The Trump administration has placed more than 50 career civil servants and foreign service officers on administrative leave after receiving information that they may have been conspiring to circumvent Trump’s executive orders requiring the halting of federal aid funds to overseas programs and all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs within the agency.

Jason Gray, acting agency administrator, placed the individuals in question on paid administrative leave so he can conduct an investigation into the matter, according to an agency-wide email Gray sent Monday afternoon and first obtained by RealClearPolitics.

“We’ve identified several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the President’s Executive Orders and the mandate from the American people,” Gray, wrote. “As a result, we have decided to put a number of USAID employees on administrative leave with full pay and benefits until further notice while we complete our analysis of these actions.”

Senior leaders in bureaus across the agency were removed, as well as several senior attorneys, sources told RCP. Several hundred contractors based in Washington and elsewhere also were laid off, according to the Associated Press.

The actions follow Trump’s executive order last week that directed a 90-day pause on most U.S. foreign assistance disbursed through the State Department. During his first week in office, Trump also signed an executive order directing all departments and agencies to end all discriminatory preferences, including DEI programs.

USAID coordinates foreign aid, disaster relief, and humanitarian development around the world with the goals of ending poverty and strengthening elections and democratic governance to “advance a free, peaceful and prosperous world,” according to its website. 

Although USAID is an independent agency with its own leadership, it often operates under directives from the secretary of state. During Trump’s first term, agency career officials clashed with presidential appointees on everything from allowing faith-based groups to receive grants to help re-build Christian and Yazidi areas in Iraq devastated by ISIS to efforts to eliminate waste and abuse.

During Trump’s first term, USAID officials tried to sabotage many of the administration’s initiatives and undermine his appointees.

After Biden won the White House in 2020, he implemented a directive mandating DEI initiatives across the federal government and abandoned Trump’s efforts to promote religious freedom around the world in favor of broader human rights goals. Those initiatives included a focus on immigrants and refugees, victims of human trafficking, LGBQ+ initiatives, and women’s access to birth control and other reproductive options.

Those moves came after then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a shift away from religious freedom to far broader goals. In making that shift, Blinken faulted the Trump administration for what he characterized as an “unbalanced” emphasis on religious liberty over other concerns.

“Human rights are also co-equal. There is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others,” Blinken said in early 2021, during remarks at the State Department’s release of its 45^th annual report on the status of human rights around the world. “At my confirmation hearing, I promised that the Biden-Harris administration would repudiate those unbalanced views. We do so decisively today,” he said.

The shift in priorities earned strong rebukes from several Republican members of Congress, including Sen. Ted Cruz.

The Texas Republican, an outspoken advocate for religious liberty at home and abroad, was so concerned about USAID’s hold on key projects that he submitted written questions on the topic to USAID Administrator Samantha Power after her first confirmation hearing.

Early in the Biden administration, others pointed to an X.com post by the USAID Middle East bureau highlighting women’s history month and a video of an interview with Rita Stephen. According to the post, Stephen at the time served as a regional coordinator and liaison for the office of “Equity and Diverse Communities in the Middle East and North Africa,” an apparent purging of the word “religious” from the title. During the first Trump term, the office was known as the “Religious and Ethnic Communities Office.”

Several Trump appointees at the agency also complained of aggressive retaliation for efforts to carry out Trump directives or report waste and abuse. Mark Moyar, a historian and conservative national security think tank official, went to work at USAID and quickly reported multiple allegations of rampant government waste, fraud, and abuse. In response, USAID officials suspended (and threatened to revoke) his security clearance and forced him to resign, according to Moyar’s book about his experience, “Masters of Corruption: How the Federal Bureaucracy Sabotaged the Trump Presidency.”

Sean Bigley, a lawyer who was specializing in security clearance retaliation cases at the time, told RCP what happened to Moyar at USAID “is shady as hell.”

Bigley, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and in numerous media interviews, had voiced deep concern that career officials had weaponized clearances to unfairly target and oust Trump appointees in retaliation or simply because of political differences, something he seldom saw during the Obama administration.

For most of the Trump administration, USAID bureaucrats also tried to thwart a Trump executive order to assist Christian and Yazidi communities in Iraq ravaged by ISIS. Months after the executive action, Catholic archbishops in Iraq complained that not only had the aid not yet arrived but also that Christians’ and Yazidis’ plights had actually gotten worse.

Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican and leading human-rights activist in Congress, who at the time chaired the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that oversees international organizations, and Robert McFarlane, President Reagan’s national security adviser, penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday complaining about the delay in funds provided to faith-based groups to complete the rebuilding of Christian and Yazidi communities in Iraq.

USAID officials had blocked proposals totaling $5 million from two groups, the Nineveh Reconstruction Committee and Catholic University in Erbil, Smith and McFarlane wrote.