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Pete Marocco Keeps Trying to Prevent Bill Cassidy from Learning the Truth about USAID

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There’s been an underlying tension throughout the five week DOGE effort to suffocate USAID (and with it, millions of people around the world).

After Trump halted foreign assistance, Republicans spoke up, often quietly; but John Cornyn did so publicly in a hearing, Jerry Moran did so as well (in part to support Kansas Ag markets), and Bill Cassidy did so on Xitter, demanding that lifesaving programs that Republicans have long supported be restarted.

Over and over again, Rubio and others insisted that they had reversed course and restarted life-saving programs.

But both in court filings and anonymous leaks, people who have previously implemented USAID’s work (virtually all have been put on leave or ousted) disputed that the programs had been restarted.

That led to this intemperate comment from Rubio, in which he claimed that if humanitarian programs had not been restarted, it was because their organizations themselves were incompetent.

“Right now, there is no USAID humanitarian assistance happening,” a current USAID official in the humanitarian division said. “There are waivers put in place by Secretary Rubio for emergency food assistance and a number of other sectors, but they are a fraud and a sham and intended to give the illusion of continuity, which is untrue.”

The official also slammed the waiver as unclear and largely unactionable because staff has been furloughed, as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency seized control of the agency.

“There is no staff left anymore to actually process waiver requests or to move money or to make awards or to do anything,” that official added. “We’ve ceased to exist.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday pushed back on nongovernmental organizations saying aid programs remained paused despite the waiver.

“I issued a blanket waiver that said if this is lifesaving programs, OK — if it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the freeze,” he said. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.

“And I would say if some organization is receiving funds from the United States and does not know how to apply a waiver, then I have real questions about the competence of that organization, or I wonder whether they’re deliberately sabotaging it for purposes of making a political point,” Rubio added.

Since then, USAID has twice silenced people continuing to debunk Rubio’s claim to have restored humanitarian care.

On February 13, USAID released a memo purporting to correct a “false narrative,” “clarifying that Global Health (GH) programming under the lifesaving humanitarian waiver has continued uninterrupted and was never paused” — effectively an order to adhere to the lie that Marco Rubio’s order had actually restored care.

Then, on Friday, USAID retaliated against the truth once again.

After the Acting Assistant Administrator for Global Health, Nicholas Enrich, issued a memo describing that such aide has never been restored, he was placed on paid leave.

The memo itself presents a detailed timeline of the various ways that aide was stalled and identifies a large number of specific documents where he memorialized each step of the process (the NYT, in its story on Enrich’s suspension, describes obtaining “a series of memos,” and I assume about five other outlets did too; it detailed and released a different memo cataloging likely impacts).

It details specific ways DOGE interfered with the release of lifesaving funds by restricting access to the financial systems needed to process waivers.

From the start, the Programs Group alerted Agency leadership that the lack of access to funds for implementing partners was a critical impediment to the ability to implement the waiver, as access to USAID financial systems (GLAAS and Phoenix) had been completely turned off by DOGE, per Bob Kingman and Daniel Gaush from Department of State ICASS Service Center, preventing the flow of any funds to implementing partners who were approved to implement LHA activities.

It describes how Christian nationalist Pete Marocco personally intervened to ensure that the Ebola relief Elon Musk claimed had been restored could not be restored if doing so involved the World Health Organization.

On February 18th, A-AA Enrich shared an action memo with Mark Lloyd recommending the utilization of an existing agreement with the WHO to utilize previously obligated funds to access a critical stockpile of PPE and lab supplies to support the Uganda Ebola outbreak response. While the activities would normally be covered in the regular process for the lifesaving humanitarian assistance waiver, this memo was drafted for approval from State/F Director Pete Marocco, given that the implementing partner of the agreement is WHO, the subject of a separate Executive Order. Mark Lloyd cleared the memo on Feb. 19th and it was sent forward for COS Borkert clearance and DFA Pete Marocco signature. COS Borkert specified that DFA Marocco would not sign the memo and would not agree to utilizing the agreement with WHO to access the PPE stockpile, and instead ordered A-AA Enrich to “pick up the PPE and deliver it to the necessary people and organizations in the region to respond to ongoing infectious disease outbreaks” without utilizing the agreement with WHO. DFA Marocco immediately responded to Borkert’s email, threatening to the jobs of GH staff if an alternate plan was not carried out immediately, directing political appointees Borkert, Lloyd and Meisburger to “take all necessary personnel actions in the event this is not completed in the next 12 hours.”

It continues the explanation of what happened with Ebola: six days later, political appointees specifically deprioritized getting Ebola funding (and that for other “neglected tropical diseases”) restarted.

