always been semantics as well. The idea was, from the very beginning, a smash-and-grab job, in which Elon would get access to the fundamental (traditionally highly guarded) systems of the US government and wreak havoc, Twitter-style, in which anything he and his suck-up compatriots didn’t understand would be deemed “bad” and anything that helped enrich him and his friends would be deemed “good,” and any consequences (including destroying life-saving programs around the globe) would be dismissed with the wave of a hand, and no culpability.
“DOGE” took over a non-temporary organization: the previously highly effective US Digital Services group, and like a parasite, took over its host by expelling all of those who did good work. It will remain.
“That’s absolutely false,” one USDA source says of reporting that DOGE has disbanded. “They are in fact burrowed into the agencies like ticks.”
Wired’s report has details on a bunch of DOGE bros with little-to-no relevant experience who are continuing the DOGE grift while employed throughout the federal government, detailing the new (and constantly changing) set of job titles of a bunch of the DOGE crew, almost all of which they seem wholly unqualified for.
But the bigger story may be now that they’re scattered across the bureaucracy without Elon as their shield, some of these DOGE operatives are starting to realize they might actually face legal consequences for the very real and very serious damage they caused. A recent Politico report noted that the younger members of the crew are getting genuinely worried about how this ends:
The fate of their shared endeavor was now in deep jeopardy, and for the youngest members of the DOGE operation the risk seemed personal. Musk had not been just their visionary leader. For them, he was their protector: the man who had a direct line to Trump, who they believed could pick up the phone and secure a presidential pardon if the worst came. Without his presence in Washington, they were suddenly exposed.
As the sun fell on downtown Washington, the displaced dozen joined up with fellow DOGE staffers atop the nine-story GSA building, armed with beer, pretzels and La Croix, and prepared for something akin to a wake. Word spread in group chats on Signal, and by 9 p.m. the rooftop area was full of dozens of staffers, some of whom had already left DOGE.
Amid the group photos and toasts, a senior DOGE figure named Donald Park tried to reassure his colleagues that they were still “brothers in arms” and that Musk would continue to protect them, according to three people who attended the gathering.Other DOGE leaders were less sanguine. “Guys, seriously,” one warned, “get your own lawyer if you need it. Elon’s great, but you need to watch your own back.”
The question of whether or not DOGE still exists completely misses the point. This team of overconfident know-nothings created real damage not just to the institution of the federal government, but to many essential projects around the globe. And they will never, ever, try to take responsibility for their ignorant smashing of the system.
Elon Musk, least of all. In recent interviews, he’s still rejecting the claims that the projects he gleefully cut resulted in any real world harm:
In an interview with entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath on hisWTF Ispodcast, Musk denied that DOGE’s sweeping cost-cutting efforts and its mandate totarget federal “waste”included “stopping essential payments to needy people” in Africa.
“Fraudsters necessarily will come up with a very sympathetic argument. They’re not going to say, ‘Give us the money for fraud,’” Musk said. “They’re going to try to make these sympathetic-sounding arguments that are false.
“It’s going to be like the Save the Baby Pandas NGO, which is like, who doesn’t want to save the baby pandas? They’re adorable. But then it turns out no pandas are being saved in this thing, it’s just corruption, essentially.
“And you’re like, ‘Well, can you send us a picture of the panda?’ They’re like, ‘No.’ OK. Well, how do we know it’s going to the pandas?”
This answer deserves calling out specifically what Musk is doing here: he’s dismissing programs that distribute HIV medications, prevent malaria deaths, and provide tuberculosis treatment as if they were all hypothetical panda scams. These aren’t abstract NGOs of questionable provenance. These are well-established US government programs, that were run through USAID, with decades of documented outcomes, rigorous monitoring, and yes, those Inspectors General that Trump systematically fired to clear the way for DOGE’s rampage.
Musk’s condescending little fable about demanding photos of pandas would be merely insufferable if he were actually talking about pandas. But he’s not. He’s talking about programs where we don’t need to guess whether they work—we have the data. We know how many people received antiretroviral therapy. We know how many children were vaccinated. We know the mortality rates before and after these interventions. The “picture of the panda,” in this case, is six hundred thousand excess deaths since these programs were gutted. There’s your fucking picture, Elon.
What’s quite clear now is that DOGE did nothing to reduce government inefficiency. If anything, it created much greater inefficiency by forcing the federal government to try to reestablish essential programs (and rehire haphazardly fired experts) in a mad dash to keep certain aspects of the government from completely falling over. And that’s not to mention all the deaths. As Atul Gawande noted in the New Yorker:
We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed “public man-made death,” which, he observed, has been perhaps the most overlooked cause of mortality in the last century. Brooke Nichols, the Boston University epidemiologist and mathematical modeller, has maintained a respectedtracker of current impact. The model is conservative, assuming, for example, that the State Department will fully sustainthe programs that remain. As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.
The toll is appalling and will continue to grow. But these losses will be harder to see than those of war. For one, they unfold slowly. When H.I.V. or tuberculosis goes untested, unprevented, or inadequately treated, months or years can pass before a person dies. The same is true for deaths from vaccine-preventable illnesses. Another difficulty is that the deaths are scattered. Suppose the sudden withdrawal of aid raises a country’s under-five death rate from three per cent to four per cent. That would be a one-third increase in deaths, but hard to appreciate simply by looking around.
The real tragedy here is that Elon Musk gets to sit in a podcast studio and spin cute parables about imaginary panda fraud while actual children die from diseases we know how to prevent. The obscenity of comparing tuberculosis programs and HIV treatment to a hypothetical panda scam is breathtaking, even if it is totally predictable. This is what happens when you let tech billionaires play government efficiency expert: they’re perfectly comfortable with mass death as long as they can frame it as fighting “waste.” Six hundred thousand people—two-thirds of them children—aren’t hypothetical. They’re not pandas. They’re dead.
So no, the question isn’t whether DOGE “still exists” as an organizational chart entry. The question is whether anyone will be held accountable for six hundred thousand deaths and the systematic dismantling of programs that took decades to build. Those DOGE members nervously telling each other to “get your own lawyer”? They should be.
Remember back in February when the DOJ told a court that, despite multiple public statements from both Elon Musk and Donald Trump to the contrary, Elon Musk was not associated one bit with DOGE and therefore should not be subject to litigation regarding DOGE’s wildly illegal actions? And remember how lots of people just kinda pretended this was fine and normal?
Well, in the ruling that Cathy Gellis just wrote about, the judge clearly recognizes the reality that Elon Musk absolutely was DOGE:
Musk, assisted by his DOGE subordinates, “continued to exercise control over USAID systems . . . to systematically block access to all systems by USAID personnel.”
Later, the judge makes it clear that the plaintiffs alleged—plausibly, despite the DOJ’s spin—that Musk ran DOGE, by his own public admissions. The judge is responding to the DOJ’s claim that Musk isn’t subject to the Appointments Clause because he had no real authority in his role. As the judge notes, nobody who wasn’t born yesterday would believe this:
This argument, however, fails to account for Plaintiffs’ allegations which strongly support the inference that Musk directed the actions to shut down USAID without authorization from any USAID official, including the closure of USAID headquarters and the removal of the USAID website, between January 31, 2025 and February 2, 2025. Consistent with its analysis in Does 1, 771 F. Supp. 3d at 668-69, such an inference is supported by the allegations in the Second Amended Complaint that Musk took a leading role in DOGE’s efforts to take physical control of USAID headquarters, including its secured spaces, and that Musk publicly took credit for the dismantling of USAID during this time period in multiple posts on X, including the February 2 and 3 posts in which he stated that “we spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” that “we’re in the process of . . . shutting down USAID,” that “USAID is a criminal organization,” and that it was “[t]ime for it to die.” SAC ¶ 87-88.Collectively, these allegations support the inference that, as the de facto administrator of DOGE at the time, Musk directed these actions.
Obviously this is motion-to-dismiss posture, not a factual finding. But when a federal judge is drawing reasonable inferences from well-pleaded allegations and concluding Musk was the “de facto administrator” of DOGE, the DOJ’s “he was just an advisor with no authority” line becomes harder to sell with each filing.
Cathy had mentioned this ruling on Bluesky as she was working on her article, and apparently that alerted lawyer Kel McClanahan of a judge officially recognizing Elon as DOGE administrator.
OK full disclosure I only found this because @cathygellis.bsky.social was complaining about OCR and I was like wtf opinion is she talking about
And that matters because Kel is representing multiple clients who are suing Musk and DOGE in cases where the DOJ continues to deny Musk’s role. So Kel took this information he learned from Cathy and made sure the judges in his cases learned about it as well.
Plaintiffs respectfully draw the Court’s attention to today’s opinion in Does v. Musk, No. 25-462 (D. Md.), in which Judge Chuang finds not once but twice that the plaintiffs had sufficiently alleged that Elon Musk was in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency” or “DOGE,” however that term was defined
It has been more than six months since Trump took office and kicked off his Musk-led rampage through the federal government. And more than six months that everyone has been turning to the courts to stop the DOGE destruction. These litigation efforts have led to some wins, although too many of them have been short-lived as either SCOTUS or even the motions panels at the appellate courts have all too often undone the protective injunctions that litigants finally managed to extract—albeit increasingly, as district courts’ hesitancy to restrain federal executive power has given way to the growing recognition of how much of that supposed executive power has been exercised illegitimately and harmfully.
