She was fired by email while on maternity leave, given 24 hours to clear out her desk and left with three days of health insurance and no severance pay. She had worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development or related groups for more than two decades. She made $175,000 a year.

That was Jan. 28, 2025. Today Amy Uccello and her husband, who also lost his job when U.S.A.I.D. funding for his nonprofit dried up, rely on food stamps, Medicaid and a supplemental nutrition program for women and children that helps with their now 19-month-old daughter.

The mortgage on their home in Washington was until recently in forbearance, meaning they negotiated to pay less than they owed each month. But the bank has now cut them off and suggested they apply for a low-income mortgage program. “We don’t know if we’ll qualify,” Ms. Uccello said. She and her husband have applied for more than 100 jobs with no luck. Most of their friends don’t have jobs either.

Nights are the hardest.

“I can’t sleep because of our own situation,” Ms. Uccello, 49, said over coffee on a recent afternoon. “I can’t sleep because of what I know what’s happening around the world. I can’t sleep because my former colleagues and friends are also suffering.”

When the Trump administration dismantled the sprawling global aid agency last year, it wiped out virtually an entire industry — international development — that had been based in Washington since U.S.A.I.D.’s creation in 1961 under President John F. Kennedy. Nearly all of the agency’s 16,000 employees were laid off. An estimated 280,000 contractors, partners and local hires worldwide lost their jobs as well.

A year later, people have plowed through savings, cashed out retirement funds and moved in with friends and relatives. Former U.S.A.I.D. workers who have done informal surveys estimate that less than half have found full-time work, with many making less than before. An estimated third are unemployed. Others are in part-time work. The District of Columbia currently has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, at 6.7 percent, in large part because of major reductions in the federal work force, including U.S.A.I.D., and cuts to government grants and contracts.

The few former U.S.A.I.D. workers who have landed similar or better jobs don’t like to talk about it in front of unemployed friends.

“I feel guilty, honestly, that of all my colleagues who I know are still unemployed, I’m the one who found something,” said Sara Miner, 42, who was a senior adviser in the agency’s H.I.V.-AIDS office and previously ran health programs in Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Now she helps manage health and human service programs for Fairfax County, Va.

Jobs are also gone at the many nonprofits and partner agencies once funded by U.S.A.I.D. “Everyone I know is also up the creek, all my bosses, my mentors, the people you would normally go to, the people providing me references,” said Catherine Baker, 36, who, as a contractor, made $127,000 a year recruiting staff and helping to start up U.S.A.I.D. projects. Ms. Baker now volunteers as a manager for OneAid, which helps former U.S.A.I.D. workers, and works nine hours a week as a companion for two elderly women.

Continued:

The New York Times interviewed 30 former U.S.A.I.D. employees, contractors and partners in Washington, around the country and overseas to see how they were faring in the year since Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, proudly announced that he had fed the agency “into the wood chipper.” Unlike in early 2025, when many who lost jobs thought they might be reinstated and declined to speak on the record for fear of antagonizing Trump officials, this time almost all gave their names and spoke emotionally and at length.

Many said they were still dealing with mental trauma and a loss of confidence in their professional abilities after brutal job hunts. All mourned the loss of a mission in working for an agency that has contributed billions of dollars every year for decades to global humanitarian assistance. Some cited studies estimating that cuts to the agency’s H.I.V.-AIDS programs could lead to millions of deaths, including young children.

Others acknowledged that there was bloat and waste in the agency and a need for reform. Much of the $35 billion it managed in 2024 went to Washington-based contractors, not directly to people in need overseas. The success of many projects was hard to measure.

But all of those interviewed said they were still incredulous that an agency that amounted to less than 1 percent of the federal budget had been so quickly obliterated and reduced to a skeletal operation within the State Department. U.S.A.I.D. workers who once thought of themselves as ambassadors for American “soft power” said they worried about the trust in the United States that was lost overseas. They said they were still burning from President Trump’s characterization of them as “radical-left lunatics.”

“I’m a queer, brown immigrant," said Adrian Mathura, 55, a Navy veteran and a former senior U.S.A.I.D. adviser in global health who was involuntarily retired last July and is still fighting for the retirement pay he is due. “I got to do all of this incredible stuff in my life and my career, and I spent all of my adult life touting how great the city on the hill was.”

In the end, he said, “I never even once imagined I would be so betrayed by my government.”

‘Daddy, Have You Gotten Fired Today?’

Many of the hardest hit are those with years of experience.