On February 24, in an effort to move forward approvals and payments, the GH leadership team (A-AA Enrich and DAA Coles) walked through each waiver request with political leadership (Mark Lloyd and Tim Meisburger) in an effort to move forward approvals and payments. Political leadership provided guidance instructing GH to narrow the focus of its requests and to deprioritize activities related to neglected tropical diseases, Mpox, polio, Ebola, and any monitoring and surveillance activities, as those would not be approved.

Then, when State shut down virtually all foreign aide last week, they shut down (inadvertently, they claimed later) Ebola programs along with everything else.

Additionally, on February 26th, over 5,000 USAID awards were terminated globally; GH was not notified of this action before it happened. The terminated awards included almost all of the awards that were needed to implement lifesaving activities. A-AA Enrich informed COS Borkert, SBO Jackson, and AtAs Lloyd and Meisburger immediately of the grave impacts on lifesaving activities related to malaria, tuberculosis, and ebola. In an email following the February 26th terminations, DCOS Borkert indicated that the awards that were terminated should not have been, and had been terminated in error: “Please hold on these life saving programs and let us review in the morning. There is an acknowledgement some may have been sent out in error and we have the ability to rescind. We need to identify what those are.” [my emphasis]

The memo even details the genesis of the earlier, February 13 memo:

On February 13th, A-AA Enrich and Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator (SDAA) Julie Wallace were told by DCOS Borkert that there had been a false narrative spread in the media that GH had been told to pause on approving activities under the LHA waiver. A-AA Enrich stated that the Agency FO had in fact told GH to pause on further approvals, and reminded him of the previous day’s email. DCOS Borkert as well as other senior advisors, including AtA Tim Meisburger and Senior FO Advisor Laken Rapier shouted at A-AA Enrich that there had never been a pause, and instructed him to immediately draft another Info Memo to correct the “false narrative in the media that there had ever been a pause.”

On February 13th, GH circulated the memo from AtA Mark Lloyd “performing the duties of Assistant Administrator, Global Health” which among other things, reiterated GH’s approach to approval of waivers per the earlier February 4th memo.

While agency leadership previously told GH to only include requests for 30 days (articulated in the February 4th memo), GH was subsequently asked to shift to the original 90 days as articulated in the original waiver language. This was updated in the February 13th memo. [my emphasis]

As a whole, it provides this summary of who is responsible for preventing lifesaving programs from being sustained: political leadership and DOGE.

USAID’s failure to implement lifesaving humanitarian assistance under the waiver is the result of political leadership at USAID, the Department of State, and DOGE, who have created and continue to create intentional and/or unintentional obstacles that have wholly prevented implementation. These actions include the refusal to pay for assistance activities conducted or goods and services rendered, the blockage and restriction of access to USAID’s payment systems followed by the creation of new and ineffective processes for payments, the ever-changing guidance as to what qualifies as “lifesaving” and whose approval is needed in making that decision, and most recently, the sweeping terminations of the most critical implementing mechanisms necessary for providing lifesaving services. These actions individually and in combination have resulted in the U.S. Government’s failure to implement critical lifesaving activities. This will no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale. This memo serves to document the LHA waiver process and challenges encountered by the Bureau for Global Health to date, excluding PEPFAR.

In other words, Nicholas Enrich documented everything that had happened in spite of Rubio’s public order, and he was ousted.

While it’s not surprising, it’s not entirely clear whether there’s a specific reason he was ousted. That is, it’s not clear to me which facts people like Pete Marocco are trying to suppress:

  • The specific actions taken by DOGE to thwart Rubio’s order.
  • Marocco’s own specific complicity with decisions that will lead to the deaths of millions.
  • The sheer amount of advance warning that political leadership got
  • Rubio’s possible lack of involvement in things that Marocco has told courts he was personally involved in, which I wrote up here

But I can’t help but notice that Rubio responded to demands from Republican Senators that life-saving programs be restarted. And State has spent a good deal of time since then trying to hide the ways that people at USAID and State — people like Marocco and DOGE — directly undermined all efforts to do what Rubio assured Republican Senators was being done.

Are they trying to hide that people reporting to Rubio have directly undermined his order, the real insubordination that Marocco has blamed on USAID staffers? Or are they trying to hide that Rubio’s order was always a lie?

Whichever it is, Senators who were placated by Rubio’s past public claims are now on notice. They were lying to you. And while they were lying to you, food and medicine was spoiling and people were dying.

