ProPublica Reports Potential Legal Violations in Trump Administration’s USAID Takeover

It was the week President Donald Trump had signed a sweeping executive order shutting off the funding for foreign aid programs. Inside the U.S. Agency for International Development, his political appointees gathered shell-shocked senior staffers for private meetings to discuss the storied agency’s new reality.

Those staffers immediately raised objections. USAID’s programs were funded by Congress, and there were rules to follow before halting the payments, they said. Instead of reassuring them, the agency’s then-chief of staff, Matt Hopson, told staff that the White House did not plan on restarting most of the aid projects, according to two officials familiar with his comments.

Then Hopson added a stark coda: Trump could not have a higher tolerance for legal risk, the officials recalled. They understood the message to mean that the administration was willing to bend or even break laws to get what it wanted, and then take the fight to court. (Hopson, who resigned shortly after, did not respond to numerous phone calls and written messages requesting comment, and he turned away a reporter who came to his door.)

No president in history has unilaterally shuttered an agency formally enshrined in law — let alone deputized his wealthiest donor, Elon Musk, to carry out that task in his name with little oversight or accountability.

While USAID was first created by President John F. Kennedy in a 1961 executive order, Congress passed a law in 1998 to make it an “independent establishment” like others in the cabinet. Multiple administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, built USAID into an institution that has helped save millions of lives around the world, promoted U.S. interests in remote corners of the globe and employed thousands of Americans.

Now Trump and Musk have nearly destroyed it in three weeks. “It’s very hard not to see what’s going on as a constitutional crisis,” said Peter Shane, a law professor and one of the country’s leading scholars on the Constitution. “It’s very scary and tragic.”

Several experts consulted by ProPublica said the new administration may have broken the law almost immediately.

Around Jan. 31, Jason Gray, the acting administrator of USAID, passed along orders to the agency’s IT department to hand the entire digital network to Musk’s engineers, Luke Farritor and Gavin Kliger, among others. (Farritor, Kliger and Gray did not respond to requests for comment.)

From there, the engineers from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency quickly gained access to USAID’s financial system. On top of that, they became “super administrators” and had access to thousands of employees’ personal information, including their desktop files and emails, two USAID officials told ProPublica. The material also included information gathered during security clearance background checks, ranging from Social Security numbers and credit histories to home addresses.

“They had complete access to everything you could think of,” one official said. “The keys to the kingdom.”

By providing that access, USAID may have violated the Privacy Act of 1974, three experts on the law told ProPublica, regardless if the engineers were government employees at the time. The law requires consent from individuals before the government gives their private information to anyone.

“It is a catastrophic privacy and information security violation for a band of some government and some nongovernment personnel to barge into an agency and take over systems that contain personal information,” said John Davisson, director of litigation at Electronic Privacy Information Center and one of the country’s foremost authorities on the Privacy Act. Breaking the law can carry civil penalties and a minimum $1,000 fine for each violation if the victim can prove they were harmed, or much more if there were damages like loss of income.

With a series of executive orders, Trump established DOGE as a technology unit to improve IT and human resources functions at government agencies. He ordered his cabinet to give “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.” There are exemptions to the Privacy Act if those accessing the personal files have proper authorization, which includes special training and other rules for each set of records, and if they are conducting routine USAID business. But the three experts ProPublica consulted said that doesn’t appear to be the case here.

Davisson and others said that the law, which Congress passed with overwhelming support from both parties in the wake of Watergate, is meant to prevent presidents and others in high office from abusing their access to records for political ends. “The Privacy Act stands at the fountainhead of all this,” he added. “It stops that constitutional crisis from tipping off in the first place.”

For this story, ProPublica spoke with dozens of current and former USAID officials — many of whom requested anonymity because they feared retribution from the administration — and consulted the country’s leading authorities in government structure, federal law and the Constitution. While other media accounts have detailed several key moments in the blitzkrieg on USAID, this article provides new details about what Trump and Musk’s lieutenants did, what they said at the time and the objections that those within the government raised along the way.

In addition to the Privacy Act, experts told ProPublica the administration may have broken other laws while violating the Constitution itself, including the separation of powers and a president’s duty to faithfully execute the laws of the land. Failing to notify Congress before making major changes to the agency may have transgressed the Administrative Procedures Act, and freezing money appropriated by Congress for foreign aid could be in violation of the Impoundment Control Act.

