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The Trump administration said Tuesday that it is pulling almost all U.S. Agency for International Development workers off the job and out of the field worldwide, moving to all but end a six-decade mission to shore up American security by fighting starvation, funding education, and working to end epidemics.The administration notified USAID workers in emails and a notice posted online, the latest in a sudden dismantling of the aid agency by returning political appointees from President Donald Trump’s first term and billionaire Elon Musk’s government-efficiency teams who call much of the spending on programs overseas wasteful.The order takes effect just before midnight Friday and gives direct hires of the agency overseasmany of whom have been frantically packing up households in expectation of the announcement30 days to return home unless they are deemed essential. Contractors not determined to be essential also would be fired, the notice said.The move had been rumored for several days and was the most extreme of several proposals considered for consolidating the agency into the State Department. Other options had included closures of smaller USAID missions and partial closures of larger ones.Thousands of USAID employees already had been laid off and programs worldwide shut down after Trump, a Republican, imposed a sweeping freeze on foreign assistance. Despite outcry from Democratic lawmakers, the aid agency has been a special target as the new administration and Musk’s budget-slashing Department of Government Efficiency look to shrink the federal government.They have ordered a spending stop that has paralyzed U.S.-funded aid and development work around the world, gutted the senior leadership and workforce with furloughs and firings, and closed Washington headquarters to staffers Monday. Lawmakers said the agency’s computer servers were carted away.“Spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,” Musk boasted on X.The mass removal of thousands of staffers overseas and in Washington would doom billions of dollars in projects in some 120 countries, including security assistance to partners such as Ukraine as well as development work for clean water, job training and education, including for schoolgirls under Taliban rule in Afghanistan.The U.S. is the world’s largest humanitarian donor by far. It spends less than 1% of its budget on foreign assistance, a smaller share of its budget than some countries.Health programs like those credited with helping end polio and smallpox epidemics and an acclaimed HIV/AIDS program that saved more than 20 million lives in Africa already have stopped. So have monitoring and deployments of rapid-response teams for contagious diseases such as an Ebola outbreak in Uganda.Hundreds of millions of dollars of food and medication already delivered by U.S. companies are sitting in ports because of the administration’s sudden shutdown of the agency.Democratic lawmakers and others say the USAID is enshrined in legislation as an independent agency, and cannot be shut down without congressional approval. Supporters of USAID from both political parties say its work overseas is essential to countering the influence of Russia, China, and other adversaries and rivals abroad, and to cementing alliances and partnerships.The decision to withdraw direct-hire staff and their families earlier than their planned departures will likely cost the government tens of millions of dollars in travel and relocation costs.Staff being placed on leave include both foreign and civil service officers who have legal protection against arbitrary dismissal and being placed on leave without reason.The American Foreign Service Association, the union which represents U.S. diplomats, sent a notice to its members denouncing the decision and saying it was preparing legal action to counter or halt it.Locally employed USAID staff, however, do not have much recourse and were excluded from the federal government’s voluntary buyout offer.USAID staffers and families faced wrenching decisions as the rumored order loomed, including whether to pull children out of school midyear. Some gave away pet cats and dogs, fearing the Trump administration would not give them time to complete the paperwork to bring the animals with them.Tuesday’s notice said it would consider case-by-case exceptions for those needing more time. But with most of the agency’s staff soon off the job, it was unclear who would process such claims or other paperwork needed for the mass removal of thousands of overseas staffers.Musk’s teams had taken USAID’s website offline over the weekend and it came back online Tuesday night, with the notice of recall or termination for global staffers its sole post.The announcement came as Secretary of State Marco Rubio was on a five-nation tour of Central America and met with embassy and USAID staff at two of the region’s largest USAID missions: El Salvador and Guatemala on Monday and Tuesday.Journalists accompanying Rubio were not allowed to witness the so-called “meet and greet” sessions in those two countries, but had been allowed in for a similar event in Panama on Sunday in which Rubio praised employees, particularly locals, for their dedication and service.At a news conference earlier Tuesday, Rubio said he has “long supported foreign aid. I continue to support foreign aid. But foreign aid is not charity.” He noted that every dollar the U.S. spends must advance its national interests.The online notice says those who will be exempted from leave include staffers responsible for “mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs” and would be informed by Thursday afternoon.“Thank you for your service,” the notice concluded. Lee reported from Guatemala City. Elen Knickmeyer and Matthew Lee, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
