In early February, Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia, went to visit one of the country’s Cabinet ministers at his agency’s headquarters, above a partially abandoned strip mall off a dirt road. It had been two weeks since President Donald Trump took office, and Cromer had pressing business to discuss. She needed the minister to fall in line to help Elon Musk.

Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet company, had spent months trying to secure regulatory approval to sell internet access in the impoverished West African country. As head of Gambia’s communications ministry, Lamin Jabbi oversees the government’s review of Starlink’s license application. Jabbi had been slow to sign off and the company had grown impatient. Now the top U.S. government official in Gambia was in Jabbi’s office to intervene.

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency loomed over the conversation. The administration had already begun freezing foreign aid projects, and early in the meeting, Cromer, a Biden appointee, said something that rattled Gambian officials in the room. She listed the ways that the U.S. was supporting the country, according to two people present and contemporaneous notes, noting that key initiatives — like one that funds a $25 million project to improve the electrical system — were currently under review.

Jabbi’s top deputy, Hassan Jallow, told ProPublica he saw Cromer’s message as a veiled threat: If Starlink doesn’t get its license, the U.S. could cut off the desperately needed funds. “The implication was that they were connected,” Jallow said.

In recent months, senior State Department officials in both Washington and Gambia have coordinated with Starlink executives to coax, lobby and browbeat at least seven Gambian government ministers to help Musk, records and interviews show. One of those Cabinet officials told ProPublica his government is under “maximum pressure” to yield.

In mid-March, Cromer escalated the campaign by writing to Gambia’s president with an “important request.” That day, a contentious D.C. meeting between Musk employees and Jabbi had ended in an impasse. She urged the president to circumvent Jabbi and “facilitate the necessary approvals for Starlink to commence operations,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by ProPublica. Jabbi told confidantes he felt the ambassador was trying to get him fired.

The saga in Gambia is the starkest known example of the Trump administration wielding the U.S. government’s foreign policy apparatus to advance the business interests of Musk, a top Trump adviser and the world’s richest man.

Since Trump’s inauguration, the State Department has intervened on behalf of Starlink in Gambia and at least four other developing nations, previously unreported records and interviews show.

As the Trump administration has gutted foreign aid, U.S. diplomats have pressed governments to fast-track licenses for Starlink and arranged conversations between company employees and foreign leaders. In cables, U.S. officials have said that for their foreign counterparts, helping Starlink is a chance to prove their commitment to good relations with the U.S.

In one country last month, the U.S. embassy bragged that Starlink’s license was approved despite concerns it wasn’t abiding by rules that its competitors had to follow.

“If this was done by another country, we absolutely would call this corruption,” said Kristofer Harrison, who served as a high-level State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “Because it is corruption.”

Helping U.S. businesses has long been part of the State Department’s mission, but former ambassadors said they sought to do this by making the positive case for the benefits of U.S. investment. When seeking deals for U.S. companies, they said they took care to avoid the appearance of conflicts or leaving the impression that punitive measures were on the table.

Ten current and former State Department officials said the recent drive was an alarming departure from standard diplomatic practice — because of both the tactics used and the person who would benefit most from them. “I honestly didn’t think we were capable of doing this,” one official told ProPublica. “That is bad on every level.” Kenneth Fairfax, a retired career diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, said the global push for Musk “could lead to the impression that the U.S. is engaging in a form of crony capitalism.”

The Washington Post previously reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has instructed U.S. diplomats to help Starlink so it can beat its Chinese and Russian competitors. Multiple countries, including India, have sped up license approvals for Starlink to try to build goodwill in tariff negotiations with the Trump administration, the Post reported.

ProPublica’s reporting provides a detailed picture of what that push has looked like in practice. After Gambia’s ambassador to the U.S. declined an interview about Starlink — a topic seen as highly sensitive given Musk’s position — ProPublica reporters traveled to the capital, Banjul, to piece together the events. This account is based on internal State Department documents and interviews with dozens of current and former officials from both countries, most of whom requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

In response to detailed questions, the State Department issued a statement celebrating Starlink. “Starlink is an America-made product that has been a game changer in helping remote areas around the world gain internet connectivity,” a spokesperson wrote. “Any patriotic American should want to see an American company’s success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors.” Cromer and Starlink did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the office of the president of Gambia. Jabbi made Jallow available to discuss the situation.

During the Biden administration, State Department officials worked with Starlink to help the company navigate bureaucracies abroad. But the agency’s approach appears to have become significantly more aggressive and expansive since Trump’s return to power, according to internal records and current and former government officials.

Foreign leaders are acutely aware of Musk’s unprecedented position in the government, which he has used to help rewrite U.S. foreign policy. After Musk spent at least $288 million on the 2024 election, Trump gave the billionaire a powerful post in the White House. In mere months, Musk’s team has directed the firing of thousands of federal workers, canceled billions of dollars in programs and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which supported humanitarian projects around the world. African nations have been particularly hard-hit by the cuts.

At the same time, Musk continues to run Starlink and the rest of his corporate empire. In past administrations, government ethics lawyers carefully vetted potential conflicts of interest. Though Trump once said that “we won’t let him get near” conflicts, the White House has also suggested Musk is responsible for policing himself. The billionaire has waved away criticisms of the arrangement, saying “I’ll recuse myself” if conflicts arise. “My companies are suffering because I’m in the government,” Musk said.

In a statement, the White House said Musk has nothing to do with deals involving Starlink and that every administration official follows ethical guidelines. “For the umpteenth time, President Trump will not tolerate any conflicts of interest,” spokesperson Harrison Fields said in an email.

Executives at Starlink have seized the moment to expand. An April State Department cable to D.C. obtained by ProPublica quoted a Starlink employee describing the company’s approach to securing a license in Djibouti, a key U.S. ally in Africa that hosts an American military base: “We’re pushing from the top and the bottom to ram this through.”

Musk entered the White House at a pivotal moment for Starlink. When the service launched in 2020, it had a novel approach to internet access. Rather than relying on underground cables or cell towers like traditional telecom companies, Starlink uses low-orbiting satellites that let it provide fast internet in places its competitors had struggled to reach. Expectations for the startup were sky high. Bullish Morgan Stanley analysts predicted that by 2040, Starlink would have up to 364 million subscribers worldwide — more than the current population of the U.S.

Starlink quickly became a central pillar of Musk’s fortune. His stake in Starlink’s parent company, SpaceX, is estimated to be worth about $150 billion of his roughly $400 billion net worth.

Although the company says its user base has grown to over 5 million people, it remains a bit player compared to the largest internet providers. And the satellite internet market is set to become more competitive as well-funded companies launch services modeled on Starlink. Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper, a unit of Amazon, has said it expects to start serving customers later this year. Satellite upstarts headquartered in Europe and China aren’t far behind either.

“They want to get as far and as fast as they can before Amazon Kuiper gets online,” said Chris Quilty, a veteran space industry analyst.

In internal cables, State Department officials have said they are eager to help Musk get ahead of foreign satellite companies. Securing licenses in the next 18 months is critical for Starlink due to the growing competition, one cable said last month. Senior diplomats have written that they hope to give Musk’s company a “first-mover advantage.”

Africa represents a lucrative prize. Much of the continent lacks reliable internet. Success in Africa could mean dominating a market with the fastest-growing population on earth.

As of last November, Starlink had reportedly launched in 15 of Africa’s 54 countries, but it was beginning to spark a backlash. Last year, Cameroon and Namibia cracked down on Musk’s company for allegedly operating in their countries illegally. In South Africa — where Starlink has so far failed to get a license — Musk exacerbated tensions by publicly accusing the government of anti-white racism. Since Trump won the election, at least five African countries have granted licenses to Starlink: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho and Chad.

Now Musk’s campaign of cuts has given him leverage inside the State Department. A Trump administration memo that leaked to the press last month proposed closing six embassies in Africa.

The Gambian embassy was on the list of proposed cuts.

An 8-year-old democracy, Gambia’s 2.7 million residents live on a sliver of land once used as a hub in the transatlantic slave trade. For two decades until 2017, the nation was ruled by a despot who had his opponents assassinated and plundered public funds to buy himself luxuries like a Rolls-Royce collection and a private zoo. When the dictator was ousted, the economy was in tatters. Today Gambia is one of the poorest countries in the world, with about half the country living on less than $4 a day.

In this fragile environment, the telecom industry that Jabbi oversees is vitally important to Gambian authorities. According to the government, the sector provides at least 20% of the country’s tax revenue. Ads for the country’s multiple internet providers are ubiquitous, painted onto dozens of public works — parks, police booths, schools.

It’s unclear why Starlink’s efforts in Gambia, a tiny market, have been so intense.

Cromer’s efforts on behalf of the company started under the Biden administration, as she documented last December in a cable sent back to Washington. Last spring, Starlink began the process of securing necessary approvals from a local utilities regulator and the Gambian communications agency. The utilities regulator wanted Starlink to pay an $85,000 license fee, which the company felt was too expensive. Cromer spoke to local officials, who then “pressured” the regulator to remove “this unnecessary barrier to entry,” the ambassador wrote.

Gambian supporters of Starlink felt that its product would be a boon for consumers and for economic growth in the country, where internet service remains unreliable and slow. “The ripple effects could be extraordinary,” Cromer said in the December cable, contending it could enable telehealth and improve education.

Opponents argued that local internet providers were one of Gambia’s few stable sources of jobs and infrastructure investments. If Starlink killed off its competition and then jacked up its prices — in Nigeria, the company announced last year it would suddenly double its fees — authorities could have little leverage to manage the fallout. When Musk refused to turn on Starlink in part of Ukraine during the war there, it heightened concerns about handing control of internet access to the mercurial billionaire, industry analysts said. One Musk tweet about foreign regulators’ ability to police his company caught the attention of Gambian critics: “They can shake their fist at the sky,” Musk said in 2021.

The ultimate authority for granting Starlink a license lies with Jabbi, an attorney who spent years in the local telecom sector. Gambian telecom companies that don’t want competition from Musk see Jabbi as an ally.

Jallow, Jabbi’s top deputy, told ProPublica that the ministry is not opposed to Starlink operating in Gambia. But he said Jabbi is doing due diligence to ensure laws and regulations are being followed before opening up the country to a consequential change.

After Trump’s inauguration, Jabbi’s position pitted him against not only Starlink but also the U.S. government. In the weeks after the February meeting where Cromer reminded Jabbi about the tenuous state of American funding to his country, the ambassador told other diplomats that getting Starlink approved was a high priority, according to a Western official familiar with her comments.

The stance surprised some of Cromer’s peers. Cromer had spent her career at USAID before President Joe Biden appointed her as ambassador. Her tenure in Gambia often focused on human rights and democracy building.

In March, when Jabbi and Jallow traveled to D.C. to attend a World Bank summit, the State Department helped arrange a series of meetings for them. The first, on March 19, was with Starlink representatives including Ben MacWilliams, a former U.S. diplomat who leads the company’s expansion efforts in Africa. The second was with U.S. government officials at the State Department’s headquarters.

The meeting with the company quickly became contentious. Huddled in a conference room at the World Bank, MacWilliams accused Jabbi of standing in the way of his nation’s progress and harming ordinary Gambians, according to Jallow, who was in the meeting, and four others briefed on the event. “We want our license now,” Jallow recalled MacWilliams saying. “Why are you delaying it?”

The conversation ended in a stalemate. In the hours that followed, Starlink and the U.S. government’s campaign intensified in a way that underscored the degree of coordination between the two parties. The company told Jabbi it would cancel his scheduled D.C. meeting with State Department officials because “there was no more need,” Jallow said.

The State Department meeting never happened. Instead, 4,000 miles away in Gambia’s capital, Cromer would try an even more aggressive approach.

That same day, Cromer had already met with Gambia’s equivalent of a commerce secretary to lobby him to help pave the way for Starlink. Then she was informed about the disappointing meeting Starlink had had in D.C., according to State Department records. By day’s end, Cromer had sent a letter to the nation’s president.

“I am writing to seek your support to allow Starlink to operate in The Gambia,” the letter opened. Over three pages, the ambassador described her concerns about Jabbi’s agency and listed the ways that Gambians could benefit from Starlink. She also said the company had satisfied conditions set by Jabbi’s predecessor.

“I respectfully urge you to facilitate the necessary approvals for Starlink to commence operations in The Gambia,” Cromer concluded. “I look forward to your favorable response.”

In the weeks since, Jabbi has refused to budge. The U.S. government’s efforts have continued. In late April, Gambia’s attorney general met in D.C. with senior State Department officials, according to a person familiar with the matter, where they again discussed the Starlink issue.

Diplomats were troubled by how the pressure campaign could hurt America’s image overseas. “This is not Iran or a rogue African state run by a dictator — this is a democracy, a natural ally,” said another senior Western diplomat in the region, noting that Gambia is “a prime partner of the West” in United Nations votes. “You beat up the smallest and the best boy in the class.”

Gambia is not the only country being leaned on. Since Trump took office, embassies around the world have sent a flurry of cables to D.C. documenting their meetings with Starlink executives and their efforts to cajole developing countries into helping Musk’s business. The cables all describe a problem similar to what happened in Gambia: The company has struggled to win a license from local regulators. In some countries, ambassadors reported, their work appears to be yielding results. (The embassies and their host countries did not respond to requests for comment.)