Such a realization is at the heart of this decision discussed here, from a case that has been discussed before, Does 1-26 v. Musk, where an initial win of an injunction against Musk and DOGE’s ruination of the USAID agency was soon evaporated by the Fourth Circuit. The big reason why the Fourth Circuit overturned the injunction was due to an issue that has kept coming up in these challenges: ratification. Because while it’s bad enough for Musk and DOGE to tear through the government, despite no lawful authority to do anything, there is a separate problem when those with lawful authority follow along after them to do the same things. Even in this case, one of the several challenging the illicit destruction of USAID as a functioning agency despite all statutory language prohibiting anyone but Congress from doing anything to interfere with its function, we’ve seen the effects of this sort of ratification, as Musk and DOGE’s super-duper illegal RIF notices to staff were later reissued only super illegally by non-DOGE officials with actual authority when it comes to running the agency. Because even these officials’ authority is still limited; they cannot do something that the law does not allow (in this case: winding down the agency that they are supposed to run). So following the loss at the Fourth Circuit the plaintiffs amended their lawsuit to name the non-DOGE officials too in order to give the court jurisdiction over their participation in the overall wrongdoing.
And in this new decision the court gave the case the green light to continue, except without Trump himself as a named defendant.
Here, Plaintiffs’ request for declaratory relief against President Trump involves matters that are not as clearly ministerial. See id.; New Mexico, 2025 WL 1502747, at *19 (dismissing the President as a defendant from a case seeking declaratory relief where the duties implicated by the relief were “highly discretionary”). Moreover, courts considering whether to issue injunctive or declaratory relief against a President have recognized that the constitutional concerns associated with doing so “can be successfully bypassed” where the plaintiff’s injury “can be rectified by injunctive relief against” subordinate Executive Branch officials. See Swan v. Clinton, 100 F.3d 973, 976 & n.1, 978-79 (D.C. Cir. 1996) (recognizing that “similar considerations” apply to requests to obtain injunctive or declaratory relief against a President); NTEU, 492 F.2d at 606 (noting that “if it were possible” for the plaintiff to “enforce its rights by naming a defendant additional to or in substitution of the President,” the court “would exercise its discretion not to answer the question of whether the President is subject to mandamus by a federal court”). Where, as here, Plaintiffs’ requests for relief will proceed as to other Executive Branch officials with authority over the relevant issues in this case, the Court will dismiss the claims against President Trump. [p.47-48]
But everyone else named—Musk, Amy Gleason, Marco Rubio, and more—are all still on the hook, with the court rejecting all the arguments raised by the government for why the case should have been dismissed entirely. The most salient relate to standing, statutory preclusion, failure to state a claim, and claim splitting.
On standing, the court found that the plaintiffs had adequately pled that they had in fact been injured [p.32-34], that this injury was “traceable” to the defendants [p.34-37], and that it was redressable by holding the remaining defendants liable.
Here, the requested relief includes an injunction setting aside prior actions and barring further actions by Defendants to “modify, reorganize, or eliminate USAID,” as well as an injunction setting aside actions taken at USAID by Musk and DOGE personnel and barring them from “performing their significant and wide-ranging duties at USAID.” SAC ¶ 141. Even without a request for specific relief relating to the placements on administrative leave and the RIFs, these forms of relief could facilitate redress of Plaintiffs’ injuries because an order halting the elimination of USAID as an agency pursuant to either the Separation of Powers claim or the Appointments Clause claim would certainly “remov[e]” a significant “obstacle” to Plaintiffs’ regaining some form of employment at USAID or other relief. Sierra Club, 899 F.3d at 285. In addition, as to the Appointments Clause claim, where Plaintiffs have alleged that Musk directed the shutdown of USAID, an order undoing his actions and barring additional actions by Musk and DOGE at USAID would similarly contribute to providing Plaintiffs with relief by removing a force that has driven forward the process that has caused or will imminently cause Plaintiffs’ loss of employment. Accordingly, accepting the allegations as true and construing them in the light most favorable to Plaintiffs, the Court concludes that Plaintiffs have satisfied all three requirements to establish standing at this stage of the case. [p.37-38]
On “failure to state a claim,” the court found the Appointments Clause and Separation of Powers claims that every DOGE action ends up implicating one way or another had been adequately pled in a way that the court could still provide relief, here through a declaratory judgment or another injunction. With respect to the Appointments Clause claim, the court made the point in particular that just because so many of the problematic actions had already happened did not make the sought after relief moot (“[W]here that episode occurred only a few months ago and there is no reason to conclude that DOGE has ceased all activity at USAID, it is premature to conclude that there is no basis. or need for injunctive or declaratory relief relating to this claim.” [p.42]). And as for Separation of Powers, that the agency has effectively already been shut down, despite Congress never authorizing such a fate, suggests such a claim remained viable.
The Second Amended Complaint contains allegations that substantially replicate the facts adduced in Does I to support the conclusion that “USAID has been effectively eliminated,” id. at 671; compare SAC TT 65, 74-75, 83-88,93-99, 102-17, with Does I, 771 F. Supp. 3d at 669-71, but also includes additional, more concrete allegations demonstrating that Defendants are acting to “eliminate[]” “substantially all non-statutory positions at USAID,” “decommission[]” USAID assets, and “wind-down” the agency’s independent operations, as described in the Lewin Memorandum and the Congressional Notification Letter, SAC ¶ 120. Accordingly, where the Court previously concluded that Plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their Separation of Powers claim in Does I, see 771 F. Supp. 3d at 678, and where the Second Amended Complaint contains even more allegations about Defendants’ course of conduct to eliminate USAID outright than were available at that time, the Court finds that Plaintiffs have stated a plausible Separation of Powers claim. See Does 1, 771 F. Supp. 3d at 678. Cf. Nat’l Treasury Emps. Union v. Vought, 774 F. Supp. 3d 1, 57-58 (D.D.C. 2025) (finding that the Executive Branch’s actions to shut down of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau likely violated the Separation of Powers), stay granted in part, No. 25-5901, 2025 WL 1721068, at *1 (D.C. Cir. Apr. 11, 2025). [p.43-44]
Perhaps more interestingly the court also rejected the “statutory preclusion” arguments, or, put another way, the arguments that the plaintiffs’ claims are just employment disputes that have to be brought before specialized agencies tasked with adjudicating employment disputes for federal workers. Because the plaintiffs here were largely USAID staff being wrongfully terminated, the government argued that, per statute, courts could not hear the complaints.
We saw the government make similar arguments before, especially in the case brought by the union of foreign service officers in the D.C. district court, AFSA v. Trump. This case has unfortunately now been dismissed for lack of standing and is thus on appeal, but earlier this year the court there refused to enjoin the agency firings. But that was then, and this is now, found this court in this case. It observed that the harm being considered by that earlier court—loss of employment—was just financial in its nature, and thus less “irreparable,” since “the agency [was] still standing.” But since that ruling, things have changed, and the potential harm to the plaintiffs here is much more weighty. Because, even if before it could be presumed that illegally-terminated employees might still have a job to go back to at the agency if their claims were redressed, such is not the case now when there is about to be no more agency at all.
Defendants’ citation of American Foreign Service Association v. Trump (“AFSA”), 768 F. Supp. 3d 6 (D.D.C. 2025), does not alter the Court’s conclusion. In AFSA, in denying a motion for a preliminary injunction, the court found that it was likely that the CSRA precluded it from exercising jurisdiction over a Separation of Powers challenge to the dismantling of USAID brought by two unions representing USAID employees. Id. at 11, 14-15, 21. In so ruling, however, the court noted that even though “in the long run,” the unions’ harms could flow from “the alleged unlawful dismantling of USAID,” at that time, “the agency [was] still standing, and so” the unions’ alleged harms based on which they sought injunctive relief related only to the changes in their members’ employment conditions at that early stage of the case, such as placement on administrative leave and requirements to return to the United States on an expedited basis, which were “largely financial” in nature. Id. at 20. Since that time, however, through the Lewin Memorandum and the Congressional Notification Letter, Defendants have confirmed their plan imminently to abolish USAID as an independent agency. Thus, the present case differs in that it relates not to employees’ specific employment conditions, as was the case at the early stage of AFSA, but to the abolition of an entire federal agency. [p.19-20]
Ultimately the court here found that the plaintiffs would be in an impossible position if the district courts couldn’t hear their claims and they had to appeal to these other agencies instead, en masse, because they were set up to handle only routine matters of federal employment, like with respect to issues with seniority. They were not set up to address the wholesale firing of an entire agency’s worth of personnel!
Nevertheless, regardless of whether the claims are subject to the CSRA, the Court finds that the CSRA does not provide for meaningful judicial review of Plaintiffs’ claims. Specifically, as alleged in the Second Amended Complaint, Plaintiffs’ claims, and their injuries, flow not from any specific employment action, but from the decision to dismantle and abolish USAID entirely. Channeling the claims of the Civil Service Employee Plaintiffs to the MSPB would foreclose meaningful judicial review because even if they were able to prevail in the administrative proceedings as to any particular employment action, such as by securing reinstatement to a USAID position, that relief would be meaningless because if the dismantling and abolition of USAID remain unaddressed, the Civil Service Employee Plaintiffs would have no workplace to which to return. [p.15]
And adjudicating the Constitutional issues that these terminations implicated was not part of their expertise.