Over the first 16 days of the Trump administration, Elon Musk and a small team at the “Department of Government Efficiency” has systematically started to dismantle the agencies that keep the country running. DOGE workers have taken multiple actions that experts say are illegal, from accessing private taxpayer data to pushing workers out of their jobs. Musk (and Trump’s) power grab has arguably created a constitutional crisisand seems likely to only get worse. “This is totally outside the bounds of the way the federal government should operate, and is required by law to operate,” says says John Davisson, director of litigation and senior counsel at the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center. So far, no one has stopped Musk. But it’s possible that lawsuits that are now underway could succeed. Musk is behind a push to try to get two million federal workers to quit their jobsincluding air traffic controllers, in an email that went out the day after a plane crash in D.C. killed 67 people. (This happened despite the fact that 90% of airports currently have a shortage of workers.) Only after a second plane crashed in Philadelphia, a day later, were air traffic controllers exempted from the general effort to try to get federal employees to take buyouts. An email sent by DOGE officials claimed that workers who took buyouts would get paid through September if they agreed to quit this month. As of Tuesday, at least 20,000 workers had agreed to leavebut the government doesnt have the funding to pay them, and DOGE doesn’t legally have the authority to make the buyout offer in the first place. Meanwhile, some roles that cover vital day-to-day work will go unfilled. Some agencies, like the Justice Department and FBI, have seen firings that are also likely illegal. Musks team also reportedly accessed classified information at USAID, the international aid agency, without the proper clearance; the security officers who tried to stop them were put on leave. Musk later said that he spent the weekend putting USAID into the wood chipper, and that the humanitarian agency, which has saved millions of lives, was a criminal organization and it was time for it to die. On Friday, USAID announced that its 10,000 employees will be put on administrative leave. DOGE also reportedly accessed private Treasury payment systems that contain Americans personal data, including tax information and social security numbers, despite potential conflicts of interest with his own businesses and the risk that the data could fall into the wrong hands. Another career official was placed on leave for trying to prevent Musk’s teamincluding some college-age programmers with no government experiencefrom seeing the data. That band of personnel is barreling in to agencies across the government, upending security and privacy and confidentiality protections and established procedures, to gain access to databases that in many cases contain vast amounts of sensitive personal information from the general public and from federal employees, says Davisson. And they are doing this to remake the federal government in their preferred manner, regardless of what Congress has ordained. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks to a crowd gathered in front of the U.S. Treasury Department in protest of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency on February 4, 2025. [Photo: Anna Rose Layden/Getty Images] ‘The approach seems to be to move fast and break things, including the law’ Much of DOGEs work is illegal, experts say. “Basically, the approach seems to be to move fast and break things, including the law,” says Laura Dickinson, a law professor at the George Washington University Law School who focuses on national security and human rights. “A lot of what his team is doing appears to be illegal, and they’re putting the burden of challenging this on people that are harmed.” DOGE is potentially breaking multiple laws. Its access to taxpayer information, for example, “is very likely illegal under the Privacy Act and under aspects of the Internal Revenue Code, which guarantee confidentiality of information,” Dickinson says. “There’s also a case to be made that it could violate the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, which has some cybersecurity protection. The issue here is just that that personal data is very closely regulatedwho can have access to it, for privacy reasons, but also for security reasons. It’s really quite dangerous to kind of change the process for handling that data. There could be greater exposure