The U.S. embassy in Cameroon wrote that the country could prove its commitment to Trump’s agenda by letting Starlink expand its presence there. In the same missive, embassy officials discussed the impact of U.S. aid cuts and deportations and cited a humanitarian official who was reckoning with America’s shifting foreign policy: “They may not be happy with what they see, but they are trying to adapt as best they can.”

In Lesotho, where embassy officials had spent weeks trying to help Starlink get a license, the company finalized a deal after Trump imposed 50% tariffs on the tiny landlocked country. Lesotho officials told embassy staff they hoped the license would help in their urgent push to reduce the levies, according to Mother Jones. A major multinational company complained that Starlink was getting preferential treatment, embassy documents obtained by ProPublica show, since Musk’s firm had been exempted from requirements its competitors still had to follow.

In cables sent from the U.S. embassy in Djibouti this spring, State Department officials recounted their meetings with the company and pledged to continue working with “Starlink in identifying government officials and facilitating discussions.”

In Bangladesh, U.S. diplomats pressed Starlink’s case “early and often” with local officials, partnered with Starlink to “build an educational strategy” for their counterparts and helped arrange a conversation between Musk and the nation’s head of state, according to a recent cable. The embassy’s work started under Biden but bore fruit only after Trump took office.

Their efforts resulted in Bangladesh approving Starlink’s request to do business in the country, the top U.S. diplomat there said last month, a sign-off that Musk’s company had sought for years.

Workers were in the middle of cleaning up the site of an enormous chemical spill, the Bien Hoa air base, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated with dioxin, the deadly byproduct of Agent Orange, which the American military sprayed across large swaths of the country during the Vietnam War. After Rubio’s orders to stop work, the cleanup crews were forced to abandon the site, and, for weeks, all that was covering the contaminated dirt were tarps, which at one point blew off in the wind.

And even more pressing, the officials warned in a Feb. 14 letter obtained by ProPublica, Vietnam is on the verge of its rainy season, when torrential downpours are common. With enough rain, they said, soil contaminated with dioxin could flood into nearby communities, poisoning their food supplies.

Hundreds of thousands of people live around the Bien Hoa air base, and some of their homes abut the site’s perimeter fence, just yards from the contaminated areas. And less than 1,500 feet away is a major river that flows into Ho Chi Minh City, population 9 million.

“Simply put,” the officials added, “we are quickly heading toward an environmental and life-threatening catastrophe.”

They received no response from Washington, according to three people familiar with the situation.

Instead, Rubio and Peter Marocco, another top Trump appointee, have not only ordered the work to stop, but they also have frozen more than $1 million in payments for work already completed by the contractors the U.S. hired. The company overseeing the project is Tetra Tech, a publicly traded consulting and engineering firm based in the U.S., and a Vietnamese construction firm has been tasked with the excavation work.

Then, on Feb. 26, Rubio and Marocco canceled both companies’ contracts altogether before apparently reversing that decision about a week later, agency records show. As of Thursday, the companies had not been paid.

The Trump administration has told the courts repeatedly that its process to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, which manages the project’s funds, has been careful and considered. But the botched situation at Bien Hoa is a stark example of the whiplash, conflicting messages and dire consequences that aid organizations worldwide have faced since early February.

Now, after losing several weeks because of the administration’s orders, the companies are scrambling — at their own expense — to secure the Bien Hoa site before it starts raining, according to documents reviewed by ProPublica and several people familiar with the current situation.

The USAID officials who would typically travel to the air base to provide oversight have been placed on administrative leave or prevented from traveling to check on the work. They’ve also been forbidden from communicating with the Vietnamese government or the companies working at the base, sources say, though they believe that directive was lifted after the contracts were recently reinstated. The confusion has left many at both the embassy and in Washington in the dark about where the situation stands.

To ascertain the current status of the work, ProPublica hired a reporter to visit the air base on Friday.

Workers are laboring in 95 degree heat, surrounded by toxic soil. The site has a skeleton crew of less than half of what they previously had, according to workers and documents reviewed by ProPublica. Some staffers found new jobs during the suspension. People working at the site told the reporter they are worried about completing the work before the rainy season descends and are terrified the U.S. will pause the work again.

Since 2019, the U.S. government has collaborated with Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense to clean up the Bien Hoa air base and agreed to spend more than $430 million for the project. Unlike other foreign aid programs, addressing Agent Orange is more akin to restitution than charity because the U.S. brought the deadly substance there in the first place. “The dioxin remediation program is one of the core reasons why we have an extraordinary relationship with Vietnam today,” a State Department official told ProPublica, “a country that should by all rights hate us.”

With enough contaminated soil to fill about 40,000 dump trucks, the Bien Hoa air base is the largest deposit of postwar pesticides remaining in Vietnam after a decadeslong cleanup campaign. Human rights groups, environmentalists and diplomats consider the cleanup work — along with disability assistance that the U.S. has provided to Agent Orange victims across the country — to be one of the most successful foreign aid initiatives of all time.

All of that was now in peril, the officials wrote in their Feb. 14 letter to USAID officials in Washington. “What immediate actions can be taken to avert a potential life-threatening incident while still maintaining compliance with the Executive Order and the suspension directives?” the officials wrote.

U.S. officials in Vietnam grew increasingly panicked. The ambassador sent a diplomatic cable to Washington, and Congress and USAID’s inspector general each received a whistleblower complaint, multiple people told ProPublica.

“Halting a project like that in the middle of the work, that’s an environmental crime,” said Jan Haemers, CEO of another organization that previously worked in Vietnam to clean up Agent Orange in the soil. “If you stop in the middle, it’s worse than if you never started.”

The State Department said in a statement that the contracts at Bien Hoa are “active and running” but did not respond to detailed follow-up questions. Tetra Tech and the Vietnamese construction firm did not respond to questions for this story. The Vietnamese Embassy and Ministry of Defense did not return requests for comment. But the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs made a statement on Feb. 13 that it was “deeply concerned” about USAID program suspensions, specifically mentioning the Bien Hoa project.

Trump’s aides, including billionaire Elon Musk, began dismantling the U.S. foreign assistance system almost immediately after the inauguration. They dismissed USAID staff en masse, issued sweeping stop-work orders, froze funds and eventually canceled most of the agency’s contracts with aid organizations around the world, leaving countless children, refugees and other desperately vulnerable people without critical services.

On Monday, Rubio boasted on X that they had cut 83% of USAID’s programs because they didn’t align with Trump’s agenda.

After terminating the contracts, Rubio, Musk and Marocco reversed several of their decisions in Vietnam, designating the Bien Hoa project as one of the few programs to survive, at least for now.

Every president since George W. Bush — including Trump — has made good on the American promise to repair relations with Vietnam by cleaning up Agent Orange and helping those sick or disabled from dioxin poisoning. In 2017, Trump landed at Danang Airport, a prior cleanup site, ahead of a free-trade meeting with Asia-Pacific countries. The U.S. now conducts $160 billion in annual commerce with Vietnam, which has also become a key partner against China’s growing influence in the South China Sea. The Pentagon and Vietnamese military now work together as well, including efforts to locate the remains of soldiers missing in action from the war 50 years ago.

“All of this is underpinned by the cooperation on Agent Orange,” said Charles Bailey, a former Ford Foundation representative in Vietnam who co-wrote a book on the country’s relations with the U.S. in the wake of the war. “It’s like pulling out one or two legs of the stool.”

The Bien Hoa project was formally launched and initial contracts signed during Trump’s first presidency. In another example of the administration’s confusing stance toward the project, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told his Vietnamese counterpart on a Feb. 7 phone call that Trump wanted to enhance defense ties by addressing war legacy issues, which include Agent Orange remediation. About half of the project’s funding comes from the Pentagon’s budget, though it’s funneled through USAID, so it was also caught up in the foreign aid freeze.

Environmental consultants, foreign policy experts and government officials said the episode in Bien Hoa shows the administration did not do a thoughtful audit. “One might imagine a less reckless government looking at what we’re doing carefully and then deciding what’s in our interest,” David Shear, a former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam under Barack Obama, told ProPublica.

“But,” he said, “this is government reform by meat cleaver.”

The mixture known as Agent Orange is a combination of two herbicides that the U.S. brought to Vietnam in huge volumes to kill off jungles and mangroves that hid opposition forces during the Vietnam war. The mixture contained dioxin, a deadly substance that not only causes a range of cancers and other illnesses, but is also linked to birth defects for babies exposed in utero. During the war, the U.S. sprayed more than 10 million gallons of the herbicides across vast swaths of the country, exposing U.S. soldiers as well as millions of Vietnamese people and their future children to the deadly toxic substance.

Storage sites like the air bases of Danang and Bien Hoa were heavily contaminated as barrels leaked, broke or were otherwise mishandled. Over the decades, dust has blown the contaminated soil off the bases and abundant rains have pushed the dioxin into waterways and the densely packed surrounding neighborhoods, contaminating fish as well as ducks and chicken that people raise for food. Soil samples at the Bien Hoa base have shown dioxin at levels as high as 800 times the allowed amount in Vietnam.

For decades since the war, and despite extensive documentation of higher rates of cancers and birth defects among people who had been exposed to the chemicals, the U.S. denied the mass toll Agent Orange had taken on Vietnamese people — as well as on American veterans, as ProPublica has previously reported. But starting in the mid-2000s under President George W. Bush, the U.S. began earmarking federal dollars for dioxin remediation in Vietnam to clean up the contamination sites and the two nations’ troubled relationship.

The cleanup work is dangerous and laborious. People hired by the contractors wear extensive protective equipment in the sweltering humidity and must have their blood tested regularly for dioxin. When levels get too high, they are no longer allowed to work at the site. There are supposed to be extensive safety checks in place to ensure the dirt doesn’t poison military officials or the surrounding community.

The plan at Bien Hoa is to excavate a half-million cubic meters of the most contaminated soil and enclose it underground or cook it in an enormous furnace, which hasn’t been built yet, until the dioxin no longer poses a threat. The work requires extensive pumping and management of dioxin-contaminated water. Contractors are halfway through a 10-year project set to happen in stages, and the bulk of the excavation work must be done between December and April when there is less rain.

After Rubio first issued sweeping stop-work orders to aid organizations and contractors around the world in late January, workers from the site were told to stay home for weeks. The companies stopped receiving money to cover payroll and their past invoices. Huge mounds of tarp-covered dirt dotted sections of the base.

USAID and State Department staff scrambled to get the project back online through the State Department’s confusing waiver process and appealed to counterparts in the U.S. A group of Democratic senators sent a letter to Hegseth and Rubio urging them to pay the contractors. “It would be difficult to overstate the damage to the relationship that would result if the U.S were to walk away from these war legacy programs,” they wrote. They got no response.

One of the senators who signed the letter, Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., told ProPublica that abandoning the Bien Hoa cleanup is “a betrayal of the goodwill our two nations built over 30 years” and a “gift to our adversaries.”

Even off-season rains pushed the sites to the brink, two sources said, with water pooling up to the edge of protective aprons, threatening to spill out onto an active military runway after recent rainstorms.

Heavier rains typically start in April before the downpours of the rainy season in May.

The contractors are desperately trying to secure the contaminated dirt and pits before then, according to interviews this week with several people working there. But they are two months behind schedule.

“The problem is that the Trump administration has destroyed USAID, so it’s very unclear how we’re going to complete this project,” said Tim Rieser, a longtime aide to former Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who led a bipartisan delegation to break ground in Bien Hoa in 2019. “The people making the decisions probably know the least.”

In their clearest accounting yet, top officials have estimated the casualties: One million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Up to 166,000 people will die from malaria. New cases of tuberculosis will go up by 30%. Two hundred thousand more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade.

Instead of acting on the repeated warnings, top administration officials, including the State Department’s director of foreign assistance, Peter Marocco, thwarted their own experts’ efforts to keep the U.S. Agency for International Development’s most vital programs up and running, according to internal memos and estimates compiled by global health leaders at the agency and obtained by ProPublica.

President Donald Trump’s political appointees, along with billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, pressed ahead with their plan to dismantle USAID by ignoring and impeding staff who tried to protect lifesaving operations — even as the administration publicly insisted that those programs remained online — according to the memos and interviews with government officials.

During exchanges outlined in one of the memos, a DOGE engineer emailed staff and said they were not allowed to review the programs they were canceling. At another point, USAID’s then-deputy chief of staff, Joel Borkert, told agency personnel to take a “draconian” approach to approving waivers.

The explosive memos — which include summaries of email exchanges and top-level meetings inside USAID, as well as internal agency research — were sent by Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health. ProPublica also obtained detailed breakdowns of lifesaving programs managed by the bureau and the projected impact of cutting them. Enrich was placed on leave Sunday.

Enrich told The New York Times he released the memos, which multiple other officials contributed to, after learning he was being placed on leave, as thousands of others at the agency have been. The memos were circulated to the staff and obtained by ProPublica.

The documents identify several key senior policymakers behind the scenes while also puncturing the administration’s claims of a careful, deliberative review of USAID programming. The records also represent the government’s most explicit concerns to date memorialized by a senior official from inside Trump’s administration.

The State Department, USAID and Elon Musk did not respond to questions about this story. Rubio and Marocco did not respond to a request for an interview.

Since the inauguration, Rubio, Musk and Marocco have taken dramatic steps to incapacitate USAID, the largest foreign aid donor in the world, by firing its employees and halting operations. The global health bureau was one of the first parts of the agency targeted for mass layoffs.

