If USAID was simply an aid agency, it would not have needed a SCIF for handling top secret documents.
HIV treatments have NOT been stopped, nor has food aid.
From today’s Devex, the International Aid/development news aggregator:
USAID employees received an email — seen by my colleague Sara Jerving — that the agency’s headquarters will be closed today and anyone working must do it remotely. This only adds to rampant speculation that the department may be absorbed into the U.S. State Department. [Which is where it came from about 60 years ago—Nass]
In a sign of the dramatically escalating tensions between USAID staff members and Trump’s team, USAID’s director of security, John Voorhees, was placed on administrative leave after refusing to allow officials from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, access to the agency’s sensitive compartmented information facility, a secure area that protects classified information, my colleague Elissa Miolene scooped over the weekend.
Following Elissa’s reporting, Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stating that “this incident as a whole raises deep concerns about the protection and safeguarding of matters related to U.S. national security.”
DOGE staff members do not have the security clearances to review such information and are not legally qualified to access classified or sensitive information. In recent days, there’s been an uptick of fear across USAID staff as DOGE has entered the building — both literally and virtually — with many staff moving to Signal to avoid being tracked by the budget-slashing agency run by billionaire Elon Musk. [I doubt that people without clearances would be allowed access, as it would be against the law—Nass]
On his social media platform X on Sunday, Musk retweeted a post about the incident, along with an ominous message: “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.” In an audio message on X, he said he and Trump were in agreement on “shutting [USAID] down,” and this morning he posted: “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.”
USAID’s legislative and public affairs team — which maintains close contact with members of the U.S. Congress — was also dismantled. While exact numbers are unknown, 40 to 100 staff members were reportedly placed on administrative leave as of Sunday morning, according to those familiar with the matter.
They join more than a thousand other agency officials and contractors who’ve found themselves out of a job — and thousands more are expected to join their ranks as a result of the aid freeze.
Read:
- Scoop: USAID closes headquarters Monday amid Trump transition chaos
- Scoop: USAID director of security, legislative staff placed on leave
[It was also said that USAID staff were communicating with each other over SIGNAL so the DOGE team could not read their communications. SIGNAL was founded with CIA money and I don’t use it. Such official communications outside government channels are unlawful—Nass]
Another interesting question is: who is telling officials at USAID to defy President Trump’s team?
https://www.devex.com/news/devex-newswire-usaid-s-staff-clashes-and-pepfar-s-partial-reprieve-109250
A top USAID official who took a stand and tried to cancel the administrative leave orders slapped on 60 senior agency executives last week was himself placed on administrative leave for doing so.
“Attached, please find a memorandum documenting the cancellation of your administrative leave status under my authority,” USAID Director of Employee Relations Nicholas Gottlieb wrote in an email obtained by Devex. “Before you get your hopes up, your systems accesses remain severed; you may receive another email within the day reinstating your leave status. However, that notice will not come from me.”
About two hours later, after he was put on leave, he fired off a second email: “It is and has always been my office’s commitment to the workforce that we ensure all employees receive their due process in any of our actions. I will not be party to a violation of that commitment.”
According to ABC News, “Documents and other items in the U.S. that are deemed to be critical to national security are generally given a federal classification….”Top Secret” is applied to information in which its unauthorized disclosure reasonably could be expected to cause “exceptionally grave” damage to the national security that the original classification authority is able to identify or describe.”
The federal government has a fairly simple process for classifying documents. The originator of a document, usually a foreign policy or national security staff member, decides if it needs to be classified. In almost all cases this is a simple decision. Has its predecessor’s been classified? If so, classify. Each federal agency has a central repository that employees connect with when producing a classified document which gives the document a number so it can be identified later, and the actual originating component contacted.
Critics of the system have argued that too many documents are classified. However, that is an endemic problem because bureaucratically it is safer to classify than not.
The most sensitive documents are Top Secret Codeword documents. Almost every product of the National Security Agency is Top Secret because the Agency engages in intercepting and decoding sensitive communications of foreign countries and individuals.
“Presidents often have a temporary SCIF on their property or vacation homes.”
Also highly classified are documents regarding operational activity of human intelligence collection (spies) by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the various military intelligence services. The raw intelligence produced by such means is usually classified SECRET, but occasionally a sensitive case will be TOP SECRET. In very sensitive cases, the originator will specify by name who can read the report.
TS (Top Secret) material must be stored in a SCIF office which stands for (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility). Only personnel with a TS clearance can enter the SCIF. When not in use, the room is locked. Presidents often have a temporary SCIF on their property or vacation homes. Presidents and VPs travel with a large communications team so they are always in constant contact with the Situation Room including when abroad.
Most State Department cables are SECRET. Some are CONFIDENTIAL, the lowest classification. Many of the most sensitive State documents are marked NODIS, which stands for No Distribution, meaning that they can only be read by a named individual or by selected positions.
A frequent classification is NOFORN, meaning the document cannot be shared with any foreign government or individual. In most cases this does not apply to the Five Eyes group: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the US. NATO allies, Japan, South Korea, and others get considerable access as well.
Meantime, a clarification was issued, assuring that the goal of taking over USAID was not to starve the poor nor kill persons with HIV, although that is what many in the media and certain officials would have us believe. “…two parts of PEPFAR had received a limited waiver and could resume operations: antiretroviral medications critical to keeping HIV/AIDS patients healthy and treatment to prevent mother-to-child transmission.”