The future of the government's foreign assistance agency hangs in the balance after a federal judge temporarily paused the Trump administration’s plan to place thousands of employees on leave Friday night.

Unions representing federal employees took the fight to save the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to the courts after Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) took a sledgehammer to the agency, which the billionaire tech executive called a "ball of worms" that must "die."

“The administration’s sudden dismantlement of USAID, an agency that has been performing life-saving work around the world, without any notice to its thousands of employees or to the people that it serves is a profound moral stain,” Lauren Bateman, an attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group, which brought the case on behalf of the unions alongside Democracy Forward, told reporters Thursday evening.

But President Trump took to Truth Social Friday morning to double down on his efforts to dismantle the agency.

“USAID IS DRIVING THE RADICAL LEFT CRAZY, AND THERE IS NOTHING THEY CAN DO ABOUT IT BECAUSE THE WAY IN WHICH THE MONEY HAS BEEN SPENT, SO MUCH OF IT FRAUDULENTLY, IS TOTALLY UNEXPLAINABLE. THE CORRUPTION IS AT LEVELS RARELY SEEN BEFORE. CLOSE IT DOWN!” Trump wrote.

Courts could decide USAID's fate

Trump-appointed Judge Carl Nichols said he would issue a “limited, very limited” order Friday evening temporarily pausing the plan.

"They should not put those 2,200 people on administrative leave tonight,” Nichols said during the hearing. More than 10,000 people worked for the agency in 2023, two-thirds of whom were posted overseas, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), Congress’s in-house research institute.

The late-night order grants the American Foreign Service Association and........

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