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US Agency for International Development employees this week recounted the panic they experienced in the days after they were ordered to return from their assignments in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Several employees, as part of a lawsuit filed Tuesday by a group representing the agency’s foreign service members, painted harrowing pictures of their chaotic departures from Kinshasa amid violent protests in the capital city, as President Donald Trump’s administration ended certain foreign assistance programs and placed members of Washington leadership on leave leading to internal disarray and a lack of guidance for staff.
Directives in recent weeks for staff around the world to return to the US and employees to be placed on administrative leave came as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to freeze foreign aid and dismantle the agency in an effort to shrink the size of the federal workforce.
CNN has reached out to the State Department and USAID for comment.
The State Department ordered non-emergency US government personnel and their family members to leave the Democratic Republic of Congo amid escalating violence in the country and its capital city of Kinshasa in late January.
The US Embassy in the DRC – which is closed until further notice – advised US citizens in a security alert Tuesday “to shelter-in-place” due to protests in Kinshasa. The embassy urged citizens to “safely depart while commercial options are available.”
One official who was stationed in the DRC told CNN that employees who left most of their belongings in Kinshasa don’t know if their homes there will be looted or burned down.
Everyone thought “we can make this work until things calm down and we’ll go back, but that’s not an option anymore,” the official said. “It’s just the anxiety of we’ll lose our jobs and what we do won’t exist anymore.”
“The most important thing is that people understand we’re not criminals,” the official said, appearing to refer to Elon Musk’s characterization of the agency as “a criminal organization.” Musk leads the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency and has discussed shutting down USAID with Trump.
Worker worried US government ‘might fully abandon’ them in Kinshasa
One foreign service officer, identified in the lawsuit as Marcus Doe, said he feared for his and his family’s safety amid widespread protests in Kinshasa, including at the US embassy and outside his home on January 28.
He detailed challenges he and other staff faced – including one colleague whose house was set on fire and “lost all their belongings to looting” – and recounted being told that “any spending not directly approved” by the agency’s acting administrator could be considered defying the administration’s orders.
“I began to feel an intense sense of panic that my government might fully abandon Americans working for USAID in Kinshasa,” Marcus Doe said.
Marcus Doe said he and his colleagues were evacuated in small boats to Brazzaville, the capital of the Republic of Congo, without an approved waiver, which they eventually received. From there, they boarded a flight to Washington, where they were “allowed two nights in the airport hotel in which to figure out what we would do next,” according to the filing.
The employees, the lawsuit argued, were left to sort their housing, schooling plans for their children and “other support payments that would normally be owed to evacuated families.”
“To date we have still not received any of these payments,” Marcus Doe said in the filing, later adding: “The chaos of the Trump administration’s haphazard and extraconstitutional shutdown of USAID has caused my family and me immense emotional distress by contributing to the already intense sense of panic and uncertainty of the riots in Kinshasa.”
One pregnant foreign service health officer, identified as Ruth Doe in the filing, said she had access to limited water and received no food for 12 hours during her return to the US, and even though she had been “assured before evacuation” by the State Department that the agency would “help facilitate access” to prenatal care upon her return, that hasn’t been the case.
“Up to this point, the State Department Bureau of Medical Services has been unable to assist with arranging an appointment earlier than March 10,” Ruth Doe said, a date she said was “too late” according to a health plan determined with a doctor in Kinshasa.
Ruth Doe noted that she has traveled outside of Washington to receive care and has paid for it out-of-pocket. She hasn’t received reimbursement, she said in the filing, “to cover costs of accommodation, food, clothes and other necessities.”
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“In one week, I have spent almost $5,000 on these necessities,” Ruth Doe said. “We have received conflicting and unclear guidance on how to submit for reimbursement for these costs. Given the chaotic nature of the USAID shutdown, I am concerned that we will not receive timely reimbursement for these costs.”
Foreign service officer describes ‘mental and physical anguish’ of move
Another foreign service officer, identified in the filing as Nathan Doe, detailed in the suit “the trauma” of exiting Kinshasa in the middle of the night with three young children and having to leave his dog. Things, he said, haven’t gotten easier since arriving in Washington.
“To minimize the personal costs I was incurring,” Nathan Doe wrote in the filing, his family relocated to Michigan while he rented an apartment in Washington.
As of the time of the filing, Nathan Doe said he hadn’t received guidance on whether he would be reimbursed for the relocation and was told that “the people who coordinate evacuations for USAID were not around” due to being put on leave.
“As news of what was happening at USAID played on the headlines, and I tried to navigate work, our situation, etc, I received calls from my children asking if I still had a job and what we were going to do,” Nathan Doe said in the filing.
“My children were scared – not only had we just been through the trauma of being evacuated, they were scared for me, for us, that we were jobless,” he continued. “I am experiencing mental and physical anguish and exhaustion.”
Lawmaker slams move as ‘scandal’
Following the lawsuit from the American Foreign Service Association, Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer criticized Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the acting director of the agency, for the chaos of the foreign service employees’ return.
“This is an absolute scandal,” Beyer wrote in a post on X. “Trump and Marco Rubio abandoned American workers and their families abroad without approving grant waivers to provide their safe return to the United States.”
Beyer is the latest Democratic member of Congress to condemn the administration’s attempts to shutter the agency, withhold critical foreign aid and lessen key oversight.
Since taking office in January, Trump has fired a number of government watchdogs, including USAID’s inspector general a day after his office released a report critical of the administration’s efforts.
“Trump is causing chaos and confusion and in the case of USAID putting so many lives at risk,” Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, said on X last week.
“What is vitally important now is that we are not silent. We must call this out,” he continued.
CNN’s Jennifer Hansler and Katelyn Polantz contributed to this report.