18 months on: What happened to USAID’s local staff? DevEx explores the answer.
Following the White House's announcement last year, the 5,500 foreign service nationals who ran and supported USAID programming around the world were put on leave and left to hope that the U.S. government would follow through on promises of compensation and visas. DevEx has examined how, more than a year after the dismantling of the agency, many of these former country staff remain unable to find work and have been living in fear of arrest or attacks from their own communities because of their work with the agency.
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"I was passionately dedicated to my job, even to the point of neglecting my private life, only to end up with nothing."
— A former USAID foreign service national based in Bosnia-Herzegovina
While U.S. personnel were repatriated following the announcement in February last year that the U.S. Agency for International Development would suspend all programming, their local colleagues — 5,500 foreign service nationals, or FSNs — were placed on leave and left to face the consequences of the country's withdrawal.
Devex contributing reporter Rebecca Root spoke to 10 FSNs to learn more about how USAID's dismantling had impacted the local experts who had spent years, sometimes decades, supporting the agency's mission. The majority asked to remain anonymous but spoke of a sense of abandonment, as well as struggles with their mental health and ongoing concerns for their safety among their own communities.
One former FSN based in El Salvador, who was forced into early retirement after 40 years of service with the agency, said local staff who had worked on USAID democracy and governance projects in the country feared for their lives. Another former FSN based in Southeast Asia, but who preferred not to disclose her country, described spending the past year worrying she would be arrested because of her work on the agency's democracy programs.
These concerns are not unfounded, according to Kent Benson, who held a leadership position in the agency's Bureau for Management. He believes that rhetoric and false allegations from the current administration have seen former staff in some countries "branded as enemies or thieves," which is also hindering their ability to find work.
In April last year, as one of the few remaining staff at the USAID headquarters in Washington, D.C., Benson was charged with terminating all 5,500 FSN contracts. He and other colleagues worked to get country staff the best payouts they could based on specific country labor laws and years of service, but rates varied depending on the local compensation plan and some FSNs got nothing.
A year on, most of the former FSNs whom Devex spoke to have been unable to find employment. In some cases, their years of experience with the agency are working against them — having spent 12 years in a financial compliance role focused on U.S. federal regulations, a former FSN based in Bosnia-Herzegovina shared that she no longer feels competitive in the local job market. "I genuinely do not know where else to look for work. I am completely overwhelmed and profoundly desperate," she said.
Others described a sense of abandonment and loneliness, having centered their lives around their work. "I really don't have any contacts here in Uganda. All the people that I used to socialize with were agency people," said an IT FSN who worked with the agency for almost a decade.
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