Plaintiffs’ claims fall outside the MSPB’s expertise. The MSPB’s expertise largely consists of addressing adverse employment actions and prohibited personnel practices that violate the merit system principles set forth in 5 U.S.C. § 2301(b). See 5 U.S.C. §§ 7513(d), 1214(b)(4)(A); N4/J, 139 F.4th at 313. As discussed above, however, Plaintiffs’ claims do not directly or indirectly involve the application of such principles and instead assert structural constitutional challenges grounded in the principle of the Sepration of Powers. The Supreme Court has recognized in the context of other administrative review schemes that “agency adjudications are generally ill suited to address structural constitutional challenges.” Axon, 143 S. Ct. at 905 (quoting Carr v. Saul, 141 S. Ct. 1352, 1360 (2021)). In Axon, where the plaintiffs brought Separation of Powers challenges to actions by certain federal agencies’ administrative law judges (“ALJs”) because (1) the ALJs were unconstitutionally insulated from the president’s supervision; and (2) combining prosecutorial and adjudicatory functions in a single agency was unconstitutional, the Court found that the claims were outside of the relevant agencies’ expertise because they raised questions of constitutional law that were “detached from `considerations of agency policy’ and “distant” from the agency’s “competence and expertise,” as the agency “knows . . . nothing special about the separation of powers.” Axon, 143 S. Ct. at 897, 905 (quoting Free Enter. Fund, 561 U.S. at 491). [p.18-19]
Furthermore, the employment review agencies themselves have also been gutted by DOGE firings, and it did not sit well with the court that the same illicit power that wrongfully fired federal workers could now effectively render them powerless to seek redress of it.
As to the first step of the test, in NAIJ, the Fourth Circuit held that although the Supreme Court “has recognized that the CSRA, when functioning as Congress intended, was designed to strip district courts of jurisdiction,” that conclusion may no longer be true because recent events, including President Trump’s removal of the Special Counsel and of two members of the MSPB such that it lacks a quorum, “raise serious questions as to whether the CSRA’s adjudicatory scheme continues to function as intended.” NAIJ, 139 F.4th at 304-05. Based on this conclusion, the Fourth Circuit remanded that case to the district court “to conduct a factual inquiry whether the CSRA continues to provide a functional adjudicatory scheme,” and, if warranted, “a new examination of Congressional intent” as to the CSRA in light of these recent events. Id. at 308. Where the Fourth Circuit’s decision in NAIJ was released after briefing on the Motion concluded, and where the Court finds, as discussed below, that the Civil Service Employee Plaintiffs’ claims do not meet the second step of the Thunder Basin test, the Court declines to make a determination on whether the CSRA meets the first step of the Thunder Basin test. See Free Enter. Fund, 561 U.S. at 489 (noting that the Supreme Court presumes “that Congress does not intend to limit jurisdiction” if the three Thunder Basin factors at step two of the inquiry weigh in favor of that result). [p.13]
While it is a big deal for this court to recognize that the statutory scheme is inapt for the types of harms at issue here, it is not the first to do so, and it cites another case that did.
In a recent opinion, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the MSPB could not provide meaningful judicial review of statutory and Separation of Powers challenges to large-scale RIFs across multiple federal agencies because even if an individual plaintiff could pursue an individual claim before the MSPB and appeal to the Federal Circuit, such a procedure would not provide meaningful judicial review because the alleged injury was not from the particular employment action, but “from subjection to [unlawful executive] authority” in violation of the Constitution. Am. Fed ‘n of Gov’t Emps. v. Trump (“AFGE”), 139 F.4th 1020, 15 Case 8:25-cv-00462-TDC Document 150 Filed 08/13/25 Page 16 of 48 .1028, 1032 (9th Cir. 2025) (quoting Axon, 143 S. Ct. at 906), stay granted on other grounds, Trump v. Am. Fed’n of Gov’t Emps., 145 S. Ct. 2635, 2635 (2025). Here, Plaintiffs notably seek no damages and do not even specifically request injunctive relief to allow them to retain or recover their positions. Even to the extent that Plaintiffs’ general request that the Court “set aside any actions taken by Defendants” to eliminate USAID could be construed as including such relief, SAC ¶ 141a, as in AFGE, “such a path to the federal courts would be meaningless where . . . entire offices and functions are being eliminated from federal agencies,’ such that a successful plaintiff “would return to an empty agency with no infrastructure to support a resumption of their work.” AFGE, 139 F.4th at 1032 (quoting Am. Fed’n of Gov’t Emps. v. Trump, No. 25-cv-03698-SI, 2025 WL 1482511, at *14 (N.D. Cal. May 22, 2025)); see Elev8 Balt., Inc. v. Corp. for Nat’l & Cmty. Serv., No. MJM-25-1458, 2025 WL 1865971, at *1, *17 (D. Md. July 7, 2025) (finding that the CSRA could not provide a union representing federal employees meaningful judicial review of its Separation of Powers challenges to the dismantling of AmeriCorps); cf. New York v. Kennedy, No. 25-cv-196-MRD-PAS, 2025 WL 1803260, at *1, *9 (D.R.I. July 1, 2025) (finding that the CSRA could not provide meaningful judicial review of states’ constitutional and statutory challenges to the large-scale terminations of employees at and reorganization of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, because there was “little to no value” in “requiring employees to bring individual claims about their employment status to MSPB” because even “successful Plaintiffs ‘would return to an empty agency’ (quoting AFGE, 139 F.4th at 1032)). [p.15-16]
Meanwhile, the existence of this other case in D.C. that had been trying to get USAID employees un-fired gets to the other interesting defense raised by the government in support of its motion to dismiss the case: claim-splitting. In this argument the government was charging that because there are multiple cases addressing very similar facts, it looks like plaintiffs may be getting multiple bites at the apple to try to get the judicial result they want, which is not something individual plaintiffs are allowed to do. But the court here noted that the plaintiffs aren’t actually the same in both cases. While there may be overlap in the classes the plaintiffs represent, the actual litigants animating and directing these cases are different and not in privity with each other.
Here, Defendants have not provided evidence that Plaintiffs are in privity with the organizations asserting the allegedly related claims in these other lawsuits. Indeed, they have not even demonstrated that Plaintiffs are all members of one of those organizations. The Court therefore declines to dismiss the Second Amended Complaint on this basis. Cf. Cooper v. Harris, 581 .U.S. 285, 297-98 (2017) (declining to dismiss claims brought by individual plaintiffs as barred by res judicata where the party asserting that defense “never satisfied the District Court that” the individual plaintiffs were members of an organization that had brought similar claims in a separate lawsuit). [p.39]
And such is the consequence an abusive government is likely to suffer, that it might find itself having to defend itself in multiple courts on similar questions, because had it taken aim at fewer people then there would be fewer people to take issue with it. And in no case should the government be able to benefit here from having attacked the rights of an agency’s entire workforce where, because it had victimized so many, it would now be impossible for any to seek redress.
In fact, there have had to be multiple cases, especially with respect to the illegal destruction of USAID, which suffered especially from being the agency Musk and DOGE “put through the woodchipper” first, as he unlawfully and unconstitutionally canceled contracts, laid off staff, and took away agency assets. Which meant that all the legal challenges to stop Musk and DOGE with respect to USAID also happened first, hitting the courts as matters of first impression before they had a chance to get their jurisprudential arms around the full extent of executive power abuse they were dealing with here, and before litigants figured out how to bring their challenges most effectively.
Because if everyone had to do it over again, knowing what we know now, presumably USAID would not now be standing on the precipice of being all but lost as an agency come September 2, when the last wave of RIFs kicks in to layoff the last of its now skeleton workforce from this once robust and valuable agency Congress established, and never closed.
We’ve talked plenty about how Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was always more about performative cruelty than actual efficiency. But a new Senate report reveals just how spectacularly DOGE failed at its supposed core mission while causing immeasurable human suffering in the process. The entire concept blew up more spectacularly than one of Musk’s Starships.
The numbers are damning. The report from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations shows that DOGE wasted at least $21.7 billion in just six months—between January 20 and July 18, 2025. But hey, at least they got to feel like they were “draining the swamp,” right?
As Senator Richard Blumenthal put it in the report’s release:
“This report is a searing indictment of DOGE’s false claims. At the very same time that the Trump Administration is cutting health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘savings,’ they have enabled DOGE’s reckless waste of at least $21.7 billion dollars.”
To recap the “efficiency”: Musk promised to save trillions, actually wasted over $21 billion. That’s some galaxy-brain efficiency right there.
To be fair, much of that “waste” comes from Musk’s Twitter-style “resign now and we’ll pay you for many months” plan to rid the government of employees. As the report notes, that cost the government $14.8 billion in salaries of people who couldn’t actually do any work and then another $6.1 billion from people DOGE fired. And I’m sure that DOGE-supporting MAGA types will try to claim that this is fine, because it’s a one-time cost and will lower government expenses going forward.
But that is untrue. Part of the problem here is that—contrary to the popular belief in MAGA circles—most people in the government were actually doing important work that the government needs to do. Firing all of them doesn’t change that. Every few weeks there are another set of stories about how the Trump admin has to scramble to try to rehire the people that DOGE fired.
Doing things that way almost certainly increases costs, because of the level of painful inconsistency and the need to convince workers to come back to this shitshow after being treated so horribly. And, when they won’t come back, then the government has to go out and find new people to fill those roles, which is also a very expensive proposition—and one the report didn’t even explore.
Not only was much of this wasteful, it was wasteful for the stupidest of reasons: much of this destruction was based on conspiracy theories that Musk found on social media.
