After rifling through a kitchen cabinet to find a hole punch, William Bradley sat down at his dining room table Friday morning in Minneapolis with a cup of coffee and the diplomatic passport that he’s had for roughly two decades. As instructed, he punched two holes on the bottom. He took a picture of those holes with his cellphone. Then, he emailed the government proof that his career was over.
It was at this table five months ago that Mr. Bradley learned from a cable TV news report that he and most of his 10,000 colleagues at the United States Agency for International Development were losing their jobs. For the past five months he’s felt scared. He was three years away from retirement and the pension his family was counting on. For five months he’s felt guilty. When the news broke, Mr. Bradley had just finished onboarding 21 new USAID employees who had quit other jobs to serve America. For five months he’s been angry. One day, he walked out his front door and got in his VW camper van, closed the door, and screamed.
And, against his better judgment, for five months he’s been in denial – waiting until the day the photo proof was actually due to pull out his hole punch. A small part of him had hoped that his government would realize, at some point, that it needed him.
Why We Wrote This
Five months after the Trump administration announced it was gutting USAID, most workers got their final paychecks this week. Many have been struggling to find a sense of purpose as well as financial stability. The Monitor followed one veteran worker as he tried to figure out his next steps.
But July 1 is the official restructuring deadline, putting some USAID functions under the purview of the State Department while terminating the rest. It is also the last day on the payroll for USAID employees like Mr. Bradley.
Now, after a liminal period of judicial restraining orders, reversals, and much waiting, thousands of USAID workers are having to begin a new chapter. For many – along with other federal workers fired at the hands of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE – that means figuring out a new career in a flooded job market. Some are considering running for political office. Others are suing the government they used to serve.
Overall, at least 58,000 federal workers have been fired since President Trump took office in January, promising to “dismantle Government Bureaucracy” and hold a “crooked” and “dishonest” workforce to account. Another 76,000 have accepted buyouts.
Few agencies, however, have received the kind of vitriol leveled at USAID. Mr. Trump has called USAID employees “radical left lunatics” who have stolen “BILLIONS OF DOLLARS.” Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who headed DOGE’s efforts for months, celebrated “feeding USAID into the wood chipper” while helping to cut more than 99% of the agency’s staff.
One challenge for many of these former employees is reconciling how they see themselves – as loyal Americans who have dedicated their lives to their nation – with the derogatory statements from their president and his administration.
Mr. Bradley has always considered himself a patriot, someone who serves his country.
Now he looks to his family, sitting around the dining room table, with a pressing question: “Should I run for Congress?”
“No,” says Hawa, his daughter who just graduated from middle school.
“I think it’s wiser to take a job,” says his son, James, who will begin a Ph.D. program in chemistry at the University of Minnesota this fall but is worried about the apartment lease he just signed, given the Trump administration’s cuts to science funding.
“Why do you want to batter yourself again?” asks his wife, Azarath. “Your government should protect you, not hurt you.”
Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor
A life of foreign service assignments
Over the 17 years he spent as an officer in the United States Agency for International Development, Mr. Bradley’s life was a series of assignments: Build latrines in Benin. Help farmers amid war’s wreckage in Afghanistan. Oversee agriculture projects in Cambodia, Guinea, and Senegal.
He sometimes worried that he was putting his family through too much for the sake of his job. He remembers watching his children get their temperature checked before school every morning when they were in Guinea during the Ebola crisis. He recalls how his wife was so upset to leave Minneapolis for Senegal a decade ago that when the movers arrived, nothing was packed. James was unhappy in Guinea after leaving all of his friends in Cambodia and chose to finish junior high at a boarding school in Minneapolis. Hawa can’t decide what country is home, after living in Minneapolis for three years and Senegal for five years before that.
Mr. Bradley always knew that private sector jobs in the mining industry, where he had started his career in Utah, paid double what he made with USAID. But whenever he considered quitting government service, he thought about how he made a difference in people’s lives as a representative of the United States. And he knew that even though he was making a lower salary now, he would have a federal pension later
When he turned on his work computer Friday so it could be remotely wiped by one of the few remaining USAID employees, he found himself reviewing some old documents, like one he had saved about the Foreign Service Pension System.
It confirmed the numbers he had already triple-checked on an Excel spreadsheet he’d made. In three years, on July 3, 2028, Mr. Bradley would have had 20 years of qualifying service and been eligible for $4,274.82 a month before taxes and insurance.