Sheryl Cowan, 57, was making $272,000 a year as a senior vice president at a U.S.A.I.D.-funded nonprofit when she was let go at the end of March 2025. Last month she had an online interview for a $19-an-hour job managing a Penzeys Spices store near her home in Falls Church, Va.

Her take-home pay would not cover her mortgage, but said she was eager to do something other than spending down her savings and has applied for 60 jobs. She has since been called back for an in-person interview. “Aside from the salary, it would be fun,” she said. “I could do it for a little while.”

She has learned from online webinars on job hunting that her three decades of work in international development, including as the Peace Corps country director for Benin, need to be papered over on her résumé.

“Somehow, after 20 years of experience, you’re suddenly trying to hide the number because it makes you sound old,” Ms. Cowan said over lunch in her Falls Church townhouse. “I was writing in the blurb at the top of my résumé, ‘I have over 30 years of experience.’ No, no. And don’t put in the year you graduated from Bucknell.”

The long months without work, she added, have made her doubt herself. “Did I really do all those great things?” she said. “Was I really good once?”

Alysha Beyer, 53, who had a 25-year career as a U.S.A.I.D. contractor and ran reproductive health programs in Africa, is a single mother of two teenagers who moved in with a neighbor last year so she could rent out her home in Rockville, Md., to cover the mortgage. She has since moved back but said because of complications with Medicaid she has delayed getting a biopsy for what her doctor thinks is non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

“We were running these large programs looking for vulnerable populations, trying to help support them, and then you find yourself a user of the system,” Ms. Beyer said. She said she feels a stigma relying on social welfare programs, “having to tell people you’re unemployed all the time and going to the doctors and saying Medicaid. It’s a humbling experience to have to ask all the time for help.”

Continued:



Courtney Blake, 47, was working last year in Geneva in U.S.A.I.D.’s bureau of humanitarian assistance. Today, she is staying with her sister and her sister’s family in New Paltz, N.Y.

“I’m living with family all over again like I’m 22 and just out of college,” she said. She has applied for more than 40 jobs, and remains angry about losing a calling that since 2012 has taken her to war zones in Iraq and Ebola outbreaks in Liberia.

“I spent the last 13 years of my career and also personal life turning up to work every day in service to my country," she said. “Doing work that, at the core, I believed in. But suddenly, and on a whim, all of that is forgotten.”

Don Niss, 56, spent 21 years at U.S.A.I.D., including three years managing the agency’s billion-dollar budgets for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last year he was making $195,000 annually as a U.S.A.I.D. development adviser at the Pentagon.

He has 12-year-old twin sons and the tension over his impending job loss was particularly tough last year.

“There was a period of time, like between February and March, where every other day my son would get home from school and say, ‘Daddy, have you gotten fired today?’” Mr. Niss said. “It’s kind of a gut punch.”

His wife works as a schoolteacher but as of last month he had depleted his savings and dipped into his 401(k). “I pulled out enough money to cover expenses for the next six months, just not knowing what to expect,” he said.

Jacqueline Devine was one of the very few to talk to The Times on the record a year ago about losing her job as a contractor in the agency’s office of HIV-AIDS. Ms. Devine, 66, is a behavioral scientist who worked largely in sub-Saharan Africa on H.I.V. treatment. She spoke out, she said at the time, because “I have nothing to lose.”

A year later, her $200,000 income as an agency contractor has been replaced by $9,000 for teaching two courses in public health at Towson University in Maryland. She has made ends meet with some income from investments and an annuity from a previous job at the World Bank. But she said what amounted to a sudden, forced retirement had left her at a loss.

“I feel invisible professionally,” she said. She was not ready to stop working full time and had not thought about what she would do next. “I feel paralyzed in some way.”

Guy Martorana, 44, was a U.S.A.I.D. foreign service officer in Ivory Coast and is now back home in Birmingham, Ala., with his wife and infant daughter. He spends half of each day applying for jobs — he is up to 100 — and at other times volunteers for a nonprofit that is continuing some of U.S.A.I.D.’s work in peace promotion in northern Ivory Coast.

He stays in touch with former colleagues, but it’s difficult. “We’re all applying for similar jobs,” he said.

Samuel Port, 32, an Army veteran who worked at a nonprofit helping manage U.S.A.I.D. projects in South Sudan and Indonesia, has applied for more than 60 jobs. He said he was so discouraged at one point last year that he went alone to Great Falls Park in Virginia. “I sat down by the river and I cried a bit,” he said.

‘I Got Very Lucky’

There are some success stories.