The destruction of USAID was remarkable in that it did not reflect any sort of broad-based consensus. While other actors in Trump’s political environment—such as the Project 2025, or the budget blueprint from the Center for Renewing America, led by Trump’s budget chief Russ Vought—called for reductions in USAID spending, they did not seek to eliminate it. The assault on USAID seemed disproportionately driven by the beliefs of one person, Musk. And those beliefs were largely disconnected from the reality of what USAID did.
For example:
Musk said that 90% of USAID spending never reaches communities, implying that most funding was wasted. But this claim demonstrates a misunderstanding of the budget. While 10% of the budget goes to direct payments to local organizations, another 46% goes to funding to multilateral agencies and 31% to American companies and nonprofits, much of which goes to direct provision, such as HIV programs, anti-malaria products, and emergency food services.
Musk claimed that $50 million was spent to send condoms to Hamas. Trump repeated this false claim, as did members of Congress. The organization that receives the funds does provide family planning, but its USAID funds were providing emergency health support to refugees in Gaza.
Musk has repeated other conspiracy theories about USAID found online including that it helped to create COVID-19, is rigging elections, and manufacturing media consent.
Musk elevated claims that USAID was protected by journalists because it had been secretly funding the media, based on government subscription services to media outlets.
Musk was not atypical of the broader Trump movement, which held conspiratorial worldviews about other parts of government it labeled as “the deep state,” but the effect on USAID was the most immediate and consequential. Such views could have been easily debunked, had DOGE been willing to talk to and trust career officials. But Musk displayed deep distrust of civil servants, labeling USAID “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” and “a criminal organization.”
Musk elevated these conspiracy theories to the mainstream on his social media platform X, reposting a small group of fringe accounts on X and promoting posts from Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official and key voice behind USAID conspiracy theories. Benz has argued that “USAID is notorious for funding the darkest, most controversial, most horrifying projects known to all of mankind” and Musk believed him. In the space of a year, Musk engaged with or elevated Benz’s messaging160 times. Unsurprisingly, Benz has also embracedwhite supremacypolitics.
The richest man in the world, put in charge of government efficiency, made life-and-death decisions based on conspiracy theories from fringe social media accounts. What could go wrong?
Well, everything, as it turns out.
DOGE’s crown jewel achievement was completely destroying USAID based on—and I feel the need to repeat this—conspiracy theories. A study published in The Lancet found that USAID had prevented 92 million deaths between 2001 and 2021. The agency’s destruction is now projected to cause 14 million avoidable deaths over the next five years, including 4.5 million children under age 5.
This is blood on the hands of Musk and the ridiculous nonsense peddlers he believed, rather than talking to actual experts.
In the southeastern African country of Malawi, U.S. funding cuts to the United Nations’ World Food Programme have “yielded a sharp increase in criminality, sexual violence, and instances of human trafficking” within a large refugee camp, U.S. embassy officials told the State Department in late April.
[….]
“We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025,” Landis said. On a recent visit to a facility treating malnourished children younger than 5, she said she saw kids who were “walking skeletons like I haven’t seen in a decade.”
Makwindi says the termination of funding “was a shock” that baffles him to this day. He takes a generous view of the U.S. motivation: “I still believe that someone didn’t do due diligence and just terminated us.” Nuha Ceesay, Eswatini country director for the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), has a harsher assessment. What the Trump administration has done is akin to saying, “I am going to unplug this life support machine from you,” he says. “It is up to you to find an alternative, and whether you perish or not, that’s not my business.”
The “efficiency” here is breathtaking. Rather than deliver emergency food supplies to starving people, the Trump administration chose to incinerate them instead. According to the Senate report, $110 million worth of food aid and medical supplies are spoiling in warehouses, with some literally being trucked to France to be burned at taxpayer expense.
The waste caused by lost investment is perhaps most starkly illustrated by supplies purchased by USAID sitting in warehouses around the globe that sat rotting rather than supporting their intended recipients. In February, the USAID Office of Inspector General warned that hundreds of thousands of tons of goods were at risk of spoilage as a result of DOGE’s attempt to shutter the agency. By May, 66,000 metric tons of food valued at $98 million remained warehoused at multiple facilities in Djibouti, South Africa, Dubai and Houston. Recent reporting indicated that a portion (approximately 622 metric tons) of the 1,100 metric tons of food aid stored in Dubai was spared from destruction in June but the remaining 496 metric tons valued at $793,000.00 are to be “turned into landfill or incinerated” at a cost of $100,000.00 to taxpayers. Additionally, as of June, USAID had abandoned approximately $12.4 million worth of “contraceptives and HIV-prevention medications” in Belgium and Dubai. Approximately $9.7 million of these contraceptives stuck in Belgium were being “trucked to France” to be incinerated at a cost of $160,000.00 because USAID allegedly refused to sell or otherwise transfer them to a third-party distributor at anything less than “full market value.”
But wait, there’s more! The report details how DOGE’s bureaucratic “Defend the Spend” initiative—supposedly designed to eliminate waste—actually created massive new forms of red tape. NASA employees were forced to write “several detailed paragraphs, across multiple rounds of emails” just to purchase simple fastening bolts. The FAA required written justifications for window-washing and buying pens and pencils.
Efficiency!
And let’s not forget the comedy gold of forcing nearly a million federal employees to send weekly “5-things” emails justifying their existence. The Senate report estimates this pointless exercise wasted $155 million in lost productivity. The best part? OPM had no intention of actually reviewing these emails and eventually sent auto-replies saying its mailbox was full.
The demand for weekly accomplishment reports was an unnecessary waste of time, primarily because OPM, as an external agency outside the management chain of command, is ill-equipped to meaningfully assess the work of other agencies’ employees. Moreover, employees would be forced to redact or omit any specific details to avoid confidentiality concerns, further diminishing the utility of these reports. Beyond what should have been immediately apparent, the pointlessness of this exercise was underscored when OPM briefed agencies that it intended to do nothing with the emails, and then a few weeks later, sent automatic replies back to employees stating that its “mailbox is full and can’t accept messages now.” Although the project continued through May, approximately 13 weeks in, news emerged that this project was “dying a slow, quiet death” across the government with agencies no longer requiring weekly reports.
Want to see a bunch of inefficient waste created by DOGE?
This is what happens when you put conspiracy theorists in charge of complex systems. DOGE didn’t just fail at its stated mission—it actively made government less efficient while causing humanitarian catastrophes on a massive scale. And that’s just with USAID. We’re not even looking most of the other cuts. And the report only briefly mentions the likely impact on the economy of some of these slash and burn efforts:
The full extent of the waste and harm caused by DOGE’s disruptive activities is difficult to quantify because costs remain hidden and many of the consequences have yet to fully materialize. While some analyses, such as an independent review of DOGE’s cuts at just seven agencies—CFPB, NIH, USDA, USAID, IRS, ED, and DOJ—determined that these actions could result in over $10 billion in lost economic activity in the U.S., these figures only scratch the surface
They also note that they’re not even counting the legal costs incurred from the long and ever-growing list of lawsuits DOGE’s cuts have spurred, many of which have already resulted in losses for the federal government in court.
The broader lesson here is one we’ve seen repeatedly: when you prioritize performative cruelty over actual governance, you get neither efficiency nor effectiveness. You get waste, chaos, and suffering.
DOGE should go down in history as one of the most grotesquely incompetent government initiatives ever attempted. An agency supposedly created to eliminate waste that managed to waste billions in six months, create tremendous inefficiencies in the workforce, while destroying programs that actually worked and saved lives.
The only thing it efficiently accomplished was proving that putting conspiracy theorists and tech bros in charge of life-and-death decisions with no oversight, guardrails, or expertise is a recipe for disaster on an unprecedented scale.
But hey, at least Musk got to feel important for a few months while millions of people faced death and suffering. Efficiency!
It is nearly impossible to keep up with all the litigation challenging all the terrible, if not also lawless and unconstitutional, things the Trump Administration is doing. But one group of cases is particularly interesting: the cases involving Musk and DOGE. In part because they are the lawless mercenaries Trump has been sending to do much of his unconstitutional bidding, but also because, by being lawless, they tempt their own personal liability that they may hopefully someday have to bear. Having their lawlessness established by the courts is also an important first step to stemming the tide, because even if it doesn’t lead to an injunction officially ordering it to stop, it can hopefully scare off anyone enabling it if they are forced to contemplate how much liability they may also have to face once Musk and DOGE’s illusory authority finishes falling away.
The earliest litigation challenging effects of their takeovers of agencies didn’t tend to directly name them as defendants (see for example American Foreign Service Association v. Trump). Those lawsuits tended to challenge what Musk and DOGE caused the agencies to do, generally in the form of complaining that “the agency leaders had no business taking these actions.” Then we started to see some litigation pursue more of a hybrid model where Musk and DOGE were also named, because their lawless interference was a factor in the illegal actions taken by the agency (see for example American Federation of Government Employees v. Office of Personnel Management). But a few lawsuits took a swing at Musk and DOGE’s lawlessness directly and how everything they were doing everywhere, or at least nearly everywhere, was unlawful. One of the earliest such cases pioneering this form of litigation was New Mexico v. Musk, which is now in the middle of some expedited discovery. Although a TRO was denied in that case, in dicta the judge there said it looked like Musk and DOGE had been acting lawlessly across government, interfering with all sorts of agencies and their actions.
