USAID staff given 15 minutes to gather belongings from Washington, D.C., office
Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — As President Donald Trump’s administration guts the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), former federal workers are being told to say goodbye to their desks — and to do so quickly.
USAID leadership sent an email to agency staffers on Tuesday instructing them that they will have 15 minutes to enter their former offices at the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown Washington, D.C., to retrieve their personal belongings.
“This Thursday and Friday ONLY–on February 27 and 28, 2025 –USAID staff will have one opportunity to retrieve their personal belongings,” the message reads, which was also posted to USAID’s government website.
“Staff will be given approximately 15 minutes to complete this retrieval and must be finished removing items within their time slot only,” the message continues.
The email includes a timetable giving staff a window in which they can collect their belongings based on their bureau or independent office.
For some, the timeframe is as long as an hour and a half; for others, it’s just half an hour.
The email also contains a lengthy list of prohibited items that USAID staff are not allowed to bring onto the premises, including BB guns, drills, knives, sabers, swords, nunchucks, ski poles, chlorine and liquid bleach.
According to the message, the items referenced “are, and have always been, prohibited from entering the Ronald Reagan Building facility through a security screening post,” which is typically only used by uncredentialled visitors who are subject to additional rules and regulations.
Several USAID officials told ABC News that including this list illustrates how agency employees who dedicated their professional lives to foreign assistance are now being treated like violent criminals.
“It sounds like they think we’re going to try to stage a Jan. 6-style ‘peaceful protest’,” an official said.
The latest directive from USAID leadership comes as 1,600 workers in the humanitarian aid bureau received termination notices over the weekend and thousands more abroad were put on administrative leave.
Prior to Trump’s second administration, more than 10,000 people worked at USAID.
Katherine Frey/The Washington Post via Getty Images, FILE
(WASHINGTON) — In the days since President Donald Trump handed down pardons and commutations for the more than 1,500 of his supporters who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, federal judges in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia have remained essentially silent while signing off on the hundreds of now-dismissed cases that for years crowded their court dockets.
On Wednesday, three judges with the D.C. District Court broke that silence on Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 rioters, with one eviscerating Trump’s proclamation that stated he was righting a “national injustice” that occurred through the prosecution of the pro-Trump mob.
“No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election,” Judge Beryl Howell, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, said in an order Wednesday. “No ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity.”
She added, “That merely raises the dangerous specter of future lawless conduct by other poor losers and undermines the rule of law. Yet, this presidential pronouncement of a ‘national injustice’ is the sole justification provided in the government’s motion to dismiss the pending indictment.”
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, also made clear in a dismissal order for one Capitol defendant that Trump’s sweeping pardons “will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021.”
“What occurred that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions analyzing and recounting the evidence through a neutral lens,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote. “Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies.”
Kollar-Kotelly further used her order to honor the law enforcement officers who responded to the Capitol that day, which she said “cannot be altered or ignored.”
“What role law enforcement played that day and the heroism of each officer who responded also cannot be altered or ignored,” she said.
“Grossly outnumbered, those law enforcement officers acted valiantly to protect the Members of Congress, their staff, the Vice President and his family, the integrity of the Capitol grounds, and the Capitol Building-our symbol of liberty and a symbol of democratic rule around the world,” she added. “For hours, those officers were aggressively confronted and violently assaulted. More than 140 officers were injured. Others tragically passed away as a result of the events of that day. But law enforcement did not falter. Standing with bear spray streaming down their faces, those officers carried out their duty to protect.”
She closed her order, stating bluntly, “All of what I have described has been recorded for posterity, ensuring that what transpired on January 6, 2021 can be judged accurately in the future.”
Trump’s Monday order commuted the sentences of 14 people and offered “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” The order fulfilled a campaign promise the president repeatedly made on the campaign trail.
Howell’s statement came through her dismissal of a case against two violent Jan. 6 rioters, Nicholas DeCarlo and Nicholas Ochs, who admitted to throwing smoke bombs at officers trying to protect the Capitol building.
Howell refused to dismiss the case “with prejudice,” as requested by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, which would leave open the possibility the prosecution could one day be resumed, though their statutes of limitations will run out by the end of this administration.
“This Court cannot let stand the revisionist myth relayed in this presidential pronouncement,” Howell said. “Bluntly put, the assertion offered in the presidential pronouncement for the pending motion to dismiss is flatly wrong.”
Later Wednesday, the federal judge who oversaw Trump’s criminal case related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election joined the growing chorus of judges breaking their silence.