Then, last week, they abruptly cancelled 10,000 foreign aid projects, which account for 90% of USAID’s humanitarian operations and about half of the State Department’s. Lifesaving programs that were still operating around the world were forced to close down immediately.

Following a series of lawsuits challenging their constitutional authority to lay off or place on leave thousands of employees and freeze nearly all foreign aid, Rubio and Marocco have defended their actions by arguing that the president has the right to cancel programs, and that they were conducting a careful review of the government’s foreign aid programs to make sure they aligned with Trump’s agenda. The administration says it is rooting out waste and fraud, while Musk has publicly vowed to destroy USAID altogether.

However, as ProPublica reported Saturday, officials throughout the government say the process was actually cursory and haphazard, so much so that the programs’ contract officers, who have oversight of individual programs and are aid groups’ primary contacts, had no idea what had been canceled or why.

Enrich’s memos offer additional evidence calling into question the administration’s claims in court while projecting the dire consequences that will play out for both the U.S. and vulnerable people around the world.

One of the documents said that the sweeping cuts to foreign aid promise to reignite outbreaks of preventable, deadly illnesses; fuel instability in war-torn areas; and put the U.S. at risk for outbreaks of infectious disease. “This will no doubt result in preventable death, destabilization, and threats to national security on a massive scale,” it says.

Take tuberculosis, which kills more than 1.25 million people a year and is already the deadliest infectious disease on the planet. New infections are expected to surge by 30% more as a result of the terminations, and disruptions to treatment will cause people to develop drug resistance, making any future treatment options far more difficult and costly, the memo said.

That global surge will inevitably lead to more cases in the U.S. USAID staff forecast there would be around 80 additional cases of multi-drug-resistant TB here each year because of the cuts across USAID, the memo added. Even a few dozen cases would cost the U.S. millions in tax dollars; it takes nearly $500,000 on average to treat someone with the most drug-resistant forms of the illness, the memo notes.

Enrich’s bureau also warned that the foreign aid cuts will destabilize entire regions around the globe. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the U.S. withdrawal of aid has led health services to collapse as an ongoing conflict flares, the memos noted. They said more than 400 mpox patients were left stranded and that more than a million people face critical shortages of food and water, supplies the U.S. has promised to provide. Malnutrition, cholera and measles are all projected to increase as well.

Across the Sahel, the transition zone between Africa’s northern deserts and southern savannahs, malaria season is fast approaching. The U.S. has already purchased mosquito nets, diagnostic tests and treatments that cannot be delivered, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the programs. Canceled programs there and elsewhere are expected to cause between 12 million and 18 million additional malaria infections over the next year, the document estimates.

And those infections are likely to be more deadly. Spread via mosquito, malaria is particularly lethal for children under 5. The U.S. was paying to help roll out drugs that are highly effective at preventing children from getting sick or dying. Those programs have been canceled.

The potential for death and the spread of disease is not new to Rubio or his top aides who ordered the mass termination of nearly all foreign aid programs, according to the documents and interviews.

USAID staff repeatedly lobbied to keep the most critical programs running, sharing specifics about patients served for individual programs and the likely harm of cutting them with political appointees, sometimes on multiple occasions. In response, political leadership “wholly prevented” staff from implementing Rubio’s promise to continue lifesaving aid, according to Enrich’s memo.

In public statements and court filings, Rubio and Marocco have said there was a waiver exemption process in place for lifesaving programs to remain funded and online.

But behind the scenes, the few employees remaining at USAID struggled to get basic information, like how to submit waivers to Marocco for approval. And when organizations did get an approved waiver, they couldn’t restart work because the administration still hadn’t paid them. (The Trump administration has refused to reimburse almost $2 billion to foreign aid contractors for work they’ve already completed.)

Agency staff had no way to send payments to organizations because their access to the financial systems had been severed, one memo said.

On Feb. 8, global health staff learned that Rubio planned to cancel many programs the bureau had identified as lifesaving. Those in the bureau appealed to Borkert and Mark Lloyd, an assistant administrator at the agency, to keep those operations alive. (Borkert and Lloyd did not respond to questions about this story.)

Lloyd asked for more information. But that same day, staffers in the bureau also received a response from DOGE. “I am hearing that Global Health is conducting supplemental reviews of awards slated for termination by Secretary Rubio and Acting Deputy Administrator Marocco,” DOGE adviser Jeremy Lewin emailed Enrich, according to one of Enrich’s memos. “This is delaying the timely processing of these termination notices and is unacceptable. … Bureaus should not be conducting their own policy and program reviews before acting on these termination instructions.” (Lewin did not respond to questions for this story.)

Enrich also said he received written instructions to pause approving waivers for lifesaving humanitarian assistance, a directive he passed along to the rest of his bureau, which had been working to identify the programs that needed money the most.

In a subsequent exchange spelled out in one memo that illustrates the frequently conflicting guidance, Enrich said that two political appointees, Tim Meisburger and Laken Rapier, along with Bokert, shouted at him during a Feb. 13 meeting that there had never been a pause, and instructed him to draft another memo to correct the “false narrative in the media that there had ever been a pause” on the bureau’s waivers for lifesaving programs. (Meisburger and Rapier did not respond to questions about this story.)

During a meeting on Feb. 24, Meisburger and Lloyd told those in the bureau to not bother trying to submit waivers for programs involving infectious diseases like mpox, polio and Ebola because they wouldn’t be approved, according to Enrich.

Then, two days later, the administration suddenly terminated about 10,000 programs across the State Department and USAID. Agency staff responsible for maintaining those contracts say they were not consulted before the move. Enrich immediately reached out to Borkert and others to warn them of the “grave impacts on lifesaving activities,” he said in the memo.

Borkert responded, indicating that many of the programs were terminated by mistake. “There is an acknowledgement some may have been sent out in error and we have the ability to rescind,” Borkert wrote to Enrich. “We need to identify what those are.”

In recent days, government officials and aid groups have told ProPublica that the administration appears to be trying to reverse-engineer its most sweeping actions to figure out which lifesaving operations were canceled. Staff have been told to report information about terminated contracts to agency leaders. It’s not clear what programs, if any, will be restored.

“It is an incompetent mess,” one official said.

Aid organizations the world over scrambled to prove their work saved lives, seeking permission from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development to continue operating.

The administration conceded that many programs prevent immediate death and should remain online: field hospitals in Gaza, an HIV drug supplier for the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syrian refugee food programs, health clinics that combat Ebola in Uganda and most of the landmark President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, known as PEPFAR.

In late January, Rubio and one of his top aides, Peter Marocco, said those programs and dozens of others could continue, granting them temporary waivers while the officials conducted what they have called a “targeted, case-by-case review” of all foreign aid programs managed by the State Department and USAID. That review, they said, would take three months.

Four weeks later, on Wednesday, Rubio and Marocco completely ended nearly 10,000 aid programs in one fell swoop — including those they had granted waivers just days earlier — saying the programs did not align with Trump’s agenda. The move consigns untold numbers of the world’s poorest children, refugees and other vulnerable people to death, according to several senior federal officials. Local authorities have already begun estimating a death toll in the hundreds of thousands.

Now, as the administration faces multiple lawsuits challenging its actions, the court fights largely hinge on whether government officials deliberated responsibly before cutting off funding. The U.S. has also refused to pay almost $2 billion that the government owes aid organizations for work they’ve already completed.

Rubio and Marocco appear to have taken their dramatic steps without the careful review they’ve described to the courts, according to internal documents and interviews with more than a dozen officials from the State Department and USAID, which raises fresh questions about the legality of President Donald Trump’s evisceration of the American foreign aid system.

Current and former officials say that Marocco and Rubio cut critical programs without consulting contract officers, who have oversight of individual programs and are aid groups’ primary contacts. “None of us believe that they’re conducting a careful, individualized review,” one official said.

In an episode that highlights how cursory and haphazard their efforts appear to have been, Marocco and Rubio ordered the cancellation of contracts, including for cellphone service, at an office they do not control. The move stranded people in war zones without phones, according to multiple officials and internal correspondence obtained by ProPublica. On Wednesday, AT&T received a termination notice for a $430,000 contract with USAID’s Office of Inspector General. That office is meant to be independent from USAID so that it can effectively audit the agency.

For more than 24 hours, OIG staff, including people in Ukraine and Haiti, did not have access to their government phones. No one at the OIG, including contract officers, knew it was coming, according to the officials. “This is an urgent issue for us, as we have OIG staff in warzones with no ability to receive security alerts,” a senior official in the agency wrote in an email to the company.

Eventually USAID reversed the termination.

Current and former officials throughout USAID and the State Department said the breakneck pace, lack of input from key officials, mistaken cancellations and boilerplate language in Wednesday’s termination notices undermine Marocco’s claims of a deliberative process.

“It’s a pretext,” one USAID official told ProPublica. “The review was supposed to take 90 days. An actual review based on substance requires laying out a process with guidelines, identifying info on each project, and selecting working groups to review. Any review they did was fake.”

If that turns out to be the case, legal experts and government officials say, the administration will have defied a federal judge’s order in a brazen gambit to continue dismantling USAID.

The morning after the mass termination notices went out, a senior USAID official sent an email saying Marocco and Rubio had canceled awards for essential services that the agency now wanted reinstated, telling staff, “We need your immediate input on any awards that may have been terminated that contain essential services related to the safety, security, and operations of USAID staff,” according to a court filing.

Since the initial decision to suspend foreign aid, humanitarian organizations and labor groups have taken the government to court, arguing that only Congress can dismantle USAID and that Trump’s blanket actions are unconstitutional. The government has told the courts that it has the right to cancel contracts, dismiss staff and reorganize USAID to align with Trump’s agenda.

Earlier this month, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting USAID and the State Department from following Trump’s executive orders to stop all foreign aid and to force the agency to pay its bills. When it didn’t comply, the judge issued another order, giving the government until midnight Wednesday to pay what it owes to aid groups.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court temporarily paused the last order over unpaid bills to conduct further legal review. That same day, aid organizations around the world began receiving termination notices.

More than 90% of USAID’s global aid operations and half of those managed by the State Department received termination notices. The move is already putting children and refugees in gravely dangerous situations. The administration canceled almost 50 United Nations Population Fund projects worth more than $370 million, including programs to address maternal deaths and gender-based violence in Egypt, Nigeria and several other member nations around the world.

In early February, the nonprofit Alight received waivers for its programs supporting refugees in war-torn Sudan, Somalia and South Sudan. On Wednesday, they were all terminated.

Alight runs six centers for extremely malnourished children in Sudan, where the organization treats babies and infants so sick that they will die within hours without ongoing care. The centers cost about $120,000 a month to operate. Alight is trying to fundraise to keep them open, knowing that the day they close their doors, children will die, CEO Jocelyn Wyatt told ProPublica.

In the meantime, they have been forced to close other lifesaving programs. In Somalia, around 700 malnourished children visited Alight clinics every day for weight check-ins and to pick up special food. Thirteen health clinics and a mobile unit served around 1,200 patients a day. On Thursday, all of those clinics closed, Wyatt said.

Alight also shuttered 33 primary health clinics in Sudan and stopped providing water to three refugee camps that house people displaced by decades of war. Alight had kept all those programs running these past five weeks, even though the organization hasn’t received any payments since Trump took office.

“We believed when Rubio said that there was no intention of cutting emergency lifesaving services that would basically cause immediate death,” said Wyatt. “We trusted that those would be protected.”

One of the State Department’s highest-ranking humanitarian aid officials, Jennifer Davis, stepped down this week, according to her resignation letter, which was obtained by ProPublica. During a meeting earlier this week, Davis, the principal deputy assistant secretary of the agency’s refugees bureau, told staff she believed she was bound by the judge’s order to restore programs and their funding, according to an attendee. “She was in tears about it,” the attendee said. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)

The State Department, USAID and the White House did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this story. The State Department did not make Rubio available for an interview. Marocco also did not respond to questions.

By Thursday, hundreds of workers had returned to USAID’s former headquarters, where the name has been removed from the building facade, to collect their personal items. They left with boxes and suitcases. Some were crying. Dozens of people cheered and rang bells each time someone exited the building; many of them had recently lost humanitarian aid jobs as well.

“This is more than lost jobs. We’re losing the sector,” a former USAID employee said through tears as she waited for her allotted 15-minute time window to pick up her belongings. “The U.S. government is losing its influence. We’re now more unsafe as a country.”

In the early hours of Feb. 13 at a refugee camp in northern Syria, two armed men wearing masks and police uniforms broke into offices and a warehouse for the aid group Blumont, stealing more than $12,000 worth of laptops and other supplies the U.S. government had already paid for. Because the organization hadn’t received any funds since Trump took office, it no longer had personnel at the camp full time and had paused all its U.S.-funded work except a daily bread delivery.

The armed theft was the result of the U.S. not paying its bills, the group told USAID officials, according to an internal agency email obtained by ProPublica.

Shortly after the incident, the government started paying Blumont’s invoices and the aid group brought back staff and food services that had received a waiver. It is one of the few programs still online and receiving money.

Prior to Jan. 20, the U.S. spent about $60 billion on nonmilitary humanitarian and developmental aid each year — far more than any other country in total dollars, but less than 1% of the federal budget. The vast majority of that money is managed by USAID and the State Department. A network of aid organizations carry out the work, which is funded by Congress.