Jackie Ndebeka, 39, who worked as a contractor on the administrative team that arranged travel for top agency officials, including Samantha Power, the U.S.A.I.D. administrator under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., now has a job as a contractor arranging travel to Antarctica for the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Program. “I got very lucky,” she said. In her spare time she volunteers for OneAid.

Alicia Contreras-Donello, who was working for U.S.A.I.D. as a foreign service officer when she was laid off while in Tunisia with her two young children, is now running for Maryland’s House of Delegates.

Then there is Michael Nicholson, 51, who was working for U.S.A.I.D. as a foreign service economist in Mozambique when he and his wife, also a foreign service officer, were laid off. They have a 4-year-old daughter and have since moved to Nairobi, where Mr. Nicholson is running his own start-up, AfriqueU, that connects talented African student basketball players with American universities.

His business is still in the “pre-revenue” stage, he said, but he is optimistic.

He does not feel that way about America. He said he preferred living overseas, with other former American diplomats.

“I feel that the United States is not a welcome place for my family right now," he said. “We wanted to be around a group of people, Americans and others, that understand what happened to us.”

The pain, he said, still hasn’t gone away.

“It’s been over a year, and it still is as bad,” he said. “I’m just able to talk about it now. I’m going to carry this the rest of my life.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/us/politics/usaid-former-employees.html

brootal, but what was she doing with all her money? Who was investments? She worked for 2 decades making bank...

"That was Jan. 28, 2025. Today Amy Uccello and her husband, who also lost his job when U.S.A.I.D. funding for his nonprofit dried up, rely on food stamps, Medicaid and a supplemental nutrition program for women and children that helps with their now 19-month-old daughter." 

To be on food stamps after making that much money for 2 decades...

^^That's a different lady than the one in the tweet. But, still brootal after 2 decades and have to resort to that.

yea, I decided to read the article after posting...

I mean, it sucks, but I also don't feel sorry for any of these people. None of them should have been paid that much... USAID was a complete scam, can't believe it went on so long

The lady in the pic in the tweet, that's the $175k food stamp lady.

Comments are delivering:

Money laundering on the resume' isn't a good look.

Amazing how the NY Times will never write an article sympathetic to all the American workers who are getting fired and replaced by H-1B workers, or the college kids who graduated and never had a shot, who are now sitting on $200k in debt, because of those H-1Bs.

I think the last time they covered H-1B was the Disney case in 2015.

Pretty unlikely she made 175k for 2 decades. Given that couple has a 19-month old kid I bet she started working for this non-profit when she was an undergrad in college doing some kind of internship for free then picked up a pretty low paying job once she graduated throughout her 20s.

Couple that with debt from college and not making much of a dent repaying it through her 20s you get into her 30s where maybe the pay increased but went to finally clearing the debt.


Really not that hard to see how by the time she was let go.... let's roughly assume she's 40 here with a 19-month old.... that she wouldn't have a ton of savings still.

Does anyone really buy this? I could go get hired tomorrow for $19 plus an hour walking off the street, no experience, wearing the clothes I slept in. Please, this reporter couldn't have written this with any more bias if they tried...

She's 49. I dunno how the hell she has a 19-month old.

Ok I kept reading now as well and this bitch has a 19-month old at 49 years old.... WTF???

Yeah she should have more saved by 40 fucking 9.

Imagine getting booted of the USG gravy train...#sad

When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much but prioritize career and partying until the eggs are almost gone...

I was gonna say...

There has been a rash of these articles popping up in the past few days, and they're all the same..



BUT... this happens often in the private sector. And how many people lost their jobs during covid?

Potato Joe Biden himself even told coal miners that they should learn to code - much to the amusement and laughter of all his leftist NPC minions too.

Here's her linkedin page...

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sherylcowan123/details/experience/

I mean lets just be real here.. Girlfriend has a BA in Psych, and then fell headfirst into this cushy ass gumint gig - which we're all supposed to be sad over her losing.

She should consider herself lucky AF to have even had it.

And now she should learn to code.

Looks like $19/hour at Penzeys Spices store will have to do!

She should be thankful she was even able to have a kid and extra thankful she was able to be at home with it instead of handing it off to someone else every day. The fact she was making 175K combined with whatever her husband was making and unable to put away a lot of money is pathetic.

And guys....ya know what else is sad? She has trouble sleeping cuz of what's happening in the world!

"Nights are the hardest.“I can’t sleep because of our own situation,” Ms. Uccello, 49, said over coffee on a recent afternoon. “I can’t sleep because of what I know what’s happening around the world. I can’t sleep because my former colleagues and friends are also suffering.”

Oh pullllllllllease...