Opinion: The dismantling of USAID and the firing of its staff was illegal

When Elon Musk and his youthful Department of Government Efficiency warriors boasted of taking a “chainsaw” to the U.S. Agency for International Development, they did more than destroy a government agency. They violated the law by summarily firing USAID’s public servants while placing millions of people around the world in mortal danger.

The thousands of public servants, fired without due process, care deeply about the agency’s mission. They did not deserve to be fired, nor did they deserve the efforts by the president himself to pile on by besmirching their reputation.

These actions have ramifications far beyond the impact on the individuals involved. They place every government employee at risk. Career professionals in the State Department and the intelligence community have also been summarily relieved of duty. 

If the courts fail to intervene, our nation will be sent hurling back in history to the era of the corrupt spoils system. That era ended when the Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 created a system based on merit. The law was updated in 1978 and it explicitly states that a public servant can only be removed if there is evidence of misconduct or poor performance — and only then after providing an opportunity for due process. 

The administration violated this act, and we are contesting these firings in federal court. One of us is an attorney who has represented federal employees for more than three decades. The other served as the head of USAID for over six years in the Clinton administration.

DOGE made no real effort to determine what would be lost, including millions of lives. And it showed no empathy for USAID’s career employees, a professional staff that had made the agency a global leader in development cooperation. 

USAID was irresponsibly removed from the world stage, and its employees were locked out. The president and Elon Musk labeled USAID’s professional public servants as “radical, leftist lunatics” and, with no evidence, stated that the agency was rife with “waste, fraud and mismanagement.”

Those labels were not mere insults. In a court of law, they are evidence.

The administration knew it could not fire career employees for their politics or for invented misconduct, so it dressed the purge as a “reorganization.” That was a façade.

The administration’s cover story has continued in court. Ironically, government lawyers now concede that no one was fired for misconduct or poor performance. That concession should end the matter. It is an admission that the lawful basis for these firings never existed. 

Instead of acknowledging an unlawful purge, the government recasts the firings as a reorganization, a label engineered to deny employees’ due process. The reorganization is a fiction. The record shows a coordinated mass firing driven by the very motive the law forbids.

The Merit Systems Protection Board, created to oversee and implement the law protecting the civil service, has been reshaped into a rubber stamp for executive excess. The New York Times reported that the White House pressed the board behind closed doors to adopt a sweeping theory of presidential power. 

In March, the board complied, breaking with decades of precedent to hold that Article II permits the president to remove career officials without due process. The decision is being appealed through the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Fired USAID employees want their procedural rights observed, the law followed and their losses reversed or compensated. They want a reaffirmation of the principle contained in the law that a federal employee be judged not on a perception of their beliefs, but on the actions they take.

That legal principle keeps public service from being reduced to peonage. In the end, this is a battle over whether the rule of law can be quietly replaced by the law of rule. 

J. Brian Atwood served as administrator of USAID from 1993 to 1999. Kevin Byrnes is an attorney who has represented federal employees for more than three decades.

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