Since Trump took office, Marocco and Rubio have not only halted foreign aid, laid off thousands of workers and put many more on administrative leave, they have also stopped paying bills for work that has already been done. In one of several lawsuits related to the administration’s dismantling of USAID, aid groups are suing the federal government over the mass program closures and unpaid bills. It was that case that led federal district court Judge Amir Ali to order the administration to settle those bills, which by Feb. 13 totaled nearly $2 billion, according to figures Marocco gave the court. Almost none of it has been paid, the court filings show.

U.S. taxpayers will also be on the hook for interest and damages from the unpaid bills and broken contracts, legal experts told ProPublica.

Organizations have struggled to get through the opaque waiver process, and programs that succeeded were often so strapped for cash because the government hadn’t reimbursed them that they remained inoperative. Medicines that were already purchased by U.S. taxpayers are languishing in warehouses instead of being delivered to the people who need them, several contractors told ProPublica.

On Wednesday, as Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily paused the district court’s order to the federal government to pay its bills, the administration told the court it had terminated 5,800 of the 6,300 foreign aid programs that USAID administered. The government also shuttered 4,100 programs managed by the State Department, about 60% of the total.

In Marocco’s own testimony to the court on Feb. 18 about the process, he said that senior staff and political appointees choose “specific awards” to be evaluated for termination or suspension. He said he personally examines the program and any potential consequences of terminating it before making final recommendations to Rubio.

But USAID staff say that subject-area experts and key personnel who are responsible for the programs were not involved in many terminations, while most others had already lost their jobs.

In the case of the phone contract for the OIG office, for example, the contract officers had no idea the termination notices were coming, officials said. Those officers are specially trained in contract law and regulations to manage these agreements and make sure the government is in compliance. But they were cut out of the process and only learned about it from AT&T, according to the officials and internal emails obtained by ProPublica. (AT&T did not respond to a request for comment.)

The one-page notice to the telecom giant said that Rubio and Marocco had “determined your award is not aligned with Agency priorities and made a determination that continuing this program is not in the national interest.” The notice added: “Immediately cease all activities.”

The notice came as an emailed PDF and not through the normal file management and correspondence system, which led multiple OIG officials to question whether anyone even looked at the contract’s basic information, like its statement of work, much less conducted a careful review.

David Black, an attorney specializing in government contracts, said that the law requires contract officers to approve termination notices and that the episode with the OIG raises questions about Marocco’s claims in court about careful reviews. “It suggests the process was done very hastily,” he said.

On the ground, in the places where the aid kept starvation at bay and deadly viruses in check, program directors say there will now be little to stop those threats.

“What really bothers me is that we’re just looking at numbers, we’re not thinking about real people who are actually going to suffer the consequences of these terminations,” said Dr. Anja Giphart, the acting president of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which had HIV programs terminated in Eswatini, Lesotho and Tanzania.

Pulling treatment away from pregnant women means children will be infected with HIV in the weeks ahead, Giphart said. And doing it so suddenly means other governments and donors don’t have the opportunity to step in. Half of children who are undiagnosed and untreated for HIV die before their first birthday. “We don’t have the luxury of waiting months and months to get this back on track again,” she said.

In Uganda, Baylor College of Medicine Children’s Foundation, which is funded by USAID, treats tens of thousands of patients for HIV and tuberculosis. In addition, it has for years been one of the only organizations in the country that helps contain Ebola outbreaks — including the current one, which has so far killed two people and infected at least eight others. Earlier this month, the U.S. government issued the foundation a waiver and said it could continue its lifesaving work.

So those who run the foundation were shocked to receive a termination notice hours later. The foundation’s executive director, Dr. Dithan Kiragga, told ProPublica his staff had just begun contact tracing patients with Ebola. He said they will likely now have to halt all U.S.-funded operations and hope that the Uganda health ministry can step in.

“The patients will be told that we are closing,” Kiragga said. “They’ve relied on our systems and support for quite a few years. We saved lives.”

In 2018, during Trump’s first term, Marocco was a senior political appointee tasked with promoting stability in areas with armed conflict. That summer, he made a two-week trip to the Balkans, visiting several Eastern European countries in what was advertised as an effort to “counter violent extremism” and “strengthen inter-religious dialogue.”

At the time, the U.S. was trying to maintain a fragile peace agreement it had helped broker two decades earlier in the region. The Balkans are still living in the shadows of the Bosnian war, a 1990s conflict between the region’s disparate ethno-religious groups that led to the deaths of an estimated 100,000 people, including thousands of Muslim civilians who were massacred by Serb forces.

To avoid compromising such delicate international relations, American diplomatic work is carefully prescribed, even down to the people U.S. officials meet — and those they should avoid, like politicians under Treasury Department sanctions for corruption or war crimes.

On a 2018 visit to the Balkans, Marocco secretly met with officials whom the American government had determined were off-limits without the highest levels of approval: ethnonationalist Bosnian Serb separatist leaders. Those politicians had been working for years to defy their nation’s constitution and undermine the American-backed peace deal in an effort to promote a Christian Bosnian Serb state. ProPublica pieced the episode together from interviews with seven current and former U.S. officials.

Among those in attendance was Milorad Dodik, according to one of the officials. The leader of a political region within the broader nation, Dodik was at the time under U.S. sanctions by the Trump administration for actively obstructing American efforts to prevent more bloodshed. (The officials interviewed for this article requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the administration.)

Dodik has since called himself “pro-Russian, anti-Western and anti-American” in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and is currently under new sanctions for corruption charges. He has also vowed to tear the country apart rather than allow the U.S. to unify it.

Maureen Cormack, then the American ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina, discovered the meeting had taken place and confronted Marocco in the embassy at the end of his visit. Marocco initially demurred, an official said, before finally acknowledging the gathering. Cormack was furious, issuing a sharp rebuke, the official said. Cormack didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment.

Marocco left the country soon after. A year later, he was no longer working at the State Department.

What he had discussed with the Bosnian separatists is not clear. But the meeting itself provided legitimacy to far-right politicians pushing for a Christian state and undermined U.S. foreign policy, experts and officials said.

“He reinforced a whole political trajectory that is antithetical to what the U.S. is trying to do,” one U.S. official told ProPublica, “which is supporting a peace agreement.”

After the State Department, the Trump administration sent Marocco to a senior post at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he attempted to delay or halt dozens of programs — including those that benefited Bosnia and Herzegovina’s unified government — and reinvent the agency to better align with his version of U.S. foreign policy. That agenda, former colleagues told ProPublica, was overtly militaristic and Christian nationalist. The complaints about Marocco alarmed agency leaders so much that they significantly curtailed his duties in the waning months of the administration.

Marocco’s turbulent tenure during the last Trump administration sheds light on his current efforts to destroy the American foreign aid system from the inside out. Current and former officials see it as a campaign of retribution against those who opposed his earlier work, as well as an opportunity to fulfill his most controversial policies by sidelining bureaucrats who get in his way.

Marocco is now the director for foreign assistance at the State Department and has been delegated the power of deputy administrator of USAID — helping lead the two agencies that previously rejected him. And unlike last time, Marocco is now without strictures and answers to few in the executive branch besides Trump himself.

Immediately after the inauguration last month, Marocco drafted the order shutting down all of USAID’s programs and freezing foreign aid. He’s led the efforts to place nearly all of the agency’s staff on administrative leave, though the courts have temporarily lifted many of those. Much of USAID’s work has not resumed, according to interviews with dozens of government employees and nongovernmental organizations, despite the State Department’s claim that waivers allow work involving “core lifesaving medicine, medical services, food, shelter and substance assistance” to continue.

“It’s an exact repeat of what he did but at scale,” said a former senior official at USAID who worked alongside Marocco during his previous stint in government. “He had no problem stopping foreign assistance. … He came in, he said, ‘We’re going to stop all programming, stop everything going on in the field.’”

Marocco and the State Department did not respond to a detailed list of questions about the meeting or his views. Dodik did not respond either.

Marocco’s meeting was not the only diplomatic misstep in his tumultuous career.

During a trip to Serbia, Marocco on his own volition invited the country’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, to visit Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Muslims were killed during the Bosnian genocide, according to two officials familiar with the incident. Considered highly inappropriate — Bosnian Serb and Serbian paramilitary forces had massacred the people buried there — the invitation had not been approved by the U.S. ambassador.

In 2020, the Trump administration appointed Marocco to USAID, the world’s largest foreign aid organization. As assistant to the administrator in charge of the Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, he bewildered staff by attempting to reorient the work exclusively toward his brand of U.S. national security interests, according to interviews with his former subordinates and superiors, as well as an official complaint, known as a dissent cable, lodged against him within three months after he’d joined. Some said he frequently favored programs that benefited Christian minorities abroad.

Marocco told subordinates that he disagreed with much of USAID’s traditional “soft power” approach toward diplomacy and ordered wide-ranging but vague reviews of the agency’s programs, insisting that he personally approve any expenses over $10,000, the officials said.

Those who worked alongside him throughout government were particularly alarmed by comments he had made during private conversations when discussing American foreign policy. Those officials told ProPublica that Marocco has questioned whether USAID should be funding programs to combat racist nationalism and hate speech abroad.

While he was at the agency, he frequently expressed wanting to cut programs he didn’t like or understand, his former colleagues said. In the internal cable filed to leaders of the agency, they accused Marocco of trying to withhold congressionally approved funds slated for most of the programs supporting democracy and fair elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina and redirect that money toward addressing Islamic extremism.

That cable warns that “operational capacity and strategic efficacy have been and continue to be rapidly degraded” by Marocco, and that the programs risk being irreversibly damaged “at significant financial cost to the American taxpayer.”

Diplomats said his efforts undermined U.S. strategic interests in the region and, by favoring one religion over another, likely ran afoul of the Constitution’s religious freedom clause, according to the cable. They were concerned that his actions “risk worsening BiH’s tense sectarian tensions by affirming one side’s narrative while stigmatizing the other,” they wrote in the cable, using the abbreviation for Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnia is about 50% Muslim with large minority populations of Serb Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholic Croats.

“He had it in for Bosnia,” a former official at USAID said, “and I didn’t know why at the time.”

Marocco’s short time at USAID was the last in a stretch of four jobs at four agencies, including the Pentagon and the Department of Commerce.

Marocco was next seen inside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, according to footage gathered and analyzed by an online group. He was not charged with a crime and has not responded to multiple requests for comment about his role that day, though he has called the accusations “[p]etty smear tactics and desperate personal attacks by politicians with no solutions.”

Experts in and outside government now consider Marocco to be orchestrating the new Trump administration’s foreign aid policy largely by himself. His official position is director of foreign assistance at the State Department, and the powers of the deputy administrator of USAID have been delegated to him as well. “Right now he is the most important person at the State Department,” one official observed.

Marocco’s rapid-fire assault on USAID has come under legal scrutiny in recent days after dozens of employees and organizations filed lawsuits, seeking to reverse his most consequential changes. Judges have at least temporarily reined in the broad use of administrative leave for thousands of employees across the agency and told the agency to reinstate programs that were funded and approved prior to Trump’s inauguration.

Marocco has defended his sweeping takedown as a necessary measure to root out government waste and support Trump’s agenda to make America safer and more prosperous.

“His thinking was that the people in government were not abiding by the right theory,” another official told ProPublica. “Well we know now how far he’s willing to go.”

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 intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

Musk’s employees told staff they could not come to USAID’s headquarters. Guards now stand sentry with a clipboard to block almost everyone from getting inside. On Friday, a maintenance crew took the agency’s title off the building’s facade.

What happens now is unclear. Friday’s court injunction temporarily prevents the administration from placing about 2,000 more people on leave, orders the reinstatement of 500 others and stops the recall of foreign service officials from abroad.

In recent days, ProPublica has interviewed dozens of USAID officials and contractors who have found themselves suddenly out of work and cut off from the government they had devoted their lives to serving. “I am a combat veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and not a deranged Marxist as Elon is shouting,” one employee told ProPublica.

“I have lived through a dictatorship before,” said another. “I know what these look like, and the writing is on the wall for me.”

A third: “I don’t think Americans seem to understand what’s at stake here. This is a heist. It’s a hostile takeover by malicious actors of our entire government.”

At various points, those within the agency who tried standing up against what they considered to be illegal abuses or immoderate management say they were punished for it. “There are no guardrails left,” another USAID official told ProPublica. “And there’s nobody left to stop it.”

The agency’s heads of security were put on leave after they blocked Musk’s engineers from accessing the classified servers last weekend. Then the same happened to the top human resources officer after he refused to put an additional 1,400 staffers on leave Tuesday. Both episodes were first reported by the trade publication Devex.

Likewise, when the USAID labor director reversed the administration’s decision to place almost 60 senior civil servants on leave at the onset, he was put on leave too. “The agency’s front office and DOGE instructed me to violate the due process of our employees by issuing immediate termination notices,” the labor director wrote in an email to staff.

“It is and has always been my office’s commitment to the workforce that we ensure all employees receive their due process,” he added. “I will not be a party to a violation of that commitment.”

Early last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio — a staunch supporter of USAID during his time in the Senate — sent Congress a letter saying that the administration “may move” some of the agency’s bureaus under the State Department, the kind of notification that is required 15 days before any major overhaul can take place, according to federal law. He told the lawmakers that the administration intended to work with them on a “review and potential reorganization of USAID’s activities,” and that Marocco would lead the effort.