to hackers and others.” In the case of USAID, because it was established by Congress, Musk and Trump don’t get to choose whether or not it survives. Theres no current authority for this president, or any president, to abolish USAID, says David Super, a law professor at Georgetown University with expertise in administrative and constitutional law. So hes flatly disregarding a binding statute of Congress. The administration has folded USAID into the State Department, something that it also doesn’t have the authority to do. Now Musk’s team is also targeting the Department of Education, which Trump reportedly wants to shut down via executive order. The DOGE team also showed up at the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on Tuesday, reportedly accessing computer systems with more confidential information. Project 2025 called for the agency to be “broken up and downsized.” Like USAID, the president doesn’t have the legal authority to close either department. DOGE also doesnt have the authority to tell employees to quit. Federal law does allow for buyouts, but only if an agency decides that it wants to staff to leave early and submits a plan to the Office of Personnel Management and gets the plan aproved. DOGE has created something entirely different, without any legal authority, in which they are effectively promising federal employees that they will be paid for doing no work between now and the end of September, Super says. Making such a promise is illegal, and they also have no authority to keep the promise even if they wanted to. (Unions representing federal workers have warned that the buyout offers are scams, and that workers are unlikely to actually get paid.) Lawsuits are underway Because the work is illegal, lawsuits are part of the answer. Federal employee unions sued the Trump administration on Tuesday for allowing DOGE access to sensitive data. The largest union also sued over the buyout offers, saying that the policy is “pretext for removing and replacing government workers on an ideological basis.” Public Citizen, an advocacy group, is suing over DOGE’s violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, a law that requires public meetings and more transparency over what the government does. More lawsuits will come. USAID workers could sue, and so could recipients of funding from USAID, including contractors who work for the agency. Anyone who’s affected, including citizens, could potentially sue. “For example, if there is someone who is signed up to get extension courses from the Agriculture Department and those courses are cut off because of the illegal change in the job responsibilities of the people who were supposed to teach that course, people could absolutely sue,” says Super. It’s possible that some court cases could move quickly, in the same way that a court almost immediately blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze all federal funding. “That doesn’t mean that there won’t be serious harm,” Super says. “We’ve heard of AIDS treatment programs overseas and other things that desperately need continuity that have been shut down. All the people whose lives have been upendedpeople who are wondering how they’re going to make their mortgage, having taken jobs with the federal government often for less than the private sector would offer, expecting the job security that federal law provides themnow seeing their lives upset.” Still, he says “lawsuits can stop these things quite quickly.” Though this also requires the Trump administration obeying the rulings of the court. Congress also needs to act, says Maria McFarland Sanchez-Moreno, CEO of RepresentUS, a nonprofit that fights corruption. “It’s urgent that Congress do its job,” she says. “They are responsible for exercising oversight over the executive branch.” Although several Congresspeople have spoken upSenator Brian Schatz, for example, vowed to put a blanket hold on nominees for the State Department to protest what’s happening to USAIDthe majority still haven’t. “Nobody should be silent in the face of this,” Sanchez-Moreno says. “And frankly, this should not be a partisan issue. This is about very traditional, historically conservative values of rule of law and preventing corruption and abuse of authority and respecting the constitution.” In her past work in international human rights, she says she saw firsthand how important it was to act. “These sorts of issues are easier to address earlier than laterI say that having worked on autocracy and corruption in many parts of the world,” she says. “Once you have attacks on the rule of law, if it’s not protected in a pretty strong way, it can be harder to recover it.” Everything DOGE has done follows the playbook that Musk has taken at his own companies, where he’s skirted labor laws and ignored safety regulations. In some cases, he’s gotten away with it. The stakes are obviously higher now. “This is a fast-rolling catastrophe,” says Davisson. “It is happening right now and demands an immediate response. I think all of our business in Congress should be put to the side and stalled wherever possible until this gross criminality and illegality is corrected and the DOGE is forced out of these systems.”