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Elon Musk’s AI-bola and Marco Rubio’s Very Busy Month

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Trump had a ritual humiliation session yesterday he billed as a Cabinet Meeting. One purpose of it was to perform complaisance with DOGE [sic]. Trump had Elon lie about his accomplishments and goal, and then invited Cabinet Members to speak up publicly about problems with him, which of course all declined to do.

And obviously, that can only be done with the support of everyone in this room. And I’d like to thank everyone for — for your support. Thank you very much this. This — this can only be done with — with your support.

So, this is — it’s really — DOGE is a support function for the president and for the — the agencies and departments to help achieve those savings and to effect- — effectively find 15 percent in reduction in fraud and — and waste.

And — and we bring the receipts. So, people say, like, “Well, is this real?” Just go to DOGE.gov. We l- — we — line item by line item, we specify each item. So — and w- — and I — I should say, we — also, we will make mistakes. We won’t be perfect. But when we make mistake, we’ll fix it very quickly.

So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled, very briefly, was Ebola — Ebola prevention. I think we all wanted Ebola prevention. So, we restored the Ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.

But we do need to move quickly if we’re — if we’re to achieve a trillion-dollar deficit reduction in tw- — in — in financial year 2026. It requires saving $4 billion per day, every day from now through the end of September. But we can do it, and we will do it.

Thank you.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, do you have any questions of Elon while we’re on the subject of DOGE? Because we’ll finish off with that. And if you would have any questions, please ask — you could ask me or Elon.

Go ahead, please.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. Musk. I just wanted to ask you, the — President Trump put out a Truth Social today saying that everybody in the Cabinet was — was happy with you. I just wondered if that — if you had heard otherwise, and if you had heard anything about members of the Cabinet who weren’t happy with the way things were going. And if so, what are you doing to address those — any dissatisfaction?

MR. MUSK: To the best of —

THE PRESIDENT: Hey, Elon, let the Cabinet speak just for a second. (Laughter.)

Is anybody unhappy with Elon? If you are, we’ll throw them out of here. (Laughter.) Is anybody unhappy? (Applause.)

They are — they have a lot of respect for Elon and that he’s doing this. And some disagree a little bit, but I will tell you, for the most part, I think everyone is not only happy, they’re thrilled.

The Ebola line — one Marco Rubio did not contest — got a ton of press.

But WaPo’s story — describing that Elon’s claimed restoration was a lie — got far less.

Yet current and former USAID officials said that Musk was wrong: USAID’s Ebola prevention efforts have been largely halted since Musk and his DOGE allies moved last month to gut the global-assistance agency and freeze its outgoing payments, they said. The teams and contractors that would be deployed to fight an Ebola outbreak have been dismantled, they added. While the Trump administration issued a waiver to allow USAID to respond to an Ebola outbreak in Uganda last month, partner organizations were not promptly paid for their work, and USAID’s own efforts were sharply curtailed compared to past efforts to fight Ebola outbreaks.

“There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” of Ebola and other diseases, said Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration and oversaw the agency’s response to health-care outbreaks.

Last month’s Ebola outbreak has now receded, but some former U.S. officials say that’s in part because of past investments in prevention efforts that helped position Uganda to respond — and that other countries remain far more vulnerable.

Bouri said her former USAID team of 60 people working on disease-response had been cut to about six staffers as of earlier this week. She called the recent USAID response to Uganda’s Ebola outbreak a “one-off,” far diminished from “the full suite” of activities that the agency historically would mount, such as ramping up efforts to monitor whether the disease had spread to neighboring countries.

“The full spectrum — the investments in disease surveillance, the investments in what we mobilize … moving commodities, supporting lab workers — that capacity is now a tenth of what it was,” Bouri said.

[snip]

“We have the programs and the people who were working on Ebola and other deadly-disease prevention capacity in other countries not able to do their jobs because their work is frozen, and many of the people have been put on administrative leave,” said Cameron, who worked on biosecurity efforts in the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations. “And we have a response that is, at best, less efficient, because the implementers are not able to get reliably paid.” [my emphasis]

This is consistent with what people have been claiming in court declarations (in this case from a Controller stationed overseas) for weeks: even where State/USAID claims to have sustained a program, it was nevertheless gutted through non-payment and staffing cuts.

8. Every single payment that I tried unsuccessfully to process after January 27 was for an expense incurred before January 20. Most of the payments I have been trying to process were for expenses incurred in November or December of 2024. These included large payments to partners who bill us every month for the work performed in the previous month, as well as smaller administrative items like cell phone and other utility payments, travel reimbursements, and rental payments.