If it were true, experts say his sentiment would more closely reflect the legal requirements that Congress has laid out since establishing USAID as an independent agency. But experts and government officials said the letter is an inadequate attempt to retrospectively justify what has already occurred.

That difference — between what the administration told lawmakers it was doing to USAID and what it was actually doing — was on display during a previously unreported episode in late January.

In late January, Marocco spoke with congressional aides representing both parties and both chambers. During a series of a half dozen phone calls — he declined to see them in person — the aides asked him to explain the rationale behind the stop-work orders the administration had sent around the world and the process for organizations to receive a waiver from program freezes.

Marocco declined to give substantive responses and claimed the waiver process was operating smoothly, one of the aides told ProPublica.

Marocco said shutting down USAID programs would give the administration an opportunity to see which ones would make America safer and stronger, which was Trump’s promise to voters. He added that he would be personally reviewing programs that requested a waiver and decide which ones should go to Rubio for final approval.

Meanwhile, organizations all over the world remain either grounded under stop-work orders or unable to draw on U.S. funds to continue working, as ProPublica previously reported. The agency put many people who could help process those payments on leave. Among the programs affected were efforts to feed malnourished children in Sudan, bring clean water to refugees in Yemen and deliver medicines to people living with HIV.

During the briefings, the congressional aides acknowledged that there are legitimate things to criticize about USAID. In the past, the agency has been accused of poor oversight of its contractors and interminable support for projects that were meant to end years ago. “I believe the purpose of foreign assistance should be ending its need to exist,” the agency’s former administrator Mark Green once said. And it was the president’s prerogative to focus on programs that align with his agenda. “But,” one of the aides told Marocco, “none of that justifies anything you’re doing.”

Days later, during a recent meeting with USAID staff in Guatemala, Rubio claimed they’d had a “problem” with some people back in the U.S. and that some of the agency’s programs undermined the Trump administration’s goals, according to a transcript of his comments. He also suggested that exceptions to Marocco’s foreign service recall could be made for people with extenuating circumstances, such as pregnant staffers in their third trimester or a person on dialysis.

By Thursday, there were plans to decimate entire USAID bureaus without inviting back the majority of staff on administrative leave. A group tracking the fallout estimates nearly 52,000 American jobs, including those working for vendors and contractors, were already eliminated in the last two weeks. “I fail to understand how having thousands of Americans lose their jobs puts America first,” said Nidhi Bouri, who worked for nearly a decade at USAID, the last two as a political appointee of President Joe Biden.

It’s legally murky if Trump simply keeps them on indefinite administrative leave. Under the Administrative Leave Act of 2016, an individual can only be placed on paid leave for 10 days a year. But a regulation issued by the Biden administration specifies that limitation only applies when that person is under investigation. Legal experts say the interpretation has since been that if there is no investigation, an employee can be placed on leave indefinitely, so long as they continue receiving a paycheck.

Not everyone is sure the Biden-era regulation will hold up in court. “That hasn’t been challenged, and it’s relatively new,” said Nick Bednar, a law professor at the University of Minnesota. “There’s enough of us that think that regulation is inconsistent with statute and if argued in court it might be considered invalid.”

It is illegal for the Trump administration to unilaterally dissolve an agency created by Congress, according to legal scholars, government experts and the congressional research facility.

“For all intents and purposes you are dismantling an agency created by Congress, and that’s a violation of the law,” said Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown Law. “It can’t stand unchallenged, in my view.”

And while a president has broad discretion to make changes to programs and reduce the workforce, the Impoundment Control Act prevents him from withholding money appropriated by Congress, the experts said.

“If it turns out that the president can eliminate or defund an agency on a whim, then ultimately Congress is stripped of all power over the budget,” said Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “That would create a precedent that destroys the separation of powers.”

It will be the courts that decide if and to what extent Trump’s takeover of USAID violated federal law.

Many legal experts in and outside of government believe this was the administration’s plan all along: drag out Trump’s most aggressive and controversial policy decisions in court for so long that by the time any permanent judgment comes down, favorable or not, USAID will be nothing but a memory.

“They don’t seem to care what the statutes say,” said Kevin Owen, an attorney who represents both management and federal workers in employment disputes. “The plan from the employment perspective was to fire them all and make them sue. If the administration loses the court cases, so be it. The damage is done.”

They chose the children.

In spite of the order, they will keep their facilities open for as long as they can, according to three people with direct knowledge of the situation. The people requested anonymity for fear that the administration might target their group for reprisals. Trump’s order also meant they would stop receiving new, previously approved funds to cover salaries, IV bags and other supplies. They said it’s a matter of days, not weeks, before they run out.

American-funded aid organizations around the globe, charged with providing lifesaving care for the most desperate and vulnerable populations imaginable, have for days been forced to completely halt their operations, turn away patients and lay off staff following a series of sudden stop-work demands from the Trump administration. Despite an announcement earlier this week ostensibly allowing lifesaving operations to continue, those earlier orders have not been rescinded.

Many groups doing such lifesaving work either don’t know the right way to request an exemption to the order, known as a waiver, or have no sense of where their request stands. They’ve received little information from the U.S. government, where, in recent days, humanitarian officials have been summarily ousted or prohibited from communicating with the aid organizations.

Trump’s rapid assault on the international aid system is quickly becoming the most consequential and far-reaching shift in U.S. humanitarian policy since the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, aid groups and government officials warned.

Among the programs that remain grounded as of Friday: emergency medical care for displaced Palestinians and Yemenis fleeing war, heat and electricity for Ukrainian refugees and HIV treatment and mpox surveillance in Africa.

Experts in and out of government have anxiously watched the fluid situation develop. “I’ve been an infectious disease doctor for 30 years, and I’ve never seen anything that scares me as much as this,” said Dr. Jennifer Furin, a Harvard Medical School physician who received a stop-work order for a program designing treatment plans for people with the most drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis. Infectious diseases do not know borders, she pointed out. “It’s terrifying.”

Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio first issued the freeze on aid operations last Friday, which included limited exemptions. “The pause on all foreign assistance means a complete halt,” a top adviser wrote in an internal memo to staff. (The order was separate from Trump’s now-seemingly rescinded moratorium on domestic U.S. grants.) Aid groups across the globe began receiving emails that instructed them to immediately stop working while the government conducted a 90-day review of their programs to make sure they aligned with the administration’s agenda.

Trump campaigned on an “America First” platform after unsuccessfully trying to slash the foreign assistance budget during his first term in office. The U.S. provides about $60 billion in nonmilitary humanitarian and development aid annually — less than 1% of the federal budget, but far more than any other country. The complex network of organizations who carry out the work is managed by the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development.

Over the weekend, that system came to a standstill. There was widespread chaos and confusion as contractors scrambled to understand seemingly arbitrary orders from Washington and figure out how to get a waiver to continue working. By Tuesday evening, Trump and Rubio appeared to heed the international pressure and scale back the order by announcing that any “lifesaving” humanitarian efforts would be allowed to continue.

Aid groups that specialize in saving lives were relieved and thought their stop-work orders would be reversed just as swiftly as they had arrived.

But that hasn’t happened. Instead, more stop-work orders have been issued. As of Thursday, contractors worldwide were still grounded under the original orders and unable to secure waivers. Top Trump appointees arrested further funding and banned new projects for at least three months.

“We need to correct the impression that the waiver was self-executing by virtue of the announcement,” said Marcia Wong, the former deputy assistant administrator of USAID’s humanitarian assistance bureau.

Aid groups that had already received U.S. money were told they could not spend it or do any previously approved work. The contractors quoted in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared the administration might prolong their suspension or cancel their contracts completely.

As crucial days and hours pass, aid groups say Trump’s order has already caused irreparable harm. Often without cash reserves or endowments, many organizations depend on U.S. funding entirely and have been forced to lay off staff and cancel contracts with vendors. One CEO said he expects up to 3,000 aid workers to lose their jobs in Washington alone, according to the trade publication Devex. Some groups may have to shutter altogether because they can’t afford to float their overhead costs without knowing if or when they’d get reimbursed.

Critics say the past week has also undermined Trump’s own stated goals of American prosperity and security by opening a vacuum for international adversaries to fill, while putting millions at immediate and long-term risk.

“A chaotic, unexplained and abrupt pause with no guidance has left all our partners around the world high and dry and America looking like a severely unreliable actor to do business with,” a USAID official told ProPublica, adding that other countries will now have good reason to look to China or Russia for the help they’re no longer getting from the U.S. “There’s nothing that was left untouched.”

In response to a detailed list of questions for this article, the White House referred ProPublica to the State Department. The State Department said to direct all questions about USAID to the agency itself. USAID did not reply to our emails. Much of its communications staff was let go in the last week.

In a public statement Wednesday, the State Department defended the foreign aid freezes and said the government has issued dozens of exemption waivers in recent days.

“The previously announced 90-day pause and review of U.S. foreign aid is already paying dividends to our country and our people,” the statement said. “We are rooting out waste. We are blocking woke programs. And we are exposing activities that run contrary to our national interests. None of this would be possible if these programs remained on autopilot.”

The dire international situation has been exacerbated by upheaval in Washington. This week, the Trump administration furloughed 500 support staff contractors from USAID’s humanitarian assistance bureau, about 40% of the unit, and fired 400 more from the global health bureau. Those workers were told to stop working and “please head home.”

The remaining officials in Washington are now attempting to navigate a confounding waiver process and get lifesaving programs back online. Officials and diplomats told ProPublica that Trump’s new political appointees have not consulted USAID’s longtime humanitarian experts when crafting the new policies. As a result, career civil servants said they are struggling to understand the policy or how to carry it out.

During an internal meeting early in the week, one of USAID’s top Middle East officials told mission directors that the bar for aid groups to qualify for an exemption to Trump’s freeze was high, according to meeting notes. It took until Thursday for the directors to receive instructions for how to fill out a spreadsheet with the programs they think should qualify for a waiver and why, a government employee told ProPublica. “The waiver for humanitarian assistance has been a farce,” another USAID official said.

“Like a Russian nesting doll of fuck-ups,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who ran some of USAID’s largest programs under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. “It’s just astonishing.”

Fear of retaliation is permeating the government’s foreign aid agencies, which have become some of Trump’s first targets in his campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Earlier this week, the administration pulled down photographs of children and families from the agency’s hallways.

Many are afraid of being punished or fired for doing their jobs. Officials in USAID’s humanitarian affairs bureau say they have been prohibited from even accepting calendar invites from aid organizations or setting up out-of-office email replies.

On Monday, USAID placed about 60 senior civil servants on administrative leave, citing unspecified attempts to “circumvent” the president’s agenda. The group received an email informing them of the decision without an explanation before they were locked out of the agency’s systems and banned from the building.

“We’re civil servants,” one of the officials said. “I should have been given notice, due process. Instead there was an agencywide notice accusing people of subverting the president’s executive orders.”

Then, on Thursday, the agency’s labor relations director told the group that he was withdrawing the agency’s decision because he found no evidence of misconduct, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

Hours later, the director was put on administrative leave himself. “The agency’s front office and DOGE instructed me to violate the due process of our employees by issuing immediate termination notices,” he wrote to colleagues, referring to Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency run by Elon Musk. (Musk did not respond to a request for comment.)

Later that night, the original 60 officials were placed back on leave again.

Diplomats have long lauded American humanitarian efforts overseas because they help build crucial alliances around the world with relatively little cost.

When he created USAID in 1961, President John F. Kennedy called it a historic opportunity to improve the developing world so that countries don’t fall into economic collapse. That, he told Congress, “would be disastrous to our national security, harmful to our comparative prosperity and offensive to our conscience.”

USAID is responsible for the most successful international health program of the 21st century. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, created in 2003 by President George W. Bush to combat HIV globally, has saved an estimated 26 million lives over the past 22 years. It currently helps supply HIV medicines to 20 million people, and it funds HIV testing and jobs for thousands of health care workers, mainly in Africa.

That all ground to a halt this week. Since receiving the U.S. government’s stop-work orders, contractors who manage the program say they have so far received little communication about what work they will be allowed to continue, or when. They are not allowed to hand out medicines already bought and sitting on shelves.

If the exemption waivers don’t come through, policy analysts and HIV advocates say the full 90-day suspension of those programs would have disastrous consequences. More than 222,000 people pick up HIV treatment every day through the program, according to an analysis by amFAR, a nonprofit dedicated to AIDS research and advocacy. As of Friday morning, those orders had not been lifted, according to three people with direct knowledge.

Up through last week, PEPFAR was providing HIV treatment to an estimated 680,000 pregnant women, the majority of whom are in Africa. A 90-day stoppage could lead to an estimated 136,000 babies acquiring HIV, according to the amfAR analysis. Since HIV testing services are also suspended, many of those could go undiagnosed.

The disarray has also reached warzones and foreign governments, risking disease outbreaks and straining international relationships forged over decades.

Government officials worried about contract personnel who were suddenly stranded in remote locations. In Syria, camp managers were told to abandon their site at al-Hawl refugee camp, which is also a prison for ISIS sympathizers. That left the refugees inside with nowhere to turn for basic supplies like food and gas.

In Mogadishu, Somalia, the State Department instructed security guards who were protecting an arms depot from insurgents to simply walk off the site, according to a company official. When the guards asked what would happen to the armory, their government contacts told them they didn’t have any answers. (Concerns about the armory were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.)