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E-Commerce
A sweeping new U.S. tariff on products made in China is expected to increase the prices American consumers pay for a wide array of products, from the ultra-cheap apparel sold on online shopping platforms to toys and electronic devices such as computers and cellphones.An additional 10% tariff on all Chinese goods took effect Tuesday, while the U.S. Postal Service announced it will stop accepting parcels inbound from China and Hong Kong until further notice.The previous day, President Donald Trump agreed to pause his threatened tariffs against Mexico and Canada for 30 days following negotiations on Trump’s demands for the North American nations to take steps to reduce illegal immigration and the flow of drugs such as fentanyl into the U.S.After failing to get a similar White House reprieve, China struck back with retaliatory tariffs on some U.S. goods that are set to begin next week.The sheer volume and variety of the China-made merchandise sold in the U.S. means residents would probably see the prices of many typically inexpensive items tick higher if the tit-for-tat tariffs persist.These are some of the products most likely to be impacted: Electronics, home supplies and car parts The U.S. imported about $427 billion worth of goods from China in 2023, the most recent year with complete data, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Consumer electronics, including cellphones, computers and other tech accessories, make up the biggest import categories.China is a dominant production engine for tech gear, including for American companies like Apple that have their products assembled in the country. In 2023, China accounted for 78% of U.S. smartphone imports and 79% of laptop and tablet imports, the Consumer Technology Association trade group reported.The tariffs also may affect how much consumers pay for typically inexpensive clothing, shoes and kitchen items like pots and pans, as well as the big-ticket items, such as appliances, furniture and auto parts.Jay Salaytah, 43, who runs his own auto repair shop in Detroit, said he bought some pieces of equipment sooner than he might have, anticipating they would cost more if Trump implemented his campaign promise to use import tariffs as a tool to promote U.S. manufacturing.“I knew the costs were going to go up, and these are manufactured in China,” Salaytah said of a probe test light he purchased before Tuesday’s tariff went into effect. Low-cost apparel and accessories In addition to imposing a new tariff on Chinese imports, Trump’s executive order also suspended a little-known trade exemption that allowed goods worth less than $800 to come into the U.S. duty-free. The order left open the possibility for the loophole to still be used with shipments from other countries.The trade rule, known as “de minimis,” has existed for nearly a century. It came under greater scrutiny in recent years due to the rapidly growing number of low-cost items coming into the U.S. from China, mainly from prominent China-founded online retailers such as Shein, Temu and Alibaba’s AliExpress.Former President Joe Biden’s administration proposed a crackdown on the loophole in September, but the rules did not take effect before Biden left office.Shein and Temu have gained global popularity by offering a quickly updated assortment of ultra-inexpensive clothes, accessories, gifts and gadgets shipped mostly from China, allowing the two e-commerce companies to compete on the home turf of American companies.Seattle-based Amazon is trying to compete with them through an online storefront that mimics their business model by offering cheap products shipped directly from China.Chinese exports of low-value packages soared to $66 billion in 2023, up from $5.3 billion in 2018, according to report released last week by the Congressional Research Service. In the U.S., Temu and Shein comprise about 17% of the discount market for fast fashion, toys and other consumer goods, the report said. How much will prices go up? It’s unclear. Under de minimis, Shein, Temu and AliExpress could bypass taxes collected by customs authorities. But under the changes effective Tuesday, company shipments from China will now be subject to existing duties plus the new 10% tariff imposed by Trump, analysts said.“The vast majority of these orders are valued less than $800, which means all or virtually all of them are going to get caught in that,” Youssef Squali, an analyst at Truist Financial, said.Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, said he thinks the price increases on platforms like Shein and Temu will be “pretty small” and the products they sell will remain cheap. However, the rule change is likely to result in delivery delays since the packages now have to go through customs, Kaziukenas said.The new tariffs will also hit third-party sellers on Amazon that import products from China, according to Squali. He expects sellers to eat some of the costs and pass the rest onto customers, which he thinks could result in percentage price increases in the mid-single digits. Other e-commerce sites that host businesses, such as Etsy, are also going to be impacted, Squali said.Temu, which is owned by China’s PDD Holdings, has previously said its growth did not depend on the de minimis policy. Though most of its products are shipped from China, Temu has been recruiting Chinese merchants to store inventory in the U.S., a move that experts said would allow it to not be as exposed to changes around the trade rule.In January, China also introduced measures to help cross-border e-commerce build overseas warehousing by offering them tax rebates or tax exemptions What are US retailers saying? The day after November’s U.S. presidential election, Brieane Olson, CEO of teen clothing chain PacSun, went to Hong Kong to meet with factory executives to figure out ways to prepare for Trump’s tariff plan.Roughly 35% to 40% of PacSun’s garments are made in China, even as the chain has accelerated moves to diversify with suppliers in countries like Cambodia and Vietnam.But Olson said Trump’s 10% tariff on Chinese goods was less extreme than the company anticipated. For now, PacSun doesn’t plan to increase prices on its products or move its manufacturing of knitwear and denim out of China.Toys are another category of consumer products that relies heavily on imports from China. Greg Ahearn, the president and CEO of The Toy Association trade group, said he thinks toy companies that source in China are going to absorb the cost of the new tariff in the short term.Eventually, those price hikes will be moved onto the consumer, Ahearn said. Associated Press writers Anne D’Innocenzio in New York, and Christopher Rugaber and Didi Tang in Washington contributed to this report. Haleluya Hadero, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
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