Officials and experts have been closely watching the developments at USAID out of fear that Trump will deploy the same playbook to target other agencies he has publicly criticized, including the Department of Education.

The Republican-controlled Congress and Trump’s Department of Justice are unlikely to initiate investigations into allegations of wrongdoing by administration officials. In fact, the DOJ’s acting U.S. attorney in Washington, who was a lawyer for Jan. 6 defendants, signaled the very opposite in a recent series of letters to Musk, promising to investigate people who illegally impeded DOGE’s efforts or even those who just acted unethically “and chase them to the end of the Earth.” The DOJ did not respond to requests for comment.

That leaves lawsuits. On Thursday, federal worker groups sued the administration, accusing Trump of violating the Constitution by systematically disemboweling the agency without congressional approval. The next day, a Trump-appointed judge issued an injunction temporarily halting a major part of the administration’s efforts to reduce USAID’s more than 10,000-person workforce to a few hundred.

The administration argued during a hearing on Friday that the president has acted within his authority and continues to press its case. Trump and his advisers have long planned to assert in court that presidents have sweeping power to withhold funding from programs they dislike.

The lawsuit is so far the only substantive challenge Trump and Musk have faced since they began dismantling the agency. The judge’s ruling raises questions about what will happen if workers try to use USAID systems or buildings on Monday and are denied access.

“USAID is driving the radical left crazy, and there is nothing they can do about it,” Trump posted that same day, in all capital letters. “Close it down!”

The White House, USAID, the State Department and Musk did not respond to detailed lists of questions for this article. Previously, the administration has said, “Those leading this mission with Elon Musk are doing so in full compliance with federal law, appropriate security clearances, and as employees of the relevant agencies, not as outside advisors or entities.”

Over the past week, they have defended their assault on the agency by repeatedly amplifying the once-fringe sentiment that USAID had become a conduit for wasteful spending, fraud and corruption. The judge on Friday noted the administration provided no evidence to support those claims. But Musk and Trump have successfully fueled intense animosity toward the agency anyway, drumming up support for their effort to destroy it.

“We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the woodchipper,” Musk posted Monday on X. He is the richest man in the world, and his company SpaceX has received at least $15.4 billion in contracts over the past decade from the same government he has pledged to cleanse of wasteful spending.

“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk said on X. “Time for it to die.”

In the frenzied days after the arrival of Musk’s engineers at USAID, they used their access to the agency’s IT systems to begin identifying bureaus to cull and programs to terminate, USAID officials told ProPublica. They were working under the direction of another political appointee named Peter Marocco, the director of foreign affairs at the State Department.

Around that time, Marocco drafted the order that required American-funded aid projects around the world to close down. Marocco — who held a leadership role at USAID during Trump’s previous administration, where staff formally accused him of undermining the agency’s mission — did not respond to a list of questions from ProPublica.

After the stop-work orders began going out, Trump’s aides and the DOGE team then turned their focus to the agency’s workforce, which is staffed by civil servants, foreign service officers and contractors. Their initial step was to oust about 60 top supervisors, including the agency’s attorneys.

Next, the administration issued stop-work orders to staffing companies in Washington, effectively laying off hundreds of workers at once. Presidents generally have wide latitude to cancel such contracts, though there is typically a deliberative process. A move like that has never been done at this scale before, experts said. The workers who lost their jobs had no civil service protections.

But that still left the bulk of the direct government workforce. The administration managed to figure out a way to sideline civil servants without officially firing them: They placed hundreds of USAID’s career staff on indefinite administrative leave — with pay but without explanation — or simply locked them out of the agency systems. Some who received no notice used their personal email addresses to ask about their status and received a reply from human resources that they “have likely been placed on administrative leave,” without official confirmation, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

Taxpayers are currently paying for them not to work. That maneuver went at the heart of what was regarded as a sacrosanct tenet in American government: that civil servants remain outside partisan politics and can’t be fired without due process.

In another stunning move, Marocco recalled back home 1,400 of USAID’s overseas foreign service officers, who were supposed to have similar job protections.

“This is a masterpiece of administrative design,” said Donald Kettl, the former dean in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland who has written multiple books about government structure. “It’s unprecedented in its scale,” Kettl added. “Each of these things has been done individually, but never all rolled together as one package and focused strategically like a series of inter