Former USAID employees on cuts: 'We are going to put lives in jeopardy'

Two former employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), who were fired last month, told CNN the 83 percent spending cuts Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Monday would "put lives in jeopardy."

“I think that when we’re talking about lifesaving aid programs, saying we’re going to cut 83 percent of USAID’s program, we are going to put lives in jeopardy," Linden Yee, a former employee of the agency, told CNN on Monday.

"There’s no way that is not going to harm millions of people’s lives,” she added.

Rubio announced the scale of the expected cuts to USAID earlier in the morning.

“After a 6 week review we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID,” Rubio wrote on the social platform X.

Rubio said the canceled commitments in some cases “harmed” the U.S. national interest.

“The 5,200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States,” he said.

Yee and Benjamin Thompson, another former USAID employee, pushed back on the suggestion that their work at USAID negatively affected American interests.

“The underlying assumption to Rubio’s statement is that these programs are full of what they’re referring to as ‘waste, fraud and abuse.’ If that were actually the case, if that were their genuine intention, they would’ve gone about this in a very different way," Thompson said.

"They would’ve worked with existing personnel, they would have worked with the inspector general to review our programs, our funding streams,” he added.

Yee and Thompson, who were let go last month as part of the Trump administration's mass firings at the foreign aid agency, had worked at USAID for two years and are engaged to be married.

Yee said her contract was terminated with only five minutes' notice, leaving her no time to inform her close colleagues, which resulted in several tasks being left incomplete.

“It is not the way we would have wanted to go about closing these programs down,” she added.

According to Thompson, he was given a brief time to collect his belongings from his office as security personnel looked on.

“It was very clearly meant to intimidate, to threaten, which just seemed wildly out of place and inappropriate,” he said.

Meanwhile, Friends of USAID, a volunteer-run newsletter supported by some USAID staff, accused the administration of failing to conduct a proper review of the programs it is cutting.

“USAID Missions around the world spent the weekend working around the clock — at the Administration’s request — drafting program descriptions to explain what we do and why it matters. We woke up Monday morning to find out the decisions have already been made, before we ever had a chance to turn anything in,” the authors wrote.

“Please explain how this is a fair, transparent, or thorough review."

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