The website for the U.S. Agency for International Development went dark Saturday afternoon as lawmakers and aid workers, already reeling over the recent freezes to foreign assistance and the suspension of senior officials, braced for the possibility that the agency might be shut down.
A slimmed-down page for U.S.A.I.D. appeared on the State Department’s website Saturday afternoon, suggesting that the agency’s activities — which are currently severely limited — had been brought under the State Department’s umbrella.
Democratic lawmakers and aid workers have been gripped since Friday by reports that President Trump was planning to issue an executive order dismantling the aid agency and moving its work to the State Department.
Mr. Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the scope of American foreign aid, arguing that sending taxpayer dollars overseas runs counter to his America first agenda.
By Saturday, lawmakers had received word that at least some of the U.S.A.I.D. signs at the agency’s headquarters in downtown Washington had come down, and rumors were circling that mission directors around the world were being called back to the United States. Those reports could not be independently verified.
Two U.S.A.I.D. employees, who work in the Washington headquarters and spoke on condition of anonymity because of an order barring employees from discussing any changes to the agency, said that they were working under an atmosphere of fear and chaos, and that half of the agency’s work force had been eliminated in the last week.
People familiar with the changes said that Pete Marocco, a State Department official who held multiple roles in the first Trump administration, appeared to be overseeing the gutting of the U.S.A.I.D. program.
Three other U.S.A.I.D. workers, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Gemini, an A.I. program, had been installed on their email accounts, leading to fears that deputies of Elon Musk, whom Mr. Trump tasked to run a new cost-cutting group known as the Department of Government Efficiency, were trying to surveil their activities.
State Department officials did not answer inquiries seeking to clarify the purpose of the moves, which lawmakers and aid workers said could be anything from a restructuring to an effort to significantly downsize, if not eliminate, most U.S. foreign aid programs.
But Democratic lawmakers said they feared a potentially bleak endgame for the aid agency.
“All the signals of how the senior staff have been put on administrative leave, many of the field staff and headquarters staff have been put on a gag order,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, who sits on the Senate panels on foreign relations and appropriations, said Saturday afternoon in an interview.
“It seems more like the early stages of shutting down than it does of reviewing it or merely retitling it,” he added.
U.S.A.I.D. is the government’s lead agency for humanitarian aid and development assistance. Since it was established in 1961, it has received foreign policy guidance from the State Department, but otherwise functioned as an independent entity.
Foreign assistance distributed by the agency, which supports health services, disaster relief, anti-poverty efforts and a range of other programs, makes up less than 1 percent of the government budget.
In January, the Trump administration ordered a freeze to nearly all foreign aid programs and later issued a waiver to allow programs that administer lifesaving humanitarian aid to keep functioning.
The changes to U.S.A.I.D.’s structure that staff and advocates are fearing are presenting a further complication to groups that were already scrambling to figure out how to keep programs afloat during the funding freeze.
Lawmakers have argued Mr. Trump cannot unilaterally shutter the agency legally, as the it was created by Congress and receives specific appropriations. The federal government, including U.S.A.I.D., is currently funded through March 14.
“Trump isn’t satisfied just to close programs and fire staff. He is now planning to ELIMINATE THE ENTIRE AGENCY. Maybe this weekend,” Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote on social media on Saturday. “That would be illegal. He cannot unilaterally close a federal agency. Another assault on the Constitution.”
Lawmakers have also warned that if U.S.A.I.D.’s operations are scaled back indefinitely, it will enable China, Russia, Iran and other U.S. adversaries to gain strategic footholds overseas that would damage U.S. security in the long term.
“Eliminating USAID — which prevents famines, counters extremism, and creates more markets for U.S. exports — would make the world a more dangerous place for Americans and be a gift to China and Russia,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, said in a social media post on Saturday.
Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Nehamas, Edward Wong and Michael Crowley contributed reporting.