9. On February 3, the situation changed yet again. As of that date, every time I tried to hit the “certify” button to begin a disbursement, I received an error message stating that I did not have authority to proceed. I contacted Phoenix Security to inquire if there was a technical problem in the system and was told “on Friday January 31, we were instructed to remove the ability to certify payments.” They did not indicate who instructed them, only stating “Unfortunately I am unable to reverse this decision.”

10. On February 5, all USAID controllers received another diplomatic cableindicating that USAID personnel could no longer process payments themselves but must request approval from a Senior Bureau Officer before forwarding the payment packages for processing. However, as of February 11, nobody can agree on who is the appropriate SBO for USAID payments and the State Department hasn’t processed a single payment based on the new procedure.

11. As of February 9, when I try to log into Phoenix, I receive a new error message stating that my sign-in attempt has failed. I have even less access to Phoenix after the February 7 court order than I did before that date.

[snip]

13. I have not been able to process payments under any of the waivers included in the January 24 cable, including legitimate expenses incurred prior to January 24 under existing awards or those for employee operating expenses. Though the waivers exist on paper, in reality all USAID funds have remained frozen because of technological barriers added to the system, I don’t know by whom. Phoenix will not let us disburse anything.

The people who pay the bills have all been forced out of payment systems. And it’s not clear whether DOGE [sic] broke the system or simply disabled it (a Matt Bai report I find suspect, but which plaintiffs have now cited in court filings, says it’s the latter).

The first of these USAID cases — on Judge Amir Ali’s order to halt freezes of such funding — landed before SCOTUS last night; the government’s request to vacate Ali’s order presents a wildly misleading description of the posture of the case.

It also wails mightily about plaintiffs’ request to conduct discovery, including by deposing Marco Rubio.

Worse, this order exposes the government to the risk of contempt proceedings and other sanctions. Agency leadership has determined that the ordered payments “cannot be accomplished in the time allotted by the” district court. App., infra, 97a. That risk is especially concerning because the district court appears poised to require mini-trials, discovery, and depositions of senior officials as to whether a host of foreign-aid decisions genuinely rested on the government’s conceded discretionary authority to terminate contracts and grants, or were instead supposed pretexts for a blanket foreign-aid cut that the district court considers unlawful. See id. at 141a (respondents’ proposed discovery plan) (requesting deposition of Secretary of State) Respondents are pressing even further, demanding discovery into personnel actions, payment-processing protocols, and other agency actions that have nothing to do with their original APA claims challenging a categorical funding pause. The threat of invasive discovery into senior officials’ subjective motivations only exacerbates the Article II harms inflicted by the court’s order.

Or perhaps it wails mightily about being called on a claim made below: That Marco Rubio has been personally involved in all this.

After Judge Ali first issued a TRO, State offered a new claimed basis for the freeze: that State was in the process of canceling the contracts via clauses within the contracts, applied individually. It claimed that the reduced staff of State reviewed every contract and decided whether to keep or eliminate it.

And according to multiple declarations from Pete Marocco, Marco Rubio was personally involved in all of that.

5. USAID led a rigorous multi-level review process that began with spreadsheets including each contract, grant, or funding instrument where each line of the spreadsheeting reflected one such agreement and included information about the recipient, the amount of the award, the subject matter, and a description of the project that often included the location of the project. Policy staff first performed a first line review to determine whether the individual agreement was in line with foreign policy priorities (and therefore could potentially be continued) or not (and presumptively could be terminated as inconsistent with Agency priorities and the national interest). Those recommendations were reviewed by a senior policy official to confirm that, for awards recommended for termination, that ending the program was consistent with the foreign policy of the United States and the operations and priorities of the Agency. The results of that review were routed to me for further review, including of institutional and diplomatic equities. As one example, a presumptively terminated agreement might be continued for a variety of foreign policy reasons, such as the location of the project or the general subject matter, or the judgment and foreign policy perspectives of the second line reviewer. Termination recommendations approved by me ultimately received the Secretary of State’s review. The Secretary of State’s personal involvement confirmed that termination decisions were taken with full visibility into the unique diplomatic, national security, and foreign policy interests at stake vis-à-vis foreign assistance programs. [my emphasis]

Just in time to rush this to the Supreme Court, Marocco claimed that Rubio had finished his decision-making.

Since last night when I executed a declaration, the process for individually reviewing each outstanding State Department grant and federal assistance award obligation has concluded. Secretary Rubio has now made a final decision with respect to each such award, affirmatively electing to either retain the award or terminate as inconsistent with the national interests and foreign policy of the United States. State is processing termination letters with the goal to reach substantial completion within the next 24-48 hours. Notification letters will be distributed for retained awards withing 2 weeks to take account of the overseas lag. In total, approximately 4,100 awards were terminated, and approximately 2,700 awards were retained. Of approximately 711 contracts originally paused, approximately 297 still need to be reviewed; the remainder have either been terminated or resumed. Defendants are committed to fully moving forward with the remaining awards and programs that Secretary Rubio has determined to retain.

