WASHINGTON — A lieutenant of Trump ally Elon Musk and other outsiders are overseeing the immediate termination of hundreds of American aid and foreign assistance programs abroad this week, without required documentation or justification, according to newly filed affidavits from staffers and accounts Wednesday from U.S. officials.

Meanwhile, other affidavits from USAID staffers until recently based in Congo describe the gutting of their agency by President Donald Trump and Musk, which they said left them abandoned and in danger from political violence in the African country’s capital.

As chaos reigned at USAID’s headquarters, with senior leadership removed and funding frozen, USAID workers and their families abroad had no agency help in fleeing after looters overran their homes in Kinshasa, several of the staffers said in sworn accounts to a federal court.

USAID Staffer Stranded in Washington

Congo-based USAID staffers who described getting out with nothing but their backpacks wrote of now being stranded in Washington, without a home or agency payments, and facing joblessness.

Those accounts, filed late Tuesday in support of a lawsuit by two associations for government employees, offer some of the most detailed looks of the scenes inside the agency and confusion abroad, and they describe Musk’s teams at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency overseeing the purge of longstanding U.S. aid and development programs. The groups are suing to roll back that dismantling by the administration and Musk’s government-cutting effort.

A court hearing in the case was postponed Wednesday because of heavy snow in Washington.

USAID contract officers on Monday emailed agency higher-ups asking for the required authorization and justification needed to cancel programs abroad. But the response was from a Musk associate, one of the contract workers said in a sworn account filed with the federal court.

The decisions on killing the programs came from the “most senior levels,” that associate told USAID staffers.

Other affidavits describe similar scenes from agency contract officers and tensions and uncertainty as USAID workers dealt with the shutdown.

More spreadsheets arrived in USAID employees’ inboxes into Wednesday about U.S.-funding programs -– including for agriculture, conflict resolution, democracy and human rights — that were to end, immediately and permanently, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the developments. The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Emails Leave Staff Confused

The emails said Secretary of State Marco Rubio had given that order, but they came from individuals not known to staffers. The decisions about which programs to eliminate appeared to be being made using the program names and one-line descriptions of them, pulled from the USAID payment system, the two U.S. officials said.

The administration, in its filings in the lawsuit, defends its actions, saying USAID was rife with “insubordination” and must be shut down as Trump’s team figures what parts to salvage. The argument was made in an affidavit by the deputy USAID administrator, Pete Marocco.

USAID staffers deny insubordination and call the accusation a pretext to break up the agency, among the world’s biggest donors of humanitarian and development assistance.

Judge to Hear Arguments

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who was nominated by Trump, dealt the administration a setback last week by temporarily halting plans to pull all but a fraction of USAID staffers off the job worldwide.

Nichols is set to hear arguments later this week on a request from the employee groups to keep blocking the move to put thousands of staffers on leave, and to broaden his order. They contend the government has already violated the judge’s order, which also reinstated USAID staffers already placed on leave but declined to suspend the administration’s freeze on foreign assistance.

A government motion in the case shows the administration pressing arguments by Vice President JD Vance and others questioning whether courts have the authority to check Trump’s power.

“The President’s powers in the realm of foreign affairs are generally vast and unreviewable,” government lawyers argued.

USAID staffers and supporters call the aid agency’s humanitarian and development work abroad essential to national security. They say the administration’s breakup of USAID has been unnecessarily cruel to its thousands of workers and devastating for people around the world who are being cut off from clean water, life-saving medical care, education, training and more since Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 freezing foreign assistance.

The American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees argue that Trump lacks the authority to shut down the agency without approval from Congress. Democratic lawmakers have made the same argument.