Across the world, USAID workers’ government phones are being disconnected
USAID is turning off government devices for employees based at the agency’s missions around the world, several sources told FedScoop.
As the future of the agency remains unclear — Secretary of State Marco Rubio is now reportedly its acting administrator — the disconnections risk the safety of U.S. government workers based in dangerous and hard-to-access regions.
One person familiar with the matter confirmed that USAID workers are having their phones disconnected. Those whose devices have been deactivated can assume they’ve been placed on leave, the person said, since those deactivations are outpacing formal human resources notifications.
A second person familiar also said that the phones of USAID workers who are currently abroad have had their phones disconnected.
A third USAID employee confirmed earlier Monday that agency employees in the West Africa region lost access to their computers and phones, and that some Washington, D.C. offices — like the Office of Transition Initiatives — had experienced the same. The same employee later told FedScoop that they had also lost access to their email address with no warning.
“It’s becoming this weird domino [effect] right now,” the source said. “I might lose access at any moment.”
Thousands of USAID email accounts had been deactivated, one source said, following widespread reports that the Trump administration plans to shut down the agency and possibly integrate it with the State Department. As of publication time, the USAID website remains offline.
The chief information office at USAID has remote control over agency devices, as FedScoop has previously reported.
During a DOGE Spaces call on the X platform Sunday night, Elon Musk said that he cleared USAID’s shutdown with President Donald Trump.
Trump “agreed that we should shut it down,” Musk said. “I actually checked with him a few times … so we’re shutting it down.”
A reduction-in-force meeting for the agency is rumored to be happening Tuesday, sources said.