A Contracting Officer submitted a declaration yesterday explaining how “implausible” the claim of personal involvement from Rubio is.

36. As a CO who manages a portfolio of less than 50 awards, the claims of “individual reviews” by Secretary Rubio are completely implausible. Contracts and awards are lengthy, technical, and complicated documents. They often include technical specifications that are dozens of pages long, as well as lengthy technical appendices. It would take a single person weeks and weeks of work to substantively review hundreds of contracts and awards, especially if that person was not already familiar with the programs at issue. For example, when the Agency asked COs to review the Scopes of Work and Program Descriptions contained in our awards to determine whether provisions regarding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion were incorporated, it took me and my team a week to review fewer than 50 awards. Not only did we have a team of people doing this work, but these were awards which I manage and have significant foundational knowledge about.

37. Beyond that, without consulting the COs and CORs/OARs who manage a specific contract or award, it would be impossible in most cases to understand whether a specific award could be terminated, effective immediately, without incurring even greater termination costs or causing even greater harms to the national interest or Agency priorities. For example, the COs and CORs/OARs have specific information about the status of ongoing work, whether immediate termination would incur sunk costs (for example, by allowing already-purchased food and medicine to expire), whether immediate termination would risk the health or safety of Agency personnel or implementing partners, among many other award-specific factors.

Rubio’s recent schedule makes that all the more implausible. For six days after the original stay, Rubio was traveling.

Secretary Rubio is on travel to Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates from February 13-19, 2025.

He had nothing but briefings on his schedule on February 20. But then he had two high level meetings on February 21. More high level meetings, including with President Macron, on Monday. A meeting with the Saudi Defense Minister Tuesday. And the aforementioned Cabinet Meeting yesterday, where Rubio didn’t speak up to correct Elon’s false claim about Ebola. Rubio did, however, blow off EU foreign policy minister Kaja Kallas yesterday, avoiding a discussion about Ukraine. Today, Keir Starmer visits.

Even with the canceled Kallas meeting, though, Rubio simply had no time —  especially not blocks of time that fell into the periods when Pete Marocco claims these decisions were made — to review the contracts in depth.

State needs to claim Rubio had personal involvement in rescinding these contracts. But it is virtually impossible that he did, much less that he had meaningful input on it.

What is far more likely is that Elon’s AI reviewed these contracts, and State is claiming that the work of that AI is instead the considered conclusion of the Senate-confirmed Secretary of State.

No wonder DOJ panicked when plaintiffs said they wanted to depose the people who made the decisions (a request Judge Ali has not endorsed).

Someone just shut down the bulk of foreign aid, purportedly with the personal involvement of the Secretary of the State. But that very same Secretary of State sat silent when Elon Musk falsely claimed that State was still funding Ebola prevention.

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DOGE2025 Is Getting the Catastrophic De-Ba’athification They Demanded

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There are two stories that attracted a lot of attention last week that offer the same lesson.

The first story is the report that after firing a bunch of people in charge of securing nuclear weapons, Trump’s minions have tried to rehire them, which was first reported by CNN.

Trump administration officials fired more than 300 staffers Thursday night at the National Nuclear Security Administration — the agency tasked with managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile — as part of broader Energy Department layoffs, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

Sources told CNN the officials did not seem to know this agency oversees America’s nuclear weapons.

An Energy Department spokesperson disputed the number of personnel affected, telling CNN that “less than 50 people” were “dismissed” from NNSA, and that the dismissed staffers “held primarily administrative and clerical roles.”

The agency began rescinding the terminations Friday morning.

The other is that the USAID is trying to prevent anyone still at the now-shuttered agency from telling the press that the life-saving grants for which Marco Rubio issued waivers have not actually been reauthorized to operate, which Greg Sargent focused on after John Hudson disclosed a memo making the order.

A new internal memo circulating inside the U.S. Agency for International Development neatly captures this split. The Washington Post reports that the memo warns USAID employees not to communicate with the press about the shocking disruptions in humanitarian assistance that are being caused by the Trump-Musk attack on the agency, which are already producing horrific consequences. The memo said this transgression might be met with “dismissal.”