But this week came the first official finding that Musk and DOGE appeared to be unlawfully messing with agencies. It came in one of the other earlier cases, Does 1-26 v. Musk and relates solely to their actions taken in furtherance of unlawfully shutting down USAID.
What follows is a scenic tour of this important decision, with some comments afterwards about its potential implications. Although it is a preliminary finding rather than a final determination, and specific to an injunction governing its actions only with respect to USAID, its reasoning is sure to reverberate, not just in this case but across all cases involving their behavior. It also walks through some important concepts that will be relevant in all cases, especially ones trying to seek some sort of injunctive relief to get the what is going on to stop, so it is worth seeing how they were handled here. For the sake of readability, I’ll use something called “pin cites” to indicate where in the 68(!) page decision the relevant language can be found and save block quotes for particularly salient language, lest the post get too long and confusing. But it’s all important, and surely not the last word on any of this.
Factual background
The decision opens by setting out some factual background. It begins by describing the parties, first DOGE, [p.2-3], and then Elon Musk, [p.3-5], documenting in particular how Trump had continually declared him to be DOGE’s leader, despite declarations filed by the government asserting the contrary. It then described DOGE’s activities writ large across the government,[p.5-7], noting in particular that “DOGE has taken numerous actions without any apparent advanced approval by agency leadership.” [p.6]. The next several pages [p.7-13] summarized DOGE’s meddling with USAID in particular.
After that the background section describes the plaintiffs, who are all “current and former employees or personal services contractors (‘PSCs’) of USAID.” [p.14]. They have proceeded anonymously, although their complaint and declarations describes their different roles and the types of harm each has either experienced or observed as a result of those roles. For instance, one plaintiff is stationed in a high-risk area in Central America, yet in danger of losing access to cellphones, electricity, and internet—and with them the security infrastructure they depend on—as a result of DOGE’s interference with USAID’s payment system. [p.15]. Another in the Middle East is in a similarly insecure predicament. [p.15]. The decision described their concerns, which in addition to those security-related ones also includes wrongful job loss, the inability to get benefits and owed payments processed, and the potential leakage of sensitive personal data, including family member information and information contained within security clearance files. [p.15-16]. The decision also discussed the reputational harms plaintiffs have experienced as a result of Musk besmirching the reputation of USAID and the tangible way it has already caused problems for them at home and abroad. [p.16].
The decision then launches into a discussion about the preliminary injunction the plaintiffs are seeking in order to obtain “narrow emergency relief.” [p.17]. To get an injunction the plaintiffs would need to make a “clear showing” that, “(1) They are likely to succeed on the merits; (2) they are likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary relief; (3) the balance of equities tips in their favor; and (4) an injunction is in the public interest.” [p.17]. Of note, these factors have been issues in essentially all of the cases seeking some form of injunctive relief, including TROs, although courts in general are even more hesitant to award them in the TRO context given that they are a remedy awarded even earlier in the litigation before more facts, or even more notice, has been given to the other party. But because these are such important factors in all these cases seeking to get the madness to stop it is worth looking to see how the court found them satisfied enough here to at least somewhat so order it.
Standing
As the court recites, standing requires that “(1) the plaintiff must have suffered an ‘injury in fact’; (2) the injury must be fairly traceable to the actions of the defendant; and (3) it must be ‘likely’ that the injury will be ‘redressed by a favorable decision.'” [p.17-18]. We’ve seen some flavor of this before, like in the Murthy v. Missouri case, where standing was not found.
Here, on “injury in fact,” the court found a variety of potential injuries, such as plaintiffs having their contracts ended or employment terminated, or other harms as discussed in the factual background. [p.18-19]. Some plaintiffs also raised concerns about DOGE having access to sensitive personal information, but the court found it unnecessary to predicate standing on that potential harm. [p.18]. It’s worth noting that not every court has credited either of these injuries, however. For instance, in AFSA, which addressed in part USAID firings, the judge there said that employees had no standing to bring claims for wrongful firings to the district court because there was an alternative form of employment adjudication prescribed by statute. On the other hand, that litigation was against the agency for using its own authority to fire people, whereas in this case the issue was someone with no authority effectively firing them, which raised a different issue than the employment statutes contemplated. And in terms of the access to sensitive information courts have somewhat diverged, although how they have done so is a subject for another day. Here the harm was credited, because if DOGE is behaving unlawfully, it’s still a harm that shouldn’t have been experienced.
As for traceability, “plaintiffs need not established that the challenged action [by defendants] is the ‘proximate cause’ of the injury and instead need only show that it is ‘in part responsible for’ the asserted injury.” [p.19]. And here the court finds the plaintiffs have done that, alleging “sufficient facts to support the conclusion that the personnel and contract actions taken against Plaintiffs, as well as the failures to pay their expenses, occurred at least in part because of Defendants’ actions.” [p.19]. The court then listed a number of facts in the record, including Musk’s own public statements, such as, “we’re in the process of … shutting down USAID,” to support that conclusion, [p.19], along with the fact that DOGE had gained full access to USAID’s office and computer systems and “Musk even threatened to call the United States Marshals if they were not provided with such full access.” [p.20]. The government tried to argue that all these alleged harms were really “caused by independent actions authorized by USAID and its leadership wielding their own power,” but the court wasn’t buying it. [p.20]. The court recognized that whatever the agency heads may have done they hadn’t done in a vacuum:
Here, the record supports the conclusion that the USAID officials were not actually independent actors and that even if they were, they in fact would predictably sign off on the actions directed or taken by Defendants. President Trump publicly acknowledged that Musk and DOGE wield significant influence across federal agencies when he stated in an interview that Musk “take[s] an executive order that I’d signed, and he would have those people go to whatever agency it was” and then “some guy that maybe didn’t want to do it, all of a sudden, he’s signing.” [p.21]
Also not helping the government’s position was that people at USAID who tried to say no to DOGE got fired. [p.21]. And that the RIF notices that laid off thousands of agency employees bore metadata saying that the notices had been sent out by a member of DOGE, not an agency official. [p.21].
Then, on redressability, the court found that the requested relief of an injunction barring Defendants from “[i]ssuing, implementing, enforcing, or otherwise giving effect to terminations, suspensions, or stop-work orders,” as well as barring their access to agency computers and requiring them to reestablish the systems for use by the agencies “would at least contribute to relieving Plaintiffs of some of their injuries.” [p.22-23]. The government tried to plead a form of hypocritical helplessness, complaining essentially that Musk and DOGE lacked the authority to fix what they broke. [p.23]. But the court didn’t buy the contention that Musk and DOGE lacked such agency:
Plaintiffs have presented evidence that as a practical matter, Musk and DOGE Team Members acting at his direction have had the ability to cause personnel actions against employees and contractors, to stop payments, and to control any action that requires use of USAID’s computer systems. The record reflects that Musk has personally taken credit for shutting down USAID, and that he and another DOGE official overrode objections from USAID officials to gain access to the USAID classified computer systems and facilities for DOGE Team members and then caused dissenting USAID officials to be placed on administrative leave. It also reflects that DOGE Team Members have had complete control over the USAID computer systems and, on at least one occasion, blocked USAID-approved payments from being sent out. Indeed, at the hearing, Defendants effectively acknowledge that DOGE has total control over USAID systems when their counsel stated that thus far they have been unable to identify a USAID official unconnected to DOGE who would have the ability to take actions over the computer system to assist Plaintiffs with their immediate needs.” [p.23]
Likelihood of success on the merits
After finding that the plaintiffs had the standing to ask for the injunction, the next major issue in the decision’s analysis was whether they had a likelihood of success on the merits in their underlying complaint. In other words, are they likely to be correct in how they argued that Musk and DOGE’s acts were unlawful in how they harmed them.
One way the plaintiffs argued it was that Musk was acting in violation of the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. The issue is that it appears that he has been performing the role of an “Officer” without having been appointed to that role. To have acted as an Officer an individual must “(1) exercise[] significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States”; and (2) “occupy a ‘continuing’ position established by law.” [p.25]
On the first point, “significant authority,” the government basically tried to argue that Musk was just advising, and all the things he advised were done because the USAID officials “ratified” the recommendations and turned them into their own. [p.26]. And while the court found the record unclear on some of the actions, for others the court found no evidence to suspect that USAID officials had ratified them. [p.27-28]. It also noted that Musk and DOGE, “despite their allegedly advisory roles, had taken other unilateral actions” at other agencies without any apparent authorization from those agencies’ officials. [p.28]. And it recognized that if the court bought the government’s arguments that Musk had not done what he was accused because he had no formal legal authority to do any of it, it would “open the door to an end-run around the Appointments Clause.” [p.31].
If a President could escape Appointments Clause scrutiny by having advisors go beyond the traditional role of White House advisors who communicate the President’s priorities to agency heads and instead exercise significant authority throughout the federal government so as to bypass duly appointed Officers, the Appointments Clause would be reduced to nothing more than a technical formality. [p. 31].
On the second point, “continuing position,” the court, after some lengthy analysis, determined that the USDS Administrator qualified as a “continuing position.” [p.34]. Then there was the question of whether Musk actually is the USDS Administrator. [p.34]. The government tried to argue via declarations that he was not, but on the other side was all sorts of mounting evidence of Trump declaring that Musk actually was at least the de facto administrator, including, “[m]ost notably,” Trump having publicly stated that, “I signed an order creating the Department of Government Efficiency and put a man named Elon Musk in charge.” [p.35-36]. Ultimately to the court it looked like Musk has a “continuing position” for purposes of the Appointments Clause, and thus the claim that his presence in it was unlawful was likely to succeed. [p.36].