“No pardon can change the tragic truth of what happened on January 6, 2021,” said Judge Tanya Chutkan, another Obama appointee, in a brief order granting the dismissal of one rioter’s criminal case. “The dismissal of this case cannot undo the ‘rampage [that] left multiple people dead, injured more than 140 people, and inflicted millions of dollars in damage.’ … And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power.
“In hundreds of cases like this one over the past four years, judges in this district have administered justice without fear or favor,” she added. “The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.”
(WASHINGTON) — Transgender young adults and families with transgender youth filed a legal challenge Tuesday against an executive order from the Trump administration that restricts gender-affirming care for transgender people under 19.
“When the Tennessee Legislature passed a law that banned gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, I knew we had to leave the state so that my daughter could continue receiving the care she needs,” said Kristen Chapman, the mother of 17-year-old plaintiff Willow, in a statement.
The Virginia resident continued: “We moved to Virginia in the summer of 2023, but struggled to find a provider that would accept our Medicaid insurance. As paying for her care out-of-pocket became prohibitively expensive, I tried for months to get an appointment at VCU, and I finally got an appointment for January 29, 2025. The day before our appointment, President Trump signed the executive order at issue in this case. The next day, just a few hours before our appointment, VCU told us they would not be able to provide Willow with care. I thought Virginia would be a safe place for me and my daughter. Instead, I am heartbroken, tired, and scared.”
Trump’s order moves to withhold federal funding to medical institutions that provide such care — including puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and surgeries — calling on the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to “take all appropriate actions to end the chemical and surgical mutilation of children.” The executive order does not appear to restrict these procedures for non-transgender people under 19.
Trump’s executive order states that “it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”
The lawsuit was filed by Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union, PFLAG national, the ACLU of Maryland, and the law firms Hogan Lovells and Jenner & Block on behalf of two transgender young adults and five transgender adolescents.
Major national medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and more than 20 others argue that gender-affirming care is safe, effective, beneficial, and medically necessary.
The complaint notes that “for many transgender adolescents, the onset of puberty leading to physical changes in their bodies that are incongruent with their gender identities can cause extreme distress.”
It continued, “Puberty-delaying medication allows transgender adolescents to pause these changes, thereby minimizing and potentially preventing the heightened gender dysphoria caused by the development of secondary sex characteristics incongruent with their gender identity.”
The executive order is the latest action from Trump that impacts the transgender community — which is estimated to make up less than 1% of the population over the age of 13. Trump also recently signed executive orders restricting transgender participation in the military, ending federal legal recognition of transgender people, and restricting gender marker changes on federal documents.
The Supreme Court is currently considering the landmark U.S. v. Skrmetti case, which challenges Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming puberty blockers and hormone therapy on the grounds that the law violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution by discriminating based on sex.
(WASHINGTON) — Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) is demanding swift action after ABC News’ exclusive reporting about hidden links in DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence tool that could potentially send data to a Chinese state-owned telecommunications company.
“I think we should ban DeepSeek from all government devices immediately. No one should be allowed to download it onto their device,” Gottheimer, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC News.
A new bill Gottheimer proposed on Thursday is called the “No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act” and it would require the Office of Management and Budget to develop guidelines within 60 days for the removal of DeepSeek from federal technologies, with exceptions for law enforcement and national security-related activity.
The bill would ban DeepSeek from federal devices as well as any future product developed by High-Flyer, the artificial intelligent tool’s hedge fund backers.
This comes after the U.S. House of Representatives chief administrative officer issued a memo urging staffers against using DeepSeek last week.
Gottheimer is one of the lawmakers behind the TikTok bill, which passed in April 2024 and led to a 24-hour blackout for the app’s American users the day before President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.
There are fears DeepSeek could pose a risk to national security after Ivan Tsarynny, CEO and founder of cybersecurity research firm Feroot, told ABC News he found hidden code with the capability to send data to servers under the control of the Chinese government.
“Even though we all know DeepSeek is a Chinese organization, what is really, really standing out is now we see direct links to servers and to companies in China that are under control of the Chinese government. And this is something that we have never seen in the past.”
“There are technologies that are embedded into the DeepSeek website that are tracking us. They have the capability to track across any other website… your interests outside of DeepSeek,” Tsarynny told ABC News. “The type of queries, type of questions, types of topics that you ask and analyze in DeepSeek makes a very, very sensitive, very personal profile.”
DeepSake and High-Flyer have not responded to repeated requests for comment.
