Washington, D.C
Thousands protest USAid workers being recalled from abroad or put on leave
Thousands gathered at the US Capitol on Wednesday after the shock announcement on Tuesday evening that the US Agency for International Development (USAid) was putting nearly all of its employees on leave and recalling thousands of officers from their postings abroad.
The news came only days after nearly a thousand contractors were laid off or furloughed, the USAid website was taken down, and its X account was deleted.
Protesters gathered near the Capitol under chilly, overcast skies and chanted: “Let us work!” and “USAid! USAid!”
“We are in a very, very dire place,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a top USAid health official under Barack Obama and Joe Biden, told the crowd. “The attempt to kill USAid will kill people.”
Competitors such as Russia and China were cheering this decision, he added.
His voice rose as he addressed members of Congress in the halls behind him – especially lawmakers, he said, who had supported the agency and its work for years.
“You know that what is being said about USAid is not true,” Konyndyk said. “Speak up! Where are you?”
“This is a dictatorship in the making,” Ed Markey, a senator from Massachusetts, told the crowd. “This is an example” of what the Trump administration can do to agencies such as the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he said.
“We are the moral force of the world,” Markey said. “The only way to take back our government is to take to the streets by the millions to demand justice, not just for our country but for people around the world.”
Nearly all of USAid’s work, which includes preventing HIV and famine as well as rebuilding nations after conflict and improving education, was halted unexpectedly on 24 January for a 90-day review.
Experts say the erasure of the agency is a test run for the Trump administration, which has also put agencies such as the Department of Education and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in its crosshairs.
“This is showing that you can do a slash-and-burn to the American governmental apparatus, including foreign aid,” Joia Mukherjee, chief medical officer of the non-profit Partners in Health, told the Guardian.
While USAid has enjoyed bipartisan support in the past, it’s now a target for conservatives. But Mukherjee said that nothing about aid work had changed in Washington.
“I think the fidelity to Trump changed,” she said. Members of Congress are “afraid of Trump”, she added. “This is just a loyalty test.”
Pete Marocco, who was allegedly photographed and filmed at the January 6 riots, appeared to threaten aid workers with military action if they didn’t comply with evacuation orders, according to a source at USAid who read the recall letter.
Marocco was named deputy administrator of USAid on Monday by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio. That position needs confirmation by the US Senate before being filled.
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Rubio seized control of the agency to fold it into the state department after alleging that officials at the agency had been too “independent”, Rubio told reporters on Monday.
The aid agency was founded in 1961, but was enshrined into law as an independent agency by Congress in 1998. Only lawmakers have the power to dismantle or move it.
“What’s happening is unconstitutional and illegal,” said Sharon Baker, who worked on grants and contracts for USAid for 11 years before retiring.
“It’s enormous – it affects all Americans,” she said, before adding of USAid staff: “In global emergencies, they’re the first responders. [After earthquakes and tsunamis], they’re the ones who are there first. You see airplanes offloading supplies that say ‘from the American people’.”
The move to stop work and dissolve the agency into the state department without direction from Congress is unprecedented, said one contractor who worked for USAid for 20 years before being furloughed last week.
“It puts us and the world in danger in a way it never has before,” said the contractor, who requested anonymity to protect their job.
“I think this is Project 2025 in action. They’re doing what they said they would do.”
The stop-work order is “the most catastrophic thing we’ve seen in foreign aid since we started working on famine in Ethiopia in the 80s”, said Crickett Nicovich, who works for the non-profit Results.
“Congress needs to stand up and defend USAid. Conservatives have told us that they care about these issues for years,” Nicovich said.
“Without them pushing back, this dismantling of programs is costing hundreds of thousands of lives around the world.”
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) – Seventy-two veterans took a trip Saturday to our nation’s capital to visit memorials honoring their service in the armed forces.
This year marks the 12th trip to Washington, D.C. for Honor Flight Tallahassee.
Early Saturday morning, veterans and their guardians met to take a charter flight up to D.C.
Throughout the day, veterans were taken to the World War II memorial, as well as the Korean and Vietnam War memorials. The veterans also visited Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
More Tallahassee news:
The day ended with a wonderful welcome home celebration.
Our Jacob Murphey, Julia Miller, Taylor Viles, and Grace Temple accompanied the veterans, capturing moments from throughout the day.
The team will have live coverage from Washington, D.C. on Monday to share more from the day’s events.
We will continue to have coverage throughout the month of May, leading up to our Honor Flight special on Memorial Day.
To keep up with the latest news as it develops, follow WCTV on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Nextdoor and X (Twitter).
Have a news tip or see an error? Write to us here. Please include the article’s headline in your message.
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Copyright 2026 WCTV. All rights reserved.
4 things to know about the weather:
- Chances of rain in the morning
- Gusty Sunday
- Chilly Monday
- Temps will rise again through the work week
Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to check the weather radar on the go.
After a nice and warm Saturday, changes arrive for part two of the weekend.
The first half of your Sunday will have a chance for showers. Winds will pick up with our next system and are expected to gust to about 20-30 mph. Cooler air will settle in, and lows Sunday night fall into the 40s.
Highs temps Monday will reach only into the mid to upper 50s.