The other claim brought against Musk and DOGE was for violating the separation of powers, which arises when the authorities of the Executive Branch encroach upon those of the Legislative. [p.37]. The gist of the plaintiffs’ argument is that when Musk and DOGE acted to eliminate USAID, a federal agency created by statute and where the ability to undo it has been reserved for Congress can undo it, it unlawfully “usurped Congress’s authority to create and abolish offices.” [p.37].
The decision spent a few pages discussing how Musk and DOGE went about effecting USAID’s shutdown. [p.37-40]. It then turned to the contours of such a separation of powers claim, guided largely by the earlier precedent from Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer:
To act within its authority, the President or the Executive Branch much act based on authority that “stem[s] either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.” Courts apply a tripartite framework, originally set forth in Justice Robert Jackson’s concurrence in Youngstown, to assess whether an executive action runs afoul of the Separation of Powers. First, “[w]hen the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate.” Second, if Congress is silent and neither grants nor denies authority, the President must rely only on the President’s independent powers as established by the Constitution and possibly based on authority existing in “a zone of twilight” in which there may be “concurrent authority” with Congress. Finally, if the President “takes measures incompatible with the express or implied will of Congress,” then the President’s “power is at its lowest ebb” and the President may “rely only upon his own constitutional powers minus any constitutional powers of Congress over the matter.” [p.41]
The court then looked at whether Congress had expressly or impliedly authorized the dismantling and elimination of USAID and found none. [p.42-44].
Where Congress has consistently reserved for itself the power to create and abolish federal agencies, specifically established USAID as an agency by statute, and has not previously permitted actions taken toward a reorganization or elimination of the agency without first providing a detailed justification to Congress, Defendants’ actions taken to abolish or dismantle USAID are “incompatible with the express or implied will of Congress. Accordingly, the third Youngstown category applies, and the President’s “power is at its lowest ebb.” [p.46-47].
After that it considered whether the President’s own Article II authority let him end the agency anyway. The government essentially argued that because he has foreign affairs powers, and USAID involved foreign policy, he could do what he wanted to the agency without being second-guessed by the courts. [p.47-48]. But the court wasn’t having it, noting how much the closure “relate[s] largely to the structure of and resources made available to a federal agency, not to the direct conduct of foreign policy or engagement with foreign governments.” [p.48]. If the government’s theory was correct then “the President would have unilateral control over all aspects of the State Department and could even abolish it as a matter of the foreign policy power.” [p.49].
As a backup argument the government also insisted that the President’s interest in “avoid[ing] waste, fraud, and abuse” was an expression of his Article II power to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed, but the court didn’t buy this argument either. While “it may justify the termination or placement on leave of certain employees […] when, however, the Executive Branch takes actions in support of the stated intent to abolish an agency, such as permanently closing the agency headquarters and engaging in mass terminations of personnel and contractors, those actions conflict with Congress’s constitutional authority to prescribe if and how an agency shall exist in form and function.” [p.49]. The decision then spent a few pages backing up that conclusion further. [p.50-53].
Irreparable harm
To show irreparable harm, the plaintiffs needed to show two things: that an award of money damages later wouldn’t adequately compensate for the harm, and that the claim that the plaintiff will suffer harm is “neither remote nor speculative, but actual and imminent.” [p.53]. But then an issue arises: While the denial of a constitutional right constitutes irreparable harm, that rule holds only in “cases involving individual rights and not the allocation of powers among the branches of government.” [p.54].
The court addressed this issue by returning to the plight of the individual plaintiffs, as discussed (both here and in the decision) in the background section, because it is in their lives that the effects of this unconstitutional exercise of power will be felt, including as to their physical security. [p.55-56]. While some of the other litigation challenging the recent harm to USAID has resulted in some mitigation of the harms Musk and DOGE created through their interference with the agency, the court here generally found the relief incomplete, with the likelihood of harm remaining. [p.56].
Notably the court also found another source of harm: Musk’s disparaging public statements about USAID. While generally a claim that an employee’s reputation would be damaged as a result of an adverse employment action does not establish irreparable harm for injunction purposes, “cases may arise in which the circumstances surrounding an employee’s discharge, together with the resultant effect on the employee, may so far depart from the normal situation that irreparable injury might be found.” [p.56-57]. And the court here found that this case presented such circumstances.
Defendants’ public statements regarding the reasons for the actions relating to USAID go far beyond the ordinary. On February 2, 2025, as USAID headquarters was being shut down, Musk stated on X that USAID is “evil” and in another post that has been viewed at least 33.2 million times, that “USAID is a criminal organization.” The next day, Musk also publicly stated in a lengthy discussion on X that USAID was not “an apple with a worm in it” but was instead “just a ball of worms” that is “hopeless” and “beyond repair” to the point that “you’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing.” Where such a prominent member of the Executive Branch has publicly described Plaintiffs’ place of employment in these ways on such a large media platform, and in a way that effectively characterizes it not as an agency in which certain individuals have engaged in misconduct but as a criminal enterprise from top to bottom, the likely harm to the reputation of personnel who worked there is of a different order of magnitude, because these statements naturally cast doubt on the integrity of those who worked there. [p.57-58]
On top of this reputational harm, which the court also found to be non-speculative, [p.58-59], there was also the harm related to the disclosure of sensitive personal information, which can constitute irreparable harm. [p.59].
Here, there are specific reasons to be concerned about the potential public disclosure of personal, sensitive, or classified information. First, as described above, the DOGE Team Members took extreme measures to gain access to classified information, including in SCIFs, when there was no identified need to do so and, as confirmed by J. Doe 11, at least some of them lacked security clearances. These measures included threatening to call the U.S. Marshals and then placing security personnel on administrative leave for attempting to enforce restrictions relating to classified material. Relatedly, J. Doe 2, a USAID employee on administrative leave with responsibilities relating to cybersecurity and privacy, has reported that DOGE Team Members without security clearances used their root access to USAID’s systems to “grant themselves access to restricted areas requiring security clearance.” [p.60]
The court then noted that sensitive personal information seems to have already been leaked, and that “disclosure of personal information is of greater concern where some Plaintiffs, such as J. Doe 1, are or have previously been posted overseas in high-risk areas and have expressed concern about ‘highly sensitive personal information’ such as ‘foreign contacts’ and ‘a safety pass phrase’ being released from personnel and security clearance files.” [p.60-61]. Given that DOGE has already “displayed an extremely troubling lack of respect for security clearance requirements and agency rules relating to access to sensitive data,” that they’ve already leaked some unredacted, and the exigent sensitivity of other data now in their possession, the court found a likelihood of irreparable harm if DOGE was not enjoined. [p.61].
Balance of the equities and the public interest
The remaining requirements for a preliminary injunction are that the balance of equities tips in favor of the plaintiffs, and that the injunction is in the public interest, which, in cases involving the government, merge into one factor. [p.61]. Basically, because an injunction changes something, this factor addresses whether that change is in the public’s interest. Here, though, because no one is harmed by a preliminary injunction that enjoins activity likely to be unconstitutional, and it looks like what Musk and DOGE did violated both the Appointments Clause and Separation of Powers, the court found these factors tipped in favor of the plaintiffs. [p.61-62].
The court further found that this factor tipped in favor of the plaintiffs because “the public interest is specifically harmed by Defendants’ actions, which have usurped the authority of the public’s elected representatives in Congress to make decisions on whether, when, and how to eliminate a federal government agency,” and because these likely unconstitutional actions have already put plaintiffs in physical jeopardy. [p.62]. The injunction also wouldn’t stop USAID from operating as an agency—it wasn’t even a party to the suit able to be enjoined anyway. The only activities being enjoined were the ones that are likely unlawful. Even Musk and DOGE could still “conduct assigned work pursuant to the various executive orders that complies with the Constitution and federal law.” [p.62].
Remedy
Having decided to issue the injunction, the next question for the court was what it should say. It decided to award some but not all of the relief the plaintiffs had requested. [p.64]. First, it addressed DOGE’s IT-related activities, requiring it to reestablish all email, payment, and other systems to their functional states. [p.64]. While the injunction doesn’t preclude all DOGE members from accessing agency information, in part because it couldn’t police if individual DOGE staff might be government employees entitled to the access in some other way, it did enjoin them “from any disclosure outside the agency of PII or other personal information of USAID employees or PSCs,” including on the DOGE website. [p.64]. Where some legally required disclosures had to be made, only USAID personnel unaffiliated with Defendants could make them. [p.64].
And the court decided that this injunction applied to how DOGE’s activities interfaced with all USAID personnel, and not just the plaintiffs themselves.
“[W]here the parties have been unable to identify a means by which individualized relief could be provided without jeopardizing Plaintiffs’ anonymity, and the record already contains multiple examples of USAID personnel who were placed on administrative leave or otherwise sanctioned for objecting to Defendants’ actions, the Court finds that applying these requirements to all current USAID employees and PSCs, including those on administrative leave, is necessary to provide full relief to plaintiffs.” [p.64-65]
One thing the court did not do was order the revocation of all the “mass personnel and contract terminations [that] are part of the ongoing dismantling of USAID that likely violates” the Constitution. It did not so abstain because the terminations are legitimate, but because it is currently unclear whether they had been issued entirely under the auspices of DOGE, or if they had been effectively ratified by legitimate USAID leadership. While such ratification wouldn’t necessarily make the layoffs lawful—see the discussion earlier in the decision about how USAID cannot be dismantled without authorization from Congress (as well as other cases involving other agencies addressing how agencies generally cannot be closed without Congress allowing it)—USAID itself was not party to this litigation and thus couldn’t be bound by such an order. Also the record on this question, about who caused the layoffs, is currently unsettled. [p.65].