The contractors in Syria and Somalia have since been allowed to return to their sites.

An executive at a health care nonprofit told ProPublica he has not been so lucky. His group is still under the stop-work order and can’t fund medical operations in Gaza, where there is a fragile ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel that depends in part on the free flow of humanitarian aid.

“People will die,” the executive said. “For organizations that rely solely or largely on U.S. government funding, this hurts. That may be part of the message. But there would be less drastic ways to send it.”

In response to criticism, the Trump administration has offered misinformation. During a press conference, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, touted the initiative’s success so far and said the government “found that there was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza.” Trump later went further, saying Hamas fighters were using the condoms to make explosives.

They didn’t name the contractor, but the State Department later cited $100 million in canceled aid packages slated for the International Medical Corps.

IMC said in a response that no U.S. government funding was used for condoms or any other family-planning services. The organization has treated more than 33,000 Palestinians a month, according to the statement. It also operates one of the only centers in Gaza for severely malnourished children.

“If the stop-work order remains in place,” IMC said, “we will be unable to sustain these activities beyond the next week or so.”

There are also new outbreaks of Ebola in Uganda’s capital and of the disease’s cousin, the Marburg virus, in Tanzania. The U.S. has long been a key funder of biosecurity measures internationally, including at high-security labs. That funding is now on hold.

In Ukraine, groups that provide vital humanitarian aid for civilians and soldiers fighting Russia have been told to stand down without any meaningful updates in days, according to three officials familiar with the situation. The halted services include first responders, fuel for hospitals and evacuation routes for refugees fleeing the front lines.

“These are people who have been living in a war zone for three years this month,” the head of one of the organizations said, adding that they may have to lay off 20% of its staff. “And we are taking away these very basic services that they need to survive.”

A support staffer working on contract for the U.S. mission in Yemen said her entire team had been told to stop their work last weekend, which ProPublica corroborated with contemporaneous emails. “One of my tasks was summarizing how many people had been directly saved by our health programs every week,” she said. “It was usually 80 to 100.”

Their stop-work order has not been lifted. It will be a week on Sunday.

In early November, a small group of senior U.S. human rights diplomats met with a top official in President Joe Biden’s State Department to make one final, emphatic plea: We must keep our word.

Weeks before, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration delivered their most explicit ultimatum yet to Israel, demanding the Israel Defense Forces allow hundreds more trucksloads of food and medicine into Gaza every day — or else. American law and Biden’s own policies prohibit arms sales to countries that restrict humanitarian aid. Israel had 30 days to comply.

In the month that followed, the IDF was accused of roundly defying the U.S., its most important ally. The Israeli military tightened its grip, continued to restrict desperately needed aid trucks and displaced 100,000 Palestinians from North Gaza, humanitarian groups found, exacerbating what was already a dire crisis “to its worst point since the war began.”

Several attendees at the November meeting — officials who help lead the State Department’s efforts to promote racial equity, religious freedom and other high-minded principles of democracy — said the United States’ international credibility had been severely damaged by Biden’s unstinting support of Israel. If there was ever a time to hold Israel accountable, one ambassador at the meeting told Tom Sullivan, the State Department’s counselor and a senior policy adviser to Blinken, it was now.

But the decision had already been made. Sullivan said the deadline would likely pass without action and Biden would continue sending shipments of bombs uninterrupted, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Those in the room deflated. “Don’t our law, policy and morals demand it?” an attendee told me later, reflecting on the decision to once again capitulate. “What is the rationale of this approach? There is no explanation they can articulate.”

Soon after, when the 30-day deadline was up, Blinken made it official and said that Israelis had begun implementing most of the steps he had laid out in his letter — all thanks to the pressure the U.S. had applied.

That choice was immediately called into question. On Nov. 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel’s methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was “consistent with genocide.” Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations. (The U.S. and Israeli governments have rejected the genocide determination as well as the warrants.)

The October red line was the last one Biden laid down, but it wasn’t the first. His administration issued multiple threats, warnings and admonishments to Israel about its conduct after Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.

Government officials worry Biden’s record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity.

Trump, who has made a raft of pro-Israel nominations, made it clear he wanted the war in Gaza to end before he took office and threatened that “all hell will break out” if Hamas did not release its hostages by then.

On Wednesday, after months of negotiations, Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire deal. While it will become clear over the next days and months exactly what the contours of the agreement are, why it happened now and who deserves the most credit, it’s plausible that Trump’s imminent ascension to the White House was its own form of a red line. Early reports suggest the deal looks similar to what has been on the table for months, raising the possibility that if the Biden administration had followed through on its tough words, a deal could have been reached earlier, saving lives.

“Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute who’s focused on U.S.-Israel relations and a former official with the Palestinian Authority who helped advise on prior peace talks. “Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying ‘no’ to the current president.”

So-called red lines have long been a prominent foreign policy tool for the world’s most powerful nations. They are communicated publicly in pronouncements by senior officials and privately by emissaries. They amount to rules of the road for friends and adversaries — you can go this far but no further.

The failure to enforce those lines in recent years has had consequences, current and former U.S. officials said. One frequently cited example arose in 2012 when President Barack Obama told the Syrian government that using chemical weapons against its own people would change his calculus about directly intervening. When Syria’s then-President Bashar al-Assad launched rockets with chemical gas and killed hundreds of civilians anyway, Obama backpedaled and ultimately chose not to invade, a move critics say allowed the civil war to spiral further while extremist groups took advantage by recruiting locals.

Authorities in and outside government said the acquiescence to Israel as it prosecuted a brutal war will likely be regarded as one the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Biden presidency. They say it undermines America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East while “destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put into place after WWII,” as Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-American scholar of genocide, put it. Jeffrey Feltman, the former assistant secretary of the State Department’s Middle East bureau, told me he fears much of the Muslim world now sees the U.S. as “ineffective at best or complicit at worst in the large-scale civilian destruction and death.”

Biden’s warnings over the past year have also been explicit. Last spring, the president vowed to stop supplying offensive bombs to Israel if it launched a major invasion into the southern city of Rafah. He also told Netanyahu the U.S. was going to rethink support for the war unless he took new steps to protect civilians and aid workers after the IDF blew up a World Central Kitchen caravan. And Blinken signaled that he would blacklist a notorious IDF unit for the death of a Palestinian-American in the West Bank if the soldiers involved were not brought to justice.

Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Blinken disagreed and said Netanyahu has listened to him by softening Israel’s most aggressive tactics, including in Rafah. He also argued there was a cost to even questioning the IDF openly. “Whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel,” Blinken said, “Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of hostages.”

He acknowledged that not enough humanitarian assistance has been reaching civilians and said the Israelis initially resisted the idea of allowing any food and medicine into Gaza — which would be a war crime — but Netanyahu relented in response to U.S. pressure behind the scenes. Blinken backtracked later in the interview and suggested that the blocking of aid was not Israeli policy. “There’s a very different question about what was the intent,” he told the Times.

For this story, ProPublica spoke with scores of current and former officials throughout the year and read through government memos, cables and emails, many of which have not been reported previously. The records and interviews shed light on why Biden and his top advisers refused to adjust his policy even as new evidence of Israeli abuses emerged.

Throughout the contentious year inside the State Department, senior leaders repeatedly disregarded their own experts. They cracked down on leaks by threatening criminal investigations and classifying material that was critical of Israel. Some of the agency’s top Middle East diplomats complained in private that they were sidelined by Biden’s National Security Council. The council also distributed a list of banned phrases, including any version of “State of Palestine” that didn’t have the word “future” first. Two human rights officials said they were prevented from pursuing evidence of abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

The State Department did not make Blinken available for an interview, but the agency’s top spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said in a statement that Blinken welcomes internal dissent and has incorporated it into his policymaking. “The Department continues to encourage individuals to make their opinions known through appropriate channels,” he added. Miller denied that the agency has classified material for any reason other than national security.

Over the past year, reports have documented physical and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons, using Palestinians as human shields and razing residential buildings and hospitals. At one point early in the conflict, UNICEF said more than 10 children required amputations every day on average. Israeli soldiers have videotaped themselves burning food supplies and ransacking homes. One IDF group reportedly said, “Our job is to flatten Gaza.”

Israel’s defenders, including those on the National Security Council, acknowledge the devastating human toll but contend that American arms have helped Israel advance western interests in the region and protect itself from other enemies. Indeed, Netanyahu has significantly diminished Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing many of the groups’ leaders. Then Iran’s “axis of resistance” received its most consequential blow late last year when rebel groups ousted Assad from Syria.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told the Times of Israel he worried that a generation of young Americans will harbor anti-Israel sentiments into the future. He said he wished that Israel had done a better job at communicating how carefully it undertook combat decisions and calling attention to its humanitarian successes to counter a narrative in the American press that he considers biased.

“The media that is presenting a pro-Hamas perspective is out instantaneously telling a story,” Lew said. “It tells a story that is, over time, shown not to be completely accurate. ‘Thirty-five children were killed.’ Well, it wasn’t 35 children. It was many fewer.”

“The children who were killed,” he added, “turned out to have been the children of Hamas fighters.”

The repercussions for the United States and the region will play out for years. Protests have erupted outside the American embassies in Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, while polls show Arab Americans grew increasingly hostile to their own government stateside. Russia, before its black eye in Syria, and China have both sought to capitalize by entering business and defense deals with Arab nations. By the summer, State Department analysts in the Middle East sent cables to Washington expressing concerns that the IDF’s conduct would only inflame tensions in the West Bank and galvanize young Palestinians to take up arms against Israel. Intelligence officials warn that terrorist groups are recruiting on the anti-American sentiment throughout the region, which they say is at its highest levels in years.

The Israeli government did not answer detailed questions, but a spokesperson for the embassy in Washington, D.C., broadly defended Israel’s relationship with the U.S., “two allies who have been working together to push back against extremist, destabilizing actors.” Israel is a country of laws, the spokesperson added, and its actions over the past 15 months “benefit the interests of the free world and the United States, creating an opportunity for a better future for the Middle East amid the tragedy of the war started by Hamas.”

Next week, Trump will inherit a demoralized State Department, part of the federal bureaucracy from which he has pledged to cull disloyal employees. Grappling with the near-daily images of carnage in Gaza, many across the U.S. government have become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented.

“This is the human rights atrocity of our time,” one senior diplomat told me. “I work for the department that’s responsible for this policy. I signed up for this. … I don’t deserve sympathy for it.”

The southern city of Rafah was supposed to be a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who the IDF had forced from their homes in the north at the start of the war. When Biden learned that Netanyahu intended to invade the city this spring, he warned that the U.S. will stop sending offensive arms if the Israelis went through with it.

“It is a red line,” Biden had said, marking the first high-profile warning from the U.S.

Netanyahu invaded in May anyway. Israeli tanks rolled into the city and the IDF dropped bombs on Hamas targets, including a refugee camp, killing dozens of civilians. Biden responded by pausing a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs but otherwise resumed military support.

In late May, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop its assault on the city, citing the Geneva Conventions. Behind the scenes, State Department lawyers scrambled to come up with a legal basis on which Israel could continue smaller attacks in Rafah. “There is room to argue that more scaled back/targeted operations, combined with better humanitarian efforts, would not meet that threshold,” the lawyers said in a May 24 email. While it’s not unreasonable for government lawyers to defend a close ally, critics say the cable illustrates the extreme deference the U.S. affords Israel.

“The State Department has a whole raft of highly paid, very good lawyers to explain, ‘Actually this is not illegal,’ when in fact it is,” said Ari Tolany, an arms trade authority and director at the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank. “Rules for thee and not for me.”

The administration says that it restrained Israel’s attack in Rafah. In a recent interview, Lew told the Times of Israel the operation ultimately resulted in relatively few civilian casualties. “It was done in a way that limited or really eliminated the friction between the United States and Israel,” he added, “but also led to a much better outcome.”

Several experts told me international law is effectively discretionary for some countries. “American policy ignores it when it’s inconvenient and adheres to it when it is convenient,” said Aaron Miller, a career State Department diplomat who worked for decades under both Democratic and Republican presidents as an adviser on Arab-Israeli negotiations. “The U.S. does not leverage or bring sustainable, credible, serious pressure to bear on any of its allies and partners,” he added, “not just Israel.”

Miller and others note that the barbarity of Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, galvanized domestic support for Israel and made it significantly easier for Biden to avoid holding the Israelis accountable as they retaliated.

There are other likely reasons for Biden’s unwillingness to impose any realistic limitations on Israel’s use of American weaponry since Oct. 7. For one, his career-long affinity for Israel — its security, people and the idea of a friendly democracy in the Middle East — is shared by many of the most powerful people in the country. (“If this Capitol crumbles to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid — I don’t even call it aid, our cooperation — with Israel,” Nancy Pelosi said in 2018, weeks before resuming her role as House speaker.) That rationale aligned with the Democrats’ political goals during an election when they were wary of taking risks and upsetting large portions of the electorate, including the immensely powerful Israel lobby.

Immediately after the ICJ’s order about the Rafah invasion, officials in the State Department’s Middle East and communications divisions drafted a list of proposed public statements to acknowledge the importance of the court and express concern over civilians in the city. But Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesperson, nixed almost all of them. He told the officials in a May 24 email that those on the White House’s National Security Council “aren’t going to clear” any recognition of the ruling or criticism of Israel.