However, temperatures will rise through the week, so you won’t need your jackets every day.
QuickCast
SUNDAY:
Showers, then partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 30 mph
HIGH: Lower 60s
MONDAY:
Partly cloudy
Wind: NW 10-15 mph
Gusts @ 25 mph
HIGH: Upper 50s
Stay with Storm Team4 for the latest forecast. Download the NBC Washington app on iOS and Android to get severe weather alerts on your phone.
Washington, D.C
‘It’s a twilight zone’: Iran war casts deep shadows over IMF gathering in Washington
The most severe energy shock since the 1970s, the risk of a global recession and households everywhere stomaching a renewed surge in the cost of living – hitting the most vulnerable hardest.
In a sweltering hot Washington DC this week, the message at the International Monetary Fund meetings was chilling: things had been looking up for living standards around the world. But then came the Iran war.
“Some countries are in panic,” said the fund’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, addressing the finance ministers and central bank bosses in town for the IMF and World Bank spring meetings. “The sooner it [the Iran war] ends, the better for everybody.”
Such gatherings are not typically used to fight geopolitical battles. “You don’t get people shouting at one another at these things,” one senior figure remarked. But, as a record-breaking April heatwave swept the US capital, no one could ignore the mounting damage from the Iran war.
Those familiar with the mood over breakfast at a meeting of the G20’s representatives on Thursday, which included Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the outgoing US Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell – said the atmosphere in the room was sombre amid an open exchange of serious views.
“It is such a twilight-zone meeting,” said Mohamed El-Erian, a former IMF deputy managing director who is now chief economic adviser at the Allianz insurance group. “There are several shadows hanging over it: one is the shadow that comes from concern about the global economy as a whole.
“The second is that some countries are going to be particularly hard hit, and it’s mostly countries that very few people are talking about. But the third concern is the adding of insult to injury: the fact that the US, which started a war of choice, is going to be hit, but by a lot less than elsewhere in relative terms.”
Before Thursday’s breakfast, Rachel Reeves had started her day with an early-morning jog. Joined by her counterparts from Spain, Australia and New Zealand for a run down the iconic National Mall, she posted an Instagram selfie with a not-so-subtle dig: “Friends that run together – work together.”
A day earlier, the chancellor had told a CNBC conference that she thought “friends are allowed to disagree on things” as she criticised Trump’s Iran war as a “mistake” and a “folly” that had not made the world safer.
Speaking at a venue just steps away from the White House, before a one-on-one meeting with Bessent, she said this “fair message” was needed because UK families and businesses were feeling the pain from higher energy prices triggered by the conflict.
Those close to Reeves insist her meeting remained cordial. Britain and the US have significant shared interests in AI, financial services and trade. The chancellor also said the UK government had little time for the Iranian regime.
But with the IMF having warned on Tuesday that the Iran war could risk a global recession – in which Britain would be the biggest G7 casualty – it was clear Reeves had travelled to Washington ready to pick a fight.
“I’m struck by how vocal she has been and the words she used,” said one global financier. “We know the disagreement between Bessent and [European Central Bank president] Christine Lagarde earlier in the year. But that was in private.”
At a cocktail party held at the British ambassador’s residence for hundreds of diplomats and financiers – including the Bank of England’s governor, Andrew Bailey, the chief executive of Barclays, CS Venkatakrishnan, and dozens of senior figures – this transatlantic tension, weeks before King Charles’s US state visit, was a major topic of conversation.
The other, in the balmy residence gardens, was one of its former occupants, Peter Mandelson, as revelations about the former ambassador’s appointment threatened to further rock the UK government.
Before the war, the agenda for the IMF had been about global cooperation; the adoption of AI, jobs and work to eradicate poverty. Each of those tasks had now been complicated, but not least the task of countries working together.
For many at the meetings, the focus was on forging closer global cooperation without the world’s pre-eminent superpower.
“Everybody is talking about how you hedge against American decisions,” said David Miliband, the former UK foreign secretary, who now runs the International Rescue Committee. “You can’t do without them, because they’re 25% of the global economy. But, in a lot of fora, they’ve pulled out.
“So everyone has to think, how does one structure international cooperation? The old west is not coming back. And so everyone has to figure out how to position themselves for that world.”
For those gathering in Washington, there was irony in the fact that they were meeting in the halls of institutions founded, under US leadership, to promote global cooperation after the second world war. The whole idea of the Bretton Woods institutions was to avoid the dire economic conditions and warfare of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet this year’s meeting was taking place amid these intertwining problems.
In their conversations about the best economic policy response to the shock of conflict, the economists also knew the real power to make a difference lay two blocks across town from the IMF and the World Bank – behind the security cordons and construction equipment blocking the White House from public view. “It is not clear they can do anything about it,” said El-Erian.
Still, with a booming economy driven by AI – including Anthropic’s powerful Mythos model, the topic of much conversation – most countries cannot afford to completely break off US ties.
“People want to find ways to insulate themselves from the mess. But, on the other hand, they admire the US private sector,” El-Erian said. “The best way I’ve heard it put, is: they want to go long the private sector and short the mess. But it’s almost impossible to do.”
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