At this point, however, DOGE cannot do more to affect the shutdown of the agency, including with respect to further firings, building closures, or records deletion. [p.65-66]. DOGE also must, within 14 days of the order, reopen USAID headquarters. However, if in that time period someone with appropriate authority ratifies the decision to close it, this requirement will be stayed. [p.66-67]. But no other portion of the injunction was stayed pending appeal—it is in effect now. [p.67]
Some implications
Several things have already happened since this decision was issued just a few days ago. For one, the government has appealed. At the time of this writing no stay has been issued, but given how it has acted in other cases it seems likely that the government will seek one to delay the injunction while it appeals.
The government also tried to play musical chairs with DOGE and agency appointees in an apparent effort to circumvent the injunction. Because this lawsuit only challenged DOGE, and not the lawfulness of anything the agency did on its own accord, it left open the possibility that the agency might have done DOGE things under its own auspices, or yet still be able to, like with respect to the building closure. These actions—like terminating contracts or the bulk of its workforce—might still be illegal, but, as discussed above, it will be for another case (or at least later in this litigation) to decide. Per where things are with respect to this case, USAID personnel lawfully in their roles can still run the agency and are presumed to be running it lawfully, while, with this decision, DOGE personnel are not. So the government tried a “foil a judicial order with this one quick trick!” maneuver by converting a DOGE staffer into a USAID official, which would then seem to grant him the mantle of legitimacy to effectively ratify his team’s own illegitimate actions. But it didn’t work: the court subsequently reiterated that the injunction kept anyone connected with DOGE out of the agency’s business.
But it does seem clear that there is no meaningful separation between Musk/DOGE and any appointed officials running USAID, and that these appointees are essentially window-dressing there only to allow the unlawful force of Musk and DOGE to take over. These decisions by the agency officials to let Musk and DOGe to control so much themselves should therefore be found unlawful, and courts are starting to get there, recognizing in other cases how the APA in particular finds such abdication of good judgment, to let DOGE loose, to be arbitrary and capricious. The USAID cases challenging the firings and contract terminations have so far had more trouble using this argument to get usable injunctive relief, although some of that difficulty may be due to them being some of the earliest challenges brought against any of what Musk and DOGE have wrought. The more DOGE has done, the more subsequent courts have noticed, and although courts are generally still being extremely conservative in how they have been ruling against the government, each time one does it does seem to make the next such decision against the government more likely. But the reasoning of each decision still matters and how courts find standing, or likelihood of irreparable harm, is still is very specific to the particulars of each case, including the agency or agencies involved, what actions are being challenged, with what claim(s), by whom, and against whom.
Still, we’ve not really had a chance yet to see too many decisions be made in the wake of this one. Having a court at last officially credit the arguments that any DOGE authority was falsely claimed seems an important point to be reached and one that hopefully should affect all the other cases, including in the ones requesting injunctive relief against what DOGE is doing. Right now all these cases are being litigated against the big black box of the government, and having to swim upstream against a lot of doctrine that says the government is due a lot of deference in how it uses its own constitutionally-appointed power—and perhaps rightly so, if that constitutionally-appointed power is to not be unduly obstructed.
But with DOGE it is different because what it is finally starting to dawn is the judicial recognition that DOGE has no constitutionally-appointed governmental power. And these cases, rather than being about the government using its lawful power badly, as most constitutional challenges are, are really about an unlawful power being allowed to do anything. Injunctive relief should therefore be much more readily available because it is not relief from government power itself that is being sought but by a separate, unentitled, invading power running around and causing immense and exigent harm.
Here’s a puzzle: When does a Supreme Court justice believe courts can review executive branch decisions? The answer, at least for Justice Alito, appears to be “whenever a Democrat is president, but only then.”
There is plenty of commentary making the rounds regarding yesterday’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision confirming that of course a judge can issue a Temporary Restraining Order to maintain the status quo and require USAID pay out the money that it owes to contractors for work already done. But beneath the straightforward legal question lies a revealing pattern of inconsistency from some of the Court’s conservatives.
The eye-opening thing about Alito’s dissent is how completely it contradicts positions he took just months ago. And not in subtle ways — we’re talking about fundamental questions of judicial power that Alito seems to view entirely differently depending on which party controls the White House.
To understand this claim — and how there’s basically no other explanation — we need to look at what actually happened here. Elon Musk and his DOGE crew went into USAID and halted nearly all payments, which created an interesting legal problem that had been mostly theoretical prior to the current administration. Congress has “the power of the purse” and requires the executive branch to spend money as directed. Not spending appropriated money (known as “impoundment”) is pretty clearly illegal.
While this has kicked off a bunch of lawsuits, the one at issue here involves two contractors — AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council — who pointed out that they already completed the work for which they have contracts, and they are owed money on those contracts. Musk freezing the payouts violated the law.
The judge in the District Court, Amir Ali, agreed that this seemed like a pretty big issue and issued a Temporary Restraining Order. TROs are supposed to be used in rare situations, mainly to return things to the status quo to avoid irreparable harms. In this case, contractors not getting paid by the US government for work they already performed, on contracts and appropriations already blessed by Congress and the executive branch, could do real damage. And thus, Ali ordered them to proceed to abide by the contracts and the constitutionally required situations in which the executive branch does, in fact, pay out the money that Congress has appropriated.
However, after doing so, the White House ignored the order and did not pay out the money. Judge Ali brought the DOJ back into court two weeks later to ask WTF, followed by issuing an order that they pay out the money they owed by that very night. This is when the DOJ tried to appeal, which quickly bumped its way up to the Supreme Court. With little time to spare, Chief Justice Roberts issued an “administrative stay” on the TRO, basically putting it on hold.
This administrative stay created an oddity worth examining. The whole point of both TROs and administrative stays is generally to “preserve the status quo” while the court can look at things more closely. But which status quo? The one where the government follows the law and pays its bills to contractors who already did the work? Or the one where Musk’s DOGE team is illegally impounding funds denying lawfully contracted work from being paid for? It sure feels like the former is the only status quo worth preserving.
After sitting on the issue for nearly a week, the Court finally ruled 5-4 in support of Judge Ali’s basic position, though they told him to come up with a new implementation plan since the original payment deadline had passed. But the really appalling part isn’t the majority ruling — it’s Alito’s dissent, which reads like it was written in an alternate universe where a bunch of other opinions, many of which Alito supported, don’t exist.
Alito’s dissent starts with what might charitably be called selective amnesia, both of the facts of this case, as well as recent Supreme Court jurisprudence that he supported:
Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars? The answer to that question should be an emphatic “No,” but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.
Stunned, are you?
Let’s pause here and note what Alito is doing. He’s framing this as a question of judicial power over executive spending. Which would be a reasonable framing, if not for two rather enormous elephants in the room: First, Congress has already directed this spending, as its power under the Constitution. Second, Alito himself has repeatedly insisted that courts must enforce such congressional directives against presidential overreach — at least when Democrats are in office.
Look, I know some people (including Chief Justice John Roberts) will get mad that I suggest Alito is an extreme partisan, but that paragraph, combined with some recent rulings that went in the other direction when Joe Biden was President, seem to make it pretty clear that Alito’s guiding philosophy is “When Republicans are in power, the president is a king; When Democrats are in power, presidents have no power at all.”
Let’s call out two previous rulings, both written by the Chief Justice, but to which Alito readily signed on. First was Biden v. Nebraska, the case in which the Supreme Court said that the President has no authority to cancel student loan debt without an act of Congress. In that case, the Court repeatedly made clear: the executive branch has zero authority to reinterpret or ignore an act of Congress, especially involving funds.
As Roberts wrote in that case, and which all of the Justices in the dissent on yesterday’s case agreed to:
The dissent is correct that this is a case about one branch of government arrogating to itself power belonging to another. But it is the Executive seizing the power of the Legislature
Fast forward to the present USAID case, and suddenly Alito is “stunned” that a district court would prevent the Executive from seizing Congress’s power of the purse. The contradiction couldn’t be more glaring.
So, in the student loan case, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were insistent that the executive branch may not “seize power” from the Legislature. The same ruling also stated:
Among Congress’s most important authorities is its control of the purse.U. S. Const., Art. I, §9, cl. 7;… It would be odd to think that separation of powers concerns evaporate simply because the Government is providing monetary benefits rather than imposing obligations.
And yet in the current case, these same justices suddenly find it “stunning” that a court would enforce Congress’s power of the purse against executive overreach. Did Alito and the others just forget the Biden case?
Or how about this part of that same ruling:
… our precedent— old and new—requires that Congress speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy.
Does that not apply equally in this case? Then why is Alito somehow stunned that the lower court made the same ruling that Alito agreed to less than two years ago?
Okay, so maybe that’s too far back in history. Let’s consider last summer’s ruling in the Loper Bright case, that got rid of Chevron deference. This case was also about separation of powers and whether the judiciary has the right to step in and overrule the executive branch.
