Trump administration battles employee lawsuit to block dismantling of USAID

The Trump administration will present an unforgiving argument for dismantling the US Agency for International Development to a federal judge Wednesday: USAID is rife with insubordination" and must be shut down for the administration to decide what pieces of it to salvage.

- Ellen Knickmeyer & Lindsay Whitehurst

The argument, made in an affidavit by political appointee and deputy USAID administrator Pete Marocco, comes as the administration confronts a lawsuit by two groups representing federal employees.

USAID staffers deny insubordination and call the accusation a pretext to break up the more than 60-year-old agency, one of the world's biggest donors of humanitarian and development assistance.

Accounts of USAID staffers filed Tuesday in support of the lawsuit revealed new details of the destruction of the agency.

That includes a sworn statement from a USAID staffer describing a specific leader in billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency teams allegedly directing USAID staffers on Monday in the immediate termination of about 200 USAID programmes without proper authorization or process.