The memo claims to be correcting a “false narrative in the press” about the disruptions to that assistance. It notes that Secretary of State Marco Rubio last month issued a waiver to “lifesaving humanitarian assistance,” allowing it to continue despite the Trump-Musk freeze in agency spending. This has meant that this assistance has “continued uninterrupted and has never paused,” the memo claims, while warning recipients against any “unauthorized external engagement with the press.”

Now, at one level, this chaos is happening because many of the people enacting these cuts are DOGE boys with no idea what they’re looking at. Don Moynihan (who is an indispensable source on the policy issues of all this) uses the nukes case as one example to make the same point: because ignorant people were making the firing decisions, they eliminated a slew of critical positions.

Musk’s management style when it comes to downsizing has been to cut to the bone, and then hire back if he fired too many. This philosophy might make sense if you are running a social media company where its not a big deal if Twitter goes down for a couple of hours. It makes less sense where the a) failure of government systems has big and sometimes irrevocable costs, and b) it is not easy to replace expertise once you have eliminated it. On the latter point, many public jobs take time to develop knowledge of the policy domain, organizational practice and tasks. Those are not qualities that are easy to rebuild if you just spent a year training a new employee who has now been fired.

[snip]

Let me note that I feel like this lesson should not be necessary. We should not need to spell this one out. One measure of the collapse of the Soviet Union was that they could no longer afford to keep staff to secure nuclear warheads. Why would the US voluntarily downgrade it’s own capacity to manage its nuclear arsenal? And yet, DOGE fired 1 in 5 federal staff that manage the nation’s nuclear stockpile.

Have you heard about the National Nuclear Security Administration before? Probably not. It’s one of those jobs that we hopefully never need to think about, because if we do that means something has gone badly wrong. But it’s also one of those jobs that someone needs to ensure is staffed appropriately to make sure something does not go badly wrong. As a citizen, its fine if you are not aware of NNSA, but bear in mind that when the right attacks wasteful bureaucracy, these sort of invisible agencies performing important tasks are some of what they are talking about.

Apparently DOGE does not know much about the NNSA either. To be fair, when you have zero experience of government, why should you? But if you have zero experience of government, you should also probably not be in the position of firing 300 of the guys who take care of the nukes. CNN reported that the fired staffers included “staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons.”

After enough members of Congress got upset, the firings were rescinded. Just one problem. DOGE made the firings effective the day they were received (no notice, not severance), immediately shutting down access to government emails. And they did not have contact information to tell NNSA employees they were unfired.

[snip]

Under Biden, the IRS had received long-awaited and much needed funds that allowed it to rebuild after a period of sustained downsizing, and was becoming more effective.
The IRS represented a very simple test for the credibility of DOGE. Was it really interested in efficiency and state capacity? If so, you support the tax enforcement, the biggest return on investment in government, generating somewhere between $5-9 for every additional $1 spent on enforcement.

Or did DOGE want to minimize parts of the state that bothered billionaires?

We have our answer. In the middle of tax season, the IRS was told to lay off thousands of workers hired as part of the rebuilding project.

Part of the DOGE hype is that after they fire everyone, they will figure out better ways to do the job using, uh, AI and such. But there is no second act where it gets better. They don’t have a plan to fix what they are breaking because they don’t understand or care about the damage they are doing. Breaking government is the point. It is not as if DOGE has some magical IRS plan up their sleeve. There is no plan.

The story is not just that these DOGE boys have no idea what they’re looking at, being so incompetent that the word “nuclear” doesn’t even spark their interest.

It’s that after ideologues fire competent bureaucrats, they’re often left without a way to turn the bureaucracy back on again when they realize they actually needed it.

Take the first example, the people ensuring the security of America’s nuclear arsenal. As NBC followed up, after Congressional lobbying and a press campaign convinced someone to reverse the NNSA firings, the DOGE boys had no easy way to contact those who had been fired to order them to return to work.

National Nuclear Security Administration officials on Friday attempted to notify some employees who had been let go the day before that they are now due to be reinstated — but they struggled to find them because they didn’t have their new contact information.

In an email sent to employees at NNSA and obtained by NBC News, officials wrote, “The termination letters for some NNSA probationary employees are being rescinded, but we do not have a good way to get in touch with those personnel.”

AP has a follow-up noting — among other things — that the key jobs were in Texas, Eastern Washington, South Carolina, and Tennessee. These are not just crucial jobs for national security, but many of them represent job losses in Republican areas.

Something similar has happened at USAID.