In this case, which again came out just months ago, Alito enthusiastically endorsed the judiciary’s authority to check executive power. Yet now he’s “stunned” that a district court would enforce congressional appropriations law against executive impoundment. Even more tellingly, Alito’s dissent summary in his opening paragraph strategically omits crucial facts — that Congress had appropriated these funds, contracts were signed, and work was completed — instead framing it as a judge arbitrarily “compelling” government payment.
Stunning! But not the way Alito thinks. It’s Alito’s blatant partisanship that should be seen as stunning.
In Loper Bright, the conservative wing of the Supreme Court was unanimous that the judiciary must always check the executive when it exceeds authorities granted by Congress. In that ruling, which again Alito joined, Roberts emphatically made clear that the judicial branch is the interpreter of the laws:
The Framers also envisioned that the final “interpretation of the laws” would be “the proper and peculiar province of the courts.” Id., No. 78, at 525 (A. Hamilton). Unlike the political branches, the courts would by design exercise “neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment.” Id., at 523. To ensure the “steady, upright and impartial administration of the laws,” the Framers structured the Constitution to allow judges to exercise that judgment independent of influence from the political branches. Id., at 522; see id., at 522–524; Stern v. Marshall, 564 U. S. 462, 484 (2011).
This Court embraced the Framers’ understanding of the judicial function early on. In the foundational decision of Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice Marshall famously declared that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803). And in the following decades, the Court understood “interpret[ing] the laws, in the last resort,” to be a “solemn duty” of the Judiciary. United States v. Dickson, 15 Pet. 141, 162 (1841) (Story, J., for the Court). When the meaning of a statute was at issue, the judicial role was to “interpret the act of Congress, in order to ascertain the rights of the parties.”
And, as the ruling (again, I need to stress, this was from just a few months ago) states, the Judiciary often has to say no to the Executive:
The views of the Executive Branch could inform the judgment of the Judiciary, but did not supersede it. Whatever respect an Executive Branch interpretation was due, a judge “certainly would not be bound to adopt the construction given by the head of a department.” Decatur, 14 Pet., at 515; see also Burnet v. Chicago Portrait Co., 285 U. S. 1, 16 (1932). Otherwise, judicial judgment would not be independent at all. As Justice Story put it, “in cases where [a court’s] own judgment . . . differ[ed] from that of other high functionaries,” the court was “not at liberty to surrender, or to waive it.”
Alito signed on to that opinion just months ago. And now he’s “stunned” that a judge is, indeed, independently determining that the executive branch is violating the law.
There’s a broader point here worth considering. The Supreme Court’s role in our constitutional system isn’t just about deciding individual cases — it’s about establishing clear, consistent principles that lower courts and other government actors can rely on. When those principles shift dramatically based on which party controls the White House, it undermines the entire project of constitutional law.
Consider what message this sends to lower court judges. If you’re a district court judge facing an executive branch that’s defying Congress by refusing to spend appropriated money, what are you supposed to do? Follow the guidance from the student loan case that says you must vigorously check executive overreach? Or follow Alito’s (thankfully minority opinion for now) guidance from yesterday that says you should be “stunned” at the very idea of telling the executive branch how to spend money?
The answer, apparently, is to check the party affiliation of the current president first. Which is exactly the kind of outcome the Founders were trying to avoid when they created an independent judiciary.
But there’s an even more troubling aspect to all this. By making such nakedly partisan distinctions, Alito and his colleagues are effectively creating two different constitutions: one that applies when Democrats are in power (featuring strict separation of powers and aggressive judicial review) and another for Republican administrations (featuring expansive executive authority and judicial deference).
This isn’t just about Alito being inconsistent. It’s about whether we can maintain any coherent theory of constitutional law when Supreme Court justices treat identical legal questions differently based purely on partisan considerations.
What we’re witnessing is not principled judicial philosophy but raw partisan power dynamics. The judicial doctrines these justices claim to revere — textualism, separation of powers, judicial independence — appear to be selectively deployed based on who occupies the White House. The message couldn’t be clearer: Republican presidents deserve kingly deference, while Democratic presidents require constant judicial constraint.
Which brings us back to Chief Justice Roberts, who continues to insist it’s unfair and inappropriate to suggest his colleagues might be motivated by partisan considerations rather than consistent legal principles. Perhaps he’s right that we shouldn’t question the motives of Supreme Court justices. But when those justices write opinions that directly contradict their own recent precedents based on nothing more than which party holds the White House, what other conclusion are we supposed to draw?
The recent book “Character Limit” exposes a perfect case study in destructive arrogance: Twitter was already building more sophisticated versions of everything Musk claimed he wanted. But Musk and his sycophants were so convinced of their own brilliance, and so certain everyone at Twitter was an idiot, they didn’t even bother to understand what was already in place. Instead, they gleefully tore it all down — only to later attempt rebuilding worse versions of the same features, having learned nothing from the ruins.
Now we’re seeing the same thing play out with the US government. Just weeks after illegally killing an agency (which Musk never actually understood) that successfully promoted American interests abroad for decades, the MAGA crew is suddenly discovering they need… an agency that promotes American interests abroad. And just like at Twitter, their “solution” involves rebuilding a stripped-down, flawed version that fundamentally misunderstands what made the original work.
As we recently detailed, USAID’s genius lay in how it wove together humanitarian aid with commercial interests. Every dollar spent fighting disease or supporting development didn’t just protect American health and security — it helped create new markets for US companies. And critically, it did this while maintaining recipient countries’ independence, in stark contrast to China’s Belt & Road Initiative, which deliberately creates debt traps to tie countries to the Chinese economy (and was more directly tied to infrastructure initiatives, rather than broader development goals around health and stability).
The MAGA crew’s sudden amnesia about USAID’s value is particularly striking given their own recent history. Take Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State. Just three years ago, he was one of USAID’s strongest defenders, demanding increased funding specifically to “counter the Chinese Communist Party’s expanding global influence.”
For years, Rubio forcefully argued that USAID’s budget (less than 1% of federal spending) delivered outsized returns for American interests. “I promise you,” he declared in 2017, “it is going to be a lot harder to recruit someone to anti-Americanism and anti-American terrorism if the United States of America is the reason one is even alive today.” He even called out those who wanted to slash foreign aid as liars pushing false narratives about the budget.
But hey, that was three whole years ago. Ancient history!
The cognitive dissonance is reaching absurd levels. Just weeks after killing USAID, Fox News ran a segment bemoaning that America has no answer to China’s Belt & Road Initiative. Trump’s solution to this “crisis”? Apparently it’s Benjamin Black, son of hedge fund giant (and Jeffrey Epstein associate) Leon Black, who Trump is appointing to rebuild what’s left of USAID. Black’s revolutionary idea, as breathlessly reported by the NY Times? Investing in “pro-market” projects.
Here’s the punchline that makes this whole thing darkly comic: USAID was already laser-focused on market development. So focused, in fact, that some of its vocal critics have long complained it prioritized commercial interests over pure humanitarian aid. But USAID understood something Black and his MAGA compatriots don’t: creating sustainable markets requires playing the long game through stability, health, and development.
Black’s grand vision? Moving USAID’s resources to Trump’s pet project from his first term, the International Development Finance Corporation (DFC). His qualification for this role? A Substack essay co-written with Peter Thiel protégé Joe Lonsdale arguing that foreign aid should be… wait for it… market-driven.
It’s USAID all over again, just stripped of the sophistication, expertise, and strategic thinking that made it effective. Another case of destroying something complex to rebuild a worse version that fits on a bumper sticker.
In other words, here are the basics of Black’s revolutionary proposal, which I swear I am not making up:
Give it to the DFC for “market-oriented investments”
???
Profit! (No, literally — the proposal promises “returns that would fund future programs”)
The whole thing reads like someone discovered USAID’s actual mission statement, crossed out the sophisticated parts about development and stability, and added “but make it more Finance Bro.” It would be funny if it weren’t so predictable.
And while USAID had its critics on both the left (for being too market-focused) and right (for being “wasteful”), it had evolved sophisticated mechanisms to balance these concerns. The agency’s programs underwent rigorous evaluation and adapted over decades. The DFC, by contrast, largely operates as a standard investment vehicle without this institutional knowledge — it’s like replacing a surgeon with someone who’s played “Operation” once.
Just like Musk “discovering” features Twitter already had, MAGA is now “inventing” development strategies that USAID spent decades refining by actually understanding the realities and nuances of the larger world.
The parallels here are almost too perfect. Just as Musk replaced Twitter’s verification system — which created genuine value through carefully managed trust — with a simplistic “pay for checkmark” scheme, MAGA wants to replace USAID’s sophisticated development strategy with a crude, short-term, “invest for returns” approach. Both changes promise quick, measurable wins while destroying the underlying long-term value and strategic importance that took years to build.
This is the MAGA/Musk playbook in action: take a complex system you don’t understand, declare it broken because you can’t grasp its nuances, tear it down while claiming you’ll build something better, then deliver a simplified version that completely misses the point. Whether it’s Twitter’s trust systems or USAID’s market development strategy, these weren’t just programs — they were calibrated ecosystems built on years of learning and refinement, with longer term goals in mind.
But here’s what makes this pattern truly dangerous: it’s not just ignorance, it’s aggressive ignorance. The Musk/MAGA worldview doesn’t just fail to understand complexity — it treats complexity itself as evidence of incompetence or corruption. They’re not just incapable of seeing the sophistication in these systems; they’re ideologically opposed to admitting such sophistication could exist.
