The America Last bureaucracy is in full panic mode. A career employee at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been placed on administrative leave after refusing to carry out the Trump administration’s long-overdue purge of wasteful government spending.
Nicholas Gottlieb, USAID’s Director of Employee and Labor Relations, openly defied orders from the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—a newly formed agency led by Elon Musk—by refusing to issue termination notices to bureaucrats entrenched in the foreign aid machine. His defiance was met with swift consequences, as he was placed on leave immediately.
Remarkable email I was forwarded from inside USAID, appears to show the head of their Employee and Labor Relations division claiming to have been put on administrative leave for refusing to carry out illegal firings ordered by DOGE and political appointees pic.twitter.com/yd0sDna256
— dylan matthews 🔸 (@dylanmatt) January 30, 2025
His email protest, which leaked online and quickly went viral, reads like a farewell letter from a bureaucrat who never imagined his taxpayer-funded empire could come crashing down.
Trump’s America First Overhaul Shakes Up the Bureaucracy
This all comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive order freezing nearly all U.S. foreign aid spending—except for humanitarian food assistance and military aid to Israel and Egypt. The move has rocked the globalist elite, sending shockwaves through USAID, where more than 50 senior officials have already been placed on administrative leave, and at least 240 employees have been reassigned or let go.
And this is just the beginning. The administration is set to cut $1 trillion from the bloated federal budget, halting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, eliminating fraudulent grant programs, and gutting the foreign aid bureaucracy that has spent decades funneling taxpayer dollars into failed initiatives.
Elon Musk’s DOGE on a Mission to Clean House
Elon Musk, now heading DOGE, has vowed to reduce government inefficiency at an unprecedented scale. For decades, agencies like USAID have operated with zero accountability, sending billions in hard-earned taxpayer dollars overseas with little to no benefit for American citizens. Now, that gravy train is coming to an end.
Trump’s executive order put it bluntly:
“The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values. They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”
In other words, the U.S. is done funding globalist pet projects that undermine national sovereignty.
Washington Melts Down, But America Wins
Predictably, the D.C. establishment is clutching its pearls over the mass firings and budget freezes. But everyday Americans—who have long been ignored while their tax dollars funded endless wars, corrupt NGOs, and anti-American policies abroad—are finally getting what they voted for.
The Trump administration isn’t just talking about draining the swamp—it’s actively dismantling the bureaucracy that has fed off the American people for generations. And with Musk leading the charge at DOGE, Washington’s bureaucratic parasites have nowhere left to hide.
The deep state’s days of unchecked power are numbered. And for once, it’s America First, not bureaucrats first.