It shouldn’t have, because there, one key player shutting down the agency, Pete Marocco, actually worked at USAID in the first Trump term. The declaration he has submitted in multiple suits admitted he shut down already-committed funds on his own authority, without Marco Rubio’s involvement. He described that after he started firing administrators, administrators were unable to answer his questions, which he deemed insubordinate rather than just a natural consequence of firing the people who might be able to answer his questions. Nevertheless, his inability to get answers is what he used to justifying shutting everything down.

As a former USAID staffer, Marocco should have the competence to know better — but ProPublica describes why his own past insubordination may be a better explanation for his war against the agency.

The flood of USAID lawsuits has produced an associated flood of sworn declarations that describe, from the perspective of people involved, what is really happening.

For example, as part of a suit by the American Foreign Services Association, a program officer described that, even though she supervises 30 emergency food assistance programs, she had not (as of February 7) been able to get a waiver for any of them, resulting in food rotting in warehouses.

For example, while it was announced that most USAID funding would be frozen, a waiver is supposed to be available for life-saving humanitarian assistance, which would apply to the more than 30 emergency food assistance programs I support. Without my knowledge, the partners I manage, nearly all of which work on lifesaving, emergency food assistance, were sent email notices from their Agreement Officers directing them to fully or partially stop their work. As an Agreement Officer Representative for these awards, I am required to be copied on any communications, which never happened. While I tried to obtain a waiver for the programs I manage, there was no guidance on the process by which our patterns could obtain a waiver and none of the programs were ever formally approved to keep running. I am skeptical that the waiver actually exists. At this point, if a waiver does in fact exist, the implementation has been so chaotic with so many employees either furloughed or on administrative leave that as a practical matter it isn’t available to those who need it. While the programs I manage are under a stop work order, food commodities sit in warehouses rotting and scheduled food distributions to vulnerable populations do not happen and children miss follow-up appointments for treatment of severe malnutrition.

A contracting officer’s declaration in the same suit described the conflicting management orders, the lack of access to experts, and the technical access limits that made it impossible to implement the waiver program.

As a Contracting Officer, some of the awards on this list were perplexing and the sudden push to do this while nearly all of our counterparts with technical knowledge about where awards were in the waiver process and what the programmatic purpose of each award were locked out of the network and suspected to be on administrative leave.

There was an approved tab with one single PEPFAR award despite the fact that the Agency has many different PEPFAR awards and we were told a waiver had been granted for PEPFAR and Emergency Food Assistance. There were no Emergency Food Assistance awards on the approved tab. Concerns were raised by Contracting Officers and Regional Legal Officers alike who replied all to Matthew’s email with concerns. We asked for clarification on the reason for the contract terminations and for confirmation that OAA had consulted with OMB and made a determination consistent with the Executive Order on realigning foreign aid. If these awards had not received such a determination, the termination would be in violation of the executive order. We received no reply to those questions. A contracting officer replied all to the email asking if Congressional notification had been made on these terminations and noted that Congressional notification is required when a termination will involve reduction in employment of 100 or more contractor employees which these actions would likely result. It was also asked if USAID had taken steps to adhere to our Congressionally authorized and funded responsibilities on these terminations.

These emails received no reply from OAA leadership and our working level supervisors urged us to proceed with the terminations and meet the deadlines.

Subsequently at approximately 6PM that same day, Nadeem Shah, Deputy Director of Washington Operations for OAA, sent around an email entitled “PLEASE PAUSE ALL AWARD TERMINATIONS” asking staff to hold off on all award terminations in Matthew’s previous email.

[snip]

When my technical bureau’s access was supposedly restored yesterday, we quickly discovered that they do not have access to our Agency File system called ‘ASIST’ nor do they have access to our financial system in direct violation of the TRO issued the night of February 7, 2025. This makes it incredibly hard for them to provide programmatic information to help with the program review process. To date, the technical bureaus have not had any opportunity to provide any inputs or relevant information for the programmatic review. I am extremely concerned that Agency and State Dept leadership do not have the relevant information needed to thoroughly evaluate programming

Importantly, this seems to suggest that PEPFAR — one of the programs that Republicans have vociferously championed — was only partly restored because someone didn’t understand the multiple programs it involves.

Another staffer in the same AFSA lawsuit, a controller, described how bureaucratic and technical problems have prevented people from disbursing funds even for the programs that have gotten waivers.

9. On February 3, the situation changed yet again. As of that date, every time I tried to hit the “certify” button to begin a disbursement, I received an error message stating that I did not have authority to proceed. I contacted Phoenix Security to inquire if there was a technical problem in the system and was told “on Friday January 31, we were instructed to remove the ability to certify payments.” They did not indicate who instructed them, only stating “Unfortunately I am unable to reverse this decision.”