That was an early sign that the State Department was taking a back seat in shaping war policy. In its place, the NSC — largely led by Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein — assumed a larger role. While the NSC has grown significantly in size and influence over the decades, State Department officials repeatedly told me they felt marginalized this past year.

“The NSC has final say over our messaging,” one diplomat said. “All any of us can do is what they’ll allow us to do.”

The NSC did not make its senior leaders available for an interview or respond to questions from ProPublica. Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser and brother to the State Department’s counselor, said recently it was difficult, for much of the past year, “to get the Israeli government to align with a lot of what President Biden publicly has been saying” about Gaza.

Sullivan said too many civilians have died there and the U.S. was frequently required to publicly and privately pressure Israel to improve the flow of humanitarian aid. “We believe Israel has a responsibility — as a democracy, as a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law — that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians.”

During another internal State Department meeting in March, top regional diplomats voiced their frustrations about messaging and appearances. Hady Amr, one of the government’s highest-ranking authorities on Palestinian affairs, said he was reluctant to address large groups about the administration’s Israel policy and he took issue with much of it, according to notes of the conversation. He warned colleagues that the sentiment in Muslim communities was turning. From a public diplomacy perspective, Amr told them, the war has been “catastrophically bad for the U.S.” (Amr did not respond to requests for comment.)

Another attendee at the meeting said they had been effectively sidelined by the NSC. A third said it was a huge amount of effort to even get permission to use the word “condemn” when talking about Israeli settlers demolishing Palestinians’ homes in the West Bank.

Such sanitizing language became common. Alex Smith, a former contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that at one point the State Department distributed NSC’s list of phrases that he and others weren’t allowed to use on internal presentations. Instead of “Palestinian residents of Jerusalem,” for example, they were meant to say “non-Israeli residents of Jerusalem.” Another official told Smith in an email, “I would recommend not discussing [international humanitarian law] at all without extensive clearances.”

A USAID spokesperson said in an email that the agency couldn’t discuss personnel matters, but the list of terms was given to the agency by the State Department as early as 2022, before the war in Gaza. The list, the spokesperson added, includes the “suggested terms that are in line with U.S. diplomatic protocol.”

Deference to Israel is not new. For decades, the U.S. has repeatedly looked the other way when Israel is accused of human rights abuses.

One of the most conspicuous paper tigers in American foreign policy is the Leahy Law, experts say. Passed more than 25 years ago, the law’s authors intended to force foreign governments to hold their own accountable for violations like torture or extrajudicial killings — or their military assistance would be restricted. The law allowed precision targeting of individual units that faced credible allegations, so that the U.S. didn’t need to cut off entire countries from U.S.-funded weapons and training. It’s essentially a blacklist.

Almost immediately, Israel got special treatment, records show. In March 1998, IDF soldiers fired on journalists covering demonstrations in the West Bank city of Hebron. Congress asked the State Department, then led by Madeleine Albright, to take action under the new law. “An Israeli official informed the U.S. Embassy that the soldiers were disciplined after the incident, but was unable to provide further information,” State Department officials responded in a letter — more than two years later — to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the law’s namesake. “It is the Department's conclusion that there are insufficient grounds on which to conclude that the units involved committed gross violations of human rights.”

While the country took action across the globe in South America, the Pacific Rim and elsewhere, the U.S. government has never disqualified an Israeli military unit under the law — despite voluminous evidence presented to the State Department.

In 2020, the agency even set up a special council, called the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, to assess accusations against the country’s military and police units. The forum is composed of State Department officials with expertise in human rights, arms transfers and the Middle East who review public allegations of human rights abuses before making referrals to the Secretary of State. While it had ambitious goals to finally hold Israeli units accountable, the forum became widely known as just another layer of bureaucracy that slowed down the process and protected Israel.

Current and former diplomats told me that U.S. leaders are fundamentally unwilling to follow through on the law and cut off units from American-funded weapons. Instead, they have created multiple processes that give the appearance of accountability while simultaneously undermining any potential results, the experts said.

“It’s like walking toward the horizon,” said Charles Blaha, a former director at the State Department who served on the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum. “You can always walk toward it but you will never ever get there.”

“I really believed in the Israeli military justice system and I really believed that the State Department was acting in good faith,” he added. “But both of those things were wrong.”

A review of the vetting forum’s emails and meeting minutes from 2021 through 2022 shows even the most high-profile and seemingly egregious cases fall into a bureaucratic black hole.

After the IDF was accused of killing Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022, videos circulated on the internet of Israeli police units beating pallbearers at her funeral. “It is indeed very difficult to watch,” a deputy assistant secretary wrote in an email to a member of the forum. Another member told colleagues, “I think this would be what is actionable for the funeral procession itself as we wait for more info on circumstances of death and whether this would trigger Leahy ineligibility.”

Neither Akleh’s killing, nor the funeral beatings, led to Leahy determinations against Israel.

For years, lawmakers pushed the U.S. government to take action on Akleh’s case. Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide who helped draft the Leahy Law, recently held a meeting with State Department officials to discuss the case again. The officials in the meeting again punted. “We’re talking about an American journalist who was killed by an Israeli soldier and nothing happened,” he said. “They are walking out the door on Jan. 20th and they haven’t implemented the law.”

In another case considered by the forum, a 15-year-old boy from the West Bank said he was tortured and raped in the Israeli detention facility Al-Mascobiyya, or Russian Compound. For years, the State Department had been told about widespread abuses in that facility and others like it.

Military Court Watch, a local nonprofit organization of attorneys, collected testimony from more than 1,100 minors who had been detained between 2013 and 2023. Most said they were strip searched and many said they were beaten. Some teens tried to kill themselves in solitary confinement. IDF soldiers recalled children so scared that they peed themselves during arrests.

At the Russian Compound, a 14-year-old said his interrogator shocked and beat him in the legs with sticks to elicit information about a car fire. A 15-year-old said he was handcuffed with another boy. “An Israeli policeman then walked into the room and beat the hell out of me and the other boy,” he said. A 12-year-old girl said she was put into a small cell with cockroaches.

Military Court Watch routinely shared its information with the State Department, according to Gerard Horton, one of the group’s co-founders. But nothing ever came of it. “They receive all our reports and we name the facilities,” he told me. “It goes up the food chain and it gets political. Everyone knows what’s going on and obviously no action is taken.”

Even the State Department’s own public human rights reports acknowledge widespread allegations of abuse in Israeli prisons. Citing nonprofits, prisoner testimony and media reports, the agency wrote last year that “detainees held by Israel were subjected to physical and sexual violence, threats, intimidation, severely restricted access to food and water.”

In the summer of 2021, the State Department reached out to the Israeli government and asked about the 15-year-old who said he was raped at the Russian Compound. The next day, the Israeli government raided the nonprofit that had originally documented the allegation, Defense for Children International — Palestine, and then designated the group a terrorist organization.

As a result, U.S. human rights officials said they were prohibited from speaking to DCIP. “A large part of the frustration was that we were unable to access Palestinian civil society because most NGOs” — nongovernmental organizations — “were considered terrorist organizations,” said Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem who resigned last year. “All these groups were essentially the premier human rights organizations, and we were not able to meet with them.”

Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said in his statement that the agency has not “blanketly prohibited” officials from speaking with groups that document allegations of human rights abuses and they continue to work with organizations in Israel and the West Bank.

After the raid on DCIP, a member of the forum emailed his superior at the State Department and said the U.S. should push to get an explanation for the raid from the Israelis and “re-raise our original request for info on the underlying allegation.”

But almost two years went by and there were no arrests, while those on the forum struggled to get basic information about the case. Then, in the early months of the Israel war on Hamas, another State Department official reached out to DCIP and tried to reengage, according to a recording of the conversation.

“As you can imagine, it’s been a bit touchy here,” the official said on the call, explaining the months without correspondence. “The Israeli government’s not going to dictate to me who I can talk to, but my superiors can.”

The IDF eventually told the State Department it did not find evidence of a sexual assault but reprimanded the guard for kicking a chair during the teenager’s interrogation. To date, the U.S. has not cut off the Russian Compound on Leahy grounds.

In late April, there was surprising news: Blinken was reportedly set to take action against Netzah Yehuda, a notorious ultraorthodox IDF battalion, under the Leahy law.

The Leahy forum had recommended several cases to him. But for months, he sat on the recommendations. One of them was the case of Omar Assad.

On a cold night in January 2022, Netzah Yehuda soldiers pulled over Assad, an elderly Palestinian American who was on his way home from playing cards in the West Bank. They bound, blindfolded and gagged him and led him into a construction site, according to local investigators. He was found dead shortly after.

After the killing, DAWN, an advocacy group founded by the slain Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, compiled a dossier of evidence on the case, including testimony from family and witnesses, as well as a medical examiner’s report. The report found Assad had traumatic injuries to the head and other injuries that caused a stress-induced heart attack. The group delivered the dossier to the State Department’s Leahy forum.

The dossier also included information about other incidents. For years, Netzah Yehuda has been accused of violent crimes in the West Bank, including killing unarmed Palestinians. They have also been convicted of torturing and abusing detainees in custody.

By late 2023, after the Oct. 7 attacks, the experts on the forum decided that Assad’s case met all the conditions of the Leahy law: a human rights violation had occurred and the soldiers responsible had not been adequately punished. The forum recommended that the battalion should no longer receive any American-funded weapons or training until the perpetrators are brought to justice.

ProPublica published an article in the spring of 2024 about Blinken sitting on the recommendations. But when he signaled his intention to take action shortly after, the Israelis responded with fury. “Sanctions must not be imposed on the Israel Defense Forces!” Netanyahu posted on X. “The intention to impose a sanction on a unit in the IDF is the height of absurdity and a moral low.”

The pressure campaign, which also reportedly came from Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. and Lew, the ambassador, appears to have worked. For months, Blinken punted on an official decision. Then, in August, the State Department announced that Netzah Yehuda would not be cut off from military aid after all because the U.S. had received new information that the IDF had effectively “remediated” the case. Two soldiers involved were removed from active duty and made ineligible to serve in the reserve, but there is no indication that anyone was charged with a crime.

Miller, the spokesperson, said the IDF also took steps to avoid similar incidents in the future, like enhanced screening and a two-week educational seminar for Netzah Yehuda recruits.

“In seven and a half years as director of the State Department office that implements the Leahy law worldwide,” Blaha wrote shortly after the announcement, “I have never seen a single case in which mere administrative measures constituted sufficient remediation.”

In its statement to ProPublica, the Israeli government did not address individual cases, but said, “All of the incidents in question were thoroughly examined by the American administration, which concluded that Israel took remedial measures when necessary.”

Last summer, CNN documented how commanders in the battalion have been promoted to senior positions in the IDF, where they train ground troops and run operations in Gaza. A weapons expert told me the guns that Netzah Yehuda soldiers have been photographed holding were likely made in the U.S.

Later in the year, Younis Tirawi, a Palestinian journalist who runs a popular account on X, posted videos showing IDF soldiers who recorded themselves rummaging through children’s clothing inside a home and demolishing a mosque’s minaret. Tirawi said the soldiers were in Netzah Yehuda. (ProPublica could not independently verify the soldiers’ units.)

Hebrew text added to one of the videos said, “We won’t leave a trace of them.”

On Nov. 14, more than a year after the war started, Human Rights Watch released a report and said that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is widespread, systematic and intentional. It accused the Israelis of a crime against humanity, writing, “Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing.” (A former Israeli defense minister has also made that allegation.)

During a news briefing later that day, reporters pressed a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, on the report’s findings.

Patel said the U.S. government disagrees and has not seen evidence of forced displacement in Gaza.

“That,” he said, “certainly would be a red line.”

In early January 2000, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was at a five-star beach resort in Sea Island, Georgia, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

After almost a decade on the court, Thomas had grown frustrated with his financial situation, according to friends. He had recently started raising his young grandnephew, and Thomas’ wife was soliciting advice on how to handle the new expenses. The month before, the justice had borrowed $267,000 from a friend to buy a high-end RV.

At the resort, Thomas gave a speech at an off-the-record conservative conference. He found himself seated next to a Republican member of Congress on the flight home. The two men talked, and the lawmaker left the conversation worried that Thomas might resign.

Congress should give Supreme Court justices a pay raise, Thomas told him. If lawmakers didn’t act, “one or more justices will leave soon” — maybe in the next year.

At the time, Thomas’ salary was $173,600, equivalent to over $300,000 today. But he was one of the least wealthy members of the court, and on multiple occasions in that period, he pushed for ways to make more money. In other private conversations, Thomas repeatedly talked about removing a ban on justices giving paid speeches.

Thomas’ efforts were described in records from the time obtained by ProPublica, including a confidential memo to Chief Justice William Rehnquist from a top judiciary official seeking guidance on what he termed a “delicate matter.”

The documents, as well as interviews, offer insight into how Thomas was talking about his finances in a crucial period in his tenure, just as he was developing his relationships with a set of wealthy benefactors.

Congress never lifted the ban on speaking fees or gave the justices a major raise. But in the years that followed, as ProPublica has reported, Thomas accepted a stream of gifts from friends and acquaintances that appears to be unparalleled in the modern history of the Supreme Court. Some defrayed living expenses large and small — private school tuition, vehicle batteries, tires. Other gifts from a coterie of ultrarich men supplemented his lifestyle, such as free international vacations on the private jet and superyacht of Dallas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow.

