A top official with the U.S. Agency for International Development has asked some of the organization’s employees to start shredding classified documents—and if the agency’s shredders become overburdened, to burn them instead.
The order came weeks after the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) full-blown attack on the agency, which is primarily concerned with humanitarian projects abroad. DOGE, under Elon Musk and President Donald Trump, has set out to disband the decades-old agency, part of their effort to slash foreign aid.
Last week, the administration said it would eliminate 83% of USAID programs—5,200 out of a previous 6,200, reports said. All remaining programs are set to be absorbed by the state department.
ADVERTISEMENT
On Tuesday, an email from Erica Carr, the agency’s acting executive secretary, reportedly told employees to destroy reams of sensitive documents, and thanked them for their “assistance in clearing our classified safes and personnel documents.”
According to NBC, which first reported the news, USAID employees were told to first shred as many documents as possible—and put them in burn bags when the shredder became unavailable.
The order is an unprecedented deviation from the agency’s standard procedure, which has long been that documents are only shredded when the embassy is under attack or during serious emergency scenarios.
But Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in an X post that “The documents involved were old, mostly courtesy content (content from other agencies), and the originals still exist on classified computer systems.”
She also said that the USAID building will soon be occupied by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
She referred to articles about the USAID requests as “fake news hysteria” and that the email was only sent to roughly three dozen employees.
Still, some foreign policy experts were suspicious that it could be the Trump administration’s attempts at evading the law.
Harold Koh, a legal adviser for the State Department during Obama’s term, noted that many of the documents show how funding was authorized and appropriated—likely making them crucial evidence in a number of court cases challenging DOGE’s draconian cuts.
He added that under normal procedure, the documents “should be preserved until the funds are fully expended.”
The American Foreign Service Association also noted that it was “alarmed” by the order, adding that the documents are important to ongoing litigation “regarding the termination of USAID employees and the cessation of USAID grants.”
Kelly noted that all of the documents are saved online. If there are no backup digital copies for all documents, the move would violate a federal law that requires agencies to preserve government records and uphold transparency and accountability.
“These are not the actions of someone looking for true waste, fraud, and abuse,” said Kel McClanahan, the director of a law firm focused on national security called National Security Counselors. “This is slash and burn mode and not leaving any evidence behind that could disprove their narrative.”