10. On February 5, all USAID controllers received another diplomatic cable indicating that USAID personnel could no longer process payments themselves but must request approval from a Senior Bureau Officer before forwarding the payment packages for processing. However, as of February 11, nobody can agree on who is the appropriate SBO for USAID payments and the State Department hasn’t processed a single payment based on the new procedure.

11. As of February 9, when I try to log into Phoenix, I receive a new error message stating that my sign-in attempt has failed. I have even less access to Phoenix after the February 7 court order than I did before that date.

12. I have been in touch with many colleagues and all report the same experience. To my knowledge, worldwide there are no USAID financial management personnel, including controllers, that can access Phoenix.

13. I have not been able to process payments under any of the waivers included in the January 24 cable, including legitimate expenses incurred prior to January 24 under existing awards or those for employee operating expenses. Though the waivers exist on paper, in reality all USAID funds have remained frozen because of technological barriers added to the system, I don’t know by whom. Phoenix will not let us disburse anything.

In a different USAID-related lawsuit by contract recipients, the head of a faith-based non-profit, Mark Hetfield, described how attempts to get waivers looked in practice.

11. On February 3, 2025, HIAS also received a revised “Notice of Suspension” for its work in Chad from PRM via email stating that HIAS should stop all work under the grant unless exempted from suspension as “existing life-saving humanitarian assistance” defined by the Department as “core life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance.” See February 3, 2025, Letter from Philip Denino, PRM Grants Officer, annexed to this declaration as Exhibit F. In his cover email, Mr. Denino stated that “PRM will follow up shortly to set up a meeting to discuss the specific HIAS programming in Chad that falls under the exemption for life-saving humanitarian assistance.” See February 3, 2025, Email from Philip Denino, annexed to this declaration as Exhibit G. That meeting with PRM took place the next day, February 4, during which HIAS and PRM staff discussed what activities would qualify as “lifesaving humanitarian assistance.” PRM asked HIAS to provide an overview of HIAS’ activities conducted in Chad pursuant to the award that HIAS deemed exempt from the 90-day suspension. HIAS prepared and sent the requested overview. See February 7, 2025, Email from Guillermo Birmingham to Philip Denino, annexed to this declaration as Exhibit H. However, after the meeting, Mr. Denino sent a follow up email indicating they he had been “given guidance that PRM will not be providing any additional information regarding the application of the waivers/exemptions to activities” and that he could only refer us to the revised Suspension Memo to guide us in resuming activities. See February 4, 2025, Email from Philip Denino to Guillermo Birmingham, annexed to this declaration as Exhibit I. Nor would we be able to receive funds to continue work under a waiver/exemption since all federal government payment portals were and are not functioning, making the purported waiver/exemption process cited in PRM’s revised Notice of Suspension useless.

12. On February 10, HIAS’ Chief Financial Officer again asked PRM for guidance on what would qualify as an emergency exemption from the indefinite suspension of PRM funds. In response, PRM’s Grants Officer stated, “I can’t provide guidance. It was determined much higher than me.” HIAS’ CFO then expressed concern to PRM that the lack of guidance coupled with the inability of aid organizations to access payments is making it impossible for organizations to provide the lifesaving humanitarian services identified by PRM as exempt in their revised Suspension Notice. See February 10, 2025, Email exchange between Guillermo Birmingham and Philip Denino, annexed to this declaration as Exhibit J.

He included a stack of backup, including the email instructing that Comptrollers were instructed not to provide any guidance on what was considered life-saving programming covered by the waivers.

Ultimately, USAID simply refused to tell grant recipients whether they had received a waiver or not, and if so for which parts of their programming. And it wouldn’t matter anyway because the computer systems on which it all runs are not functioning. State doesn’t want employees telling the press that life-saving grants haven’t been resumed, because Marco Rubio doesn’t want to confess to Republicans that he failed to deliver what he promised them.

Whether intentional at USAID or the inevitable outcome of arbitrary ignorance, the effect is the same.

It’s not just that the DOGE2025 attack on government has destroyed critical expertise. But absent that expertise, Trump’s minions are finding it difficult to reverse the ill effects of their initial assault, because the initial damage they do to both systems and expertise makes it far harder to reverse their initial failures.

Last July, JD Vance envisioned this process as a de-Ba’athification, which he imagined was targeted at a caricature of liberal culture, but which in reality targeted the civil service. Someone who served in Iraq really did set out to recreate the same insanely stupid policy decision that made Iraq a decade-long clusterfuck — he really did set out to launch that same kind of attack on his own government.

We’ve seen this movie before. It was, perhaps, Americas biggest failure ever.

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