Precisely what led so many people to offer Thomas money and other gifts remains an open question. There’s no evidence the justice ever raised the specter of resigning with Crow or his other wealthy benefactors.

George Priest, a Yale Law School professor who has vacationed with Thomas and Crow, told ProPublica he believes Crow’s generosity was not intended to influence Thomas’ views but rather to make his life more comfortable. “He views Thomas as a Supreme Court justice as having a limited salary,” Priest said. “So he provides benefits for him.”

Thomas and Crow didn’t respond to questions for this story. Crow, a major Republican donor, has not had cases at the Supreme Court since Thomas joined it and has previously said Thomas is a dear friend. David Sokol, a conservative financier who has taken Thomas on vacation on a private jet, said in a statement that he and Thomas had never discussed the justice’s finances or when he might retire.

Thomas’ comments in 2000 were to Florida Rep. Cliff Stearns, a vocal conservative who’d been in Congress for 11 years and occasionally socialized with the justice. They set off a flurry of activity across the judiciary and Capitol Hill. “His importance as a conservative was paramount,” Stearns said in a recent interview. “We wanted to make sure he felt comfortable in his job and he was being paid properly.”

There’s an often-criticized dynamic surrounding most important jobs in the federal government: The posts pay far less than comparable jobs in the private sector, but officials can cash in once they leave. Ex-regulators sell advice to the regulated. Generals retire to join military contractors. Former senators get jobs lobbying Congress.

But there is no revolving-door payday waiting on the other side of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Justices generally stay on the bench past their 80th birthday, if not until death. In 2000, justices were paid more than cabinet secretaries or members of Congress, and far more than the average American. Still, judges’ salaries were not keeping pace with inflation, a source of ire throughout the federal judiciary. Young associates at top law firms made more than Supreme Court justices, while partners at the firms could earn millions a year.

Some of Thomas’ colleagues were extremely wealthy — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was married to a high-paid tax lawyer and Justice Stephen Breyer to the daughter of a wealthy British lord. Thomas did not come from money. When he was appointed to the court in 1991, he was 43 years old and had spent almost all his adult life working for the government. At the time, he still had student loans from law school, Thomas has said.

The full details of Thomas’ finances over the years remain unclear. He made at least two big purchases around the early ’90s: a Corvette and a house in the Virginia suburbs on 5 acres of land. When Thomas and his wife, Ginni, bought the home for $522,000 a year after he joined the court, they borrowed all but $8,000, less than 2% of the purchase price, property records show.

Public records suggest a degree of financial strain. Throughout the first decade of his tenure, the couple regularly borrowed more money, including a $100,000 credit line on their house and a consumer loan of up to $50,000. Around January 1998, Thomas’ life changed when he took in his 6-year-old grandnephew, becoming his legal guardian and raising him as a son. The Thomases sent the child to a series of private schools.

In early January 2000, Thomas took the trip to the Georgia beach resort. Thomas was there to deliver a keynote speech at Awakening, a “conservative thought weekend” featuring golf, shooting lessons and aromatherapy along with panel discussions with businessmen and elected officials. (A founder and organizer of the annual event, Ernest Taylor, told ProPublica that Thomas’ trip was paid for by the organization. Thomas reported 11 free trips that year on his annual financial disclosure, mostly to colleges and universities, but did not disclose attending the conservative conference, an apparent violation of federal disclosure law.)

On a commercial flight back from Awakening, Thomas brought up the prospect of justices resigning to Stearns, the Republican lawmaker. Worried, Stearns wrote a letter to Thomas after the flight promising “to look into a bill to raise the salaries of members of The Supreme Court.”

“As we agreed, it is worth a lot to Americans to have the constitution properly interpreted,” Stearns wrote. “We must have the proper incentives here, too.”

Stearns’ office soon sought help from a lobbying firm working on the issue, and he delivered a speech on the House floor about judges’ salaries getting eroded by inflation. Thomas’ warning about resignations was relayed at a meeting of the heads of several judges’ associations. L. Ralph Mecham, then the judiciary’s top administrative official, fired off the memo describing Thomas’ complaints to Rehnquist, his boss.

“I understand that Justice Thomas clearly told him that in his view departures would occur within the next year or so,” Mecham wrote of Thomas’ conversation with Stearns. Mecham worried that “from a tactical point of view,” congressional Democrats might oppose a raise if they sensed “the apparent purpose is to keep Justices [Antonin] Scalia and Thomas on the Court.” (Scalia had nine children and was also one of the less wealthy justices. Scalia, Mecham and Rehnquist have since died.)

It’s not clear if Rehnquist ever responded. Several months later, Rehnquist focused his annual year-end report on what he called “the most pressing issue facing the Judiciary: the need to increase judicial salaries.”

Several people close to Thomas told ProPublica they believed that it was implausible the justice would ever retire early, and that he may have exaggerated his concerns to bolster the case for a raise. But around 2000, chatter that Thomas was dissatisfied about money circulated through conservative legal circles and on Capitol Hill, according to interviews with prominent attorneys, former members of Congress and Thomas’ friends. “It was clear he was unhappy with his financial situation and his salary,” one friend said.

Former Sen. Trent Lott, then the Republican Senate majority leader, recalled in a recent interview that there were serious concerns at the time that Thomas or other justices would leave.

The public received hardly a hint that such conversations about Thomas were unfolding in Washington. Thomas did once allude to government salaries, in a 2001 speech praising the value of public service. “The job is not worth doing for what they pay. It’s not worth doing for the grief,” he said. “But it is worth doing for the principle.”

Around that time, Thomas was also pushing to allow justices to make paid speeches — a source of income that had been banned in the 1980s. On several occasions, Thomas discussed lifting the ban with appellate Judge David Hansen, who chaired the judiciary’s committee responsible for lobbying Congress on issues like pay, according to Mecham’s memo.

At Sen. Mitch McConnell’s request, a provision removing the ban for judges was quietly inserted into a spending bill in mid-2000. Why McConnell made the proposal became a subject of scrutiny in the legal press. After the Legal Times reported the measure had been dubbed the “Keep Scalia on the Court” bill, Scalia responded that the “honorarium ban makes no difference to me” and denied that he would ever leave the court for financial reasons. (The ban was never lifted. McConnell did not respond to a request for comment.)

During his second decade on the court, Thomas’ financial situation appears to have markedly improved. In 2003, he received the first payments of a $1.5 million advance for his memoir, a record-breaking sum for justices at the time. Ginni Thomas, who had been a congressional staffer, was by then working at the Heritage Foundation and was paid a salary in the low six figures.

Thomas also received dozens of expensive gifts throughout the 2000s, sometimes coming from people he’d met only shortly before. Thomas met Earl Dixon, the owner of a Florida pest control company, while getting his RV serviced outside Tampa in 2001, according to the Thomas biography “Supreme Discomfort.” The next year, Dixon gave Thomas $5,000 to put toward his grandnephew’s tuition. Thomas reported the payment in his annual disclosure filing.

Larger gifts went undisclosed. Crow paid for two years of private high school, which tuition rates indicate would’ve cost roughly $100,000. In 2008, another wealthy friend forgave “a substantial amount, or even all” of the principal on the loan Thomas had used to buy the quarter-million dollar RV, according to a recent Senate inquiry prompted by The New York Times’ reporting. Much of the Thomases’ leisure time was also paid for by a small set of billionaire businessmen, who brought the justice and his family on free vacations around the world. (Thomas has said he did not need to disclose the gifts of travel and his lawyer has disputed the Senate findings about the RV.)

By 2019, the justices’ pay hadn’t changed beyond keeping up with inflation. But Thomas’ views had apparently transformed from two decades before. That June, during a public appearance, Thomas was asked about salaries at the court. “Oh goodness, I think it’s plenty,” Thomas responded. “My wife and I are doing fine. We don’t live extravagantly, but we are fine.”

A few weeks later, Thomas boarded Crow’s private jet to head to Indonesia. He and his wife were off on vacation, an island cruise on Crow’s 162-foot yacht.

The Supreme Court on Monday released a code of conduct governing the behavior of the country’s most powerful judges for the first time in its history. But experts said it was unclear if the new rules, which do not include any enforcement mechanism, would address the issues raised by recent revelations about justices’ ethics and conduct.

The nine-page code, with an accompanying five pages of commentary, was signed by all the sitting justices and covers everything from the acceptance of gifts, to recusal standards, to avoiding improper outside influence on the justices. The step followed months of reporting by ProPublica detailing undisclosed gifts to Supreme Court justices from wealthy political donors.

The code does not specify who, if anyone, could determine whether the rules had been violated.

The new Supreme Court code’s lack of any apparent enforcement process is “the elephant in the room,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas who studies the court. “Even the most stringent and aggressive ethics rules don’t mean all that much if there’s no mechanism for enforcing them. And the justices’ unwillingness to even nod toward that difficulty kicks the ball squarely back into Congress’ court.”

Nevertheless, some leading observers of the court described the creation of an explicit, written code as a landmark in the court’s 234-year history.

“The Supreme Court’s promulgation of a code of conduct today is of surpassing historic significance,” former federal appellate judge J. Michael Luttig told ProPublica. “The court must lead by the example that only it can set for the federal judiciary, as it does today.”

A statement released by the court on Monday accompanying the code said it was formulated to dispel “the misunderstanding that the Justices of this Court, unlike all other jurists in this country, regard themselves as unrestricted by any ethics rules.” It said the code “largely represents a codification of principles that we have long regarded as governing our conduct.”

A series of ProPublica stories this year detailed a pattern of behavior by Supreme Court justices that legal ethics experts said was far outside the norms of conduct for other federal judges. ProPublica disclosed that Justice Clarence Thomas has accepted undisclosed luxury travel from Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow and a coterie of other ultrawealthy men for decades. Crow purchased Thomas’ mother’s home and paid private school tuition for a relative Thomas was raising as his son. Thomas also spoke at donor events for the Koch network, the powerful conservative activist group. Separately, ProPublica revealed that Justice Samuel Alito accepted a private jet trip to Alaska from a hedge fund billionaire and did not recuse himself when that billionaire later had a case before the court.

Reporting from other outlets, including The Washington Post and The Associated Press, has added to the picture. The New York Times revealed that Thomas received a loan from a wealthy friend to purchase an expensive RV. A Senate investigation later found Thomas did not repay the loan in full.

Federal judges below the Supreme Court have long been subject to a written code of conduct, the foundations of which were set down a century ago following a major ethics scandal in the judiciary. Lower court judges are subject to oversight by panels of other judges, who review allegations of misconduct.

The high court’s new code of conduct is separate from an existing federal law that requires all federal judges including the justices on the Supreme Court to annually report income, assets and most gifts on a publicly available disclosure form. The law, which passed after the Watergate scandal, has been at the center of the controversies involving Thomas’ undisclosed gifts. Thomas and Alito have argued they were not required to disclose the luxury travel, and Thomas’ lawyer has said that “any prior reporting errors were strictly inadvertent.”

The new document largely echoes the code that applies to lower court judges. Many of its prescriptions are lofty but vague. It requires the justices to “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” It prohibits justices from soliciting gifts, practicing law or sitting on cases where their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” It states that the justices should not engage in “political activity,” but it does not define what that means.

Court observers are likely to spend weeks parsing the differences between the new code and that of the lower courts. Small changes were made without explanation. For instance, lower court judges are prohibited from lending “the prestige of the judicial office to advance” their own private interests. The justices are merely prohibited from “knowingly” doing so.

Whether any of the conduct that sparked the push for a formal ethics code would now be prohibited seems to remain open for interpretation. Take Thomas’ appearances at Koch network events. A federal judge told ProPublica that if he’d done the same as a lower court judge, it would’ve violated prohibitions against fundraising and political activity and he would’ve been subject to a disciplinary proceeding. It’s unclear if the high court’s new code would bar such activities or if each justice would answer such questions for him or herself.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who has introduced a bill that would require the Supreme Court to adopt an enforceable code of conduct, said in a statement that the new code fell short of what is needed.

“The honor system has not worked for members of the Roberts Court,” he said. “This is a long-overdue step by the justices, but a code of ethics is not binding unless there is a mechanism to investigate possible violations and enforce the rules.”

Whitehouse’s bill advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in July, but it has since stalled in the face of GOP opposition. It would create an enforcement mechanism for the court’s code of conduct and set up a process where panels of appellate judges would investigate potential ethics violations.

It’s unclear whether the court’s release of the code will affect the ongoing Senate investigations into justices’ relationships with businessmen and others involved in undisclosed travel and gifts. For months, the Senate Judiciary Committee has been seeking information from Crow and others about undisclosed gifts to Thomas.

Last week, Senate Judiciary Democrats deferred an effort to subpoena Crow in the face of intense Republican opposition on the committee. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the panel’s chair, said last week the committee would continue its efforts to authorize subpoenas in the near future.

The court’s new ethics standards are in many ways more lenient than those governing employees of the executive and legislative branches. There are still few restrictions on what gifts the justices can accept. Members of Congress are generally prohibited from taking gifts worth $50 or more and would need preapproval from an ethics committee to take many of the gifts Thomas and Alito have accepted.

Jeremy Fogel, a retired federal judge in California who had publicly called for the Supreme Court to adopt an ethics code, said Monday that he was “heartened to see that the justices unanimously have recognized the need for an explicit code of conduct.”

“Whether it will make a difference in the justices’ day-to-day actions or in public perceptions of the court remains to be seen,” Fogel said.