“We had a plan,” Mr. Bradley says to Azarath, as well as himself. She hacks a raw chicken in the kitchen and packs cornmeal into balls for amiwo, a dish from her native Benin.
It was in Benin, when Mr. Bradley was serving in the Peace Corps, that he met Azarath. He would spend hours traveling to see her on the weekends. A few years later, Mr. Bradley’s first paycheck from USAID went to a Beninese hospital to pay for the birth of their first child, James. When Mr. Bradley was assigned to a new project in Afghanistan and his young family couldn’t come, he bought a house for them sight unseen in Minneapolis, where Azarath’s new mother-in-law taught her how to ride the bus to her English classes, with James slung on her back.
She sighs. Adjusting to America alone with her baby, with her husband living abroad, was hard. But these past few months have been harder. When James graduated from college this spring, she wondered if it was OK to buy balloons since his dad had just lost his job. She wonders now if she should quit culinary school and find work herself, even though her goals (medium term, begin selling signature West African dishes locally; long term, own a restaurant in Minneapolis) remain tacked on the kitchen wall.
They had thought when Mr. Bradley retired, he could help his wife open a restaurant, and she could finally launch her own career after so many years of supporting his. But now, Hawa was asking her mom if they would have to move again. Mrs. Bradley didn’t know how to answer.
What comes next when USAID closes
The rumors and news reports became real for Mr. Bradley on Feb. 4, when an email with the subject line “The Path Forward” arrived in his inbox, saying “all USAID direct hire personnel will be placed on administrative leave globally,” except for a few mission-critical employees. Later that week, Mr. Bradley watched on television as a man in a cherry picker pried the letters spelling “U.S. Agency for International Development” off the Ronald Reagan building in Washington. He remembers being surprised at how easily they came off.
President John F. Kennedy created the agency during the Cold War in 1961 to compete with Soviet influence abroad. In the decades since, USAID grew into one of the largest aid organizations in the world, managing $77 billion in fiscal year 2024. Still, at the time of its gutting, it accounted for less than 1% of the U.S. government’s budget, and a smaller share of GDP than what other G7 countries spend on foreign aid.
In those first weeks of February, as the agency was dismantled, protesters in Washington showed up to support what many saw as the pillar of American soft power. But the public outcry soon dwindled, even as the courts issued restraining orders and in some cases reversals. In late March, Mr. Bradley received a Reduction in Force (“RIF”) email telling him his pay would stop on July 1.
Mr. Bradley, along with more than 50 USAID colleagues, has filed a lawsuit alleging they were illegally terminated for political reasons. He has also joined more than 200 former USAID workers planning to file claims of age discrimination, because the RIF will affect their retirement benefits.
Yet even as he fights the government and feels deeply that it has broken its promises to him, Mr. Bradley also keeps thinking about other ways to serve. In particular, he wonders if running for office could allow him to keep his promise to protect the Constitution against any enemies, foreign – or domestic.
“My heart’s really telling me to run,” Mr. Bradley tells his family. “Somebody has to hold them to account.”
So, on a Saturday morning in late June, as an excessive heat warning blanketed Minneapolis, he found himself driving north on Interstate 94, hugging the Mississippi River in his yellow 1996 Ford F250.
Story Hinckley/The Christian Science Monitor
He had spent the past few weeks tackling projects around the house, like replacing the brakes in his truck. He also did some things he never expected – like reaching out to a local contact for the Democratic Party. When he spoke to Tamara Polzin about his interest in possibly running for office, she invited Mr. Bradley to come to a forum in Blaine for potential congressional candidates.
He turns up the truck’s radio dial, as a public policy expert on NPR explains the importance of keeping federal workers based on their experience, not loyalty. Mr. Bradley turns the radio back down. After 17 years he had experience, but hadn’t he also been loyal?
New administrations always bring new priorities and new marching orders, and he believed his job was to follow them like a soldier. A few years after President George W. Bush announced the military invasion of Afghanistan, Mr. Bradley was dispatched to the Badakhshan Province to manage a $57 million contract helping locals find alternative crops to opium. At the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, he was sent to West Africa to help farmers in Guinea and Sierra Leone recover from the Ebola outbreak.
Although he was disappointed when the first Trump administration cut that project’s funding, he accepted it as part of the job. He had hoped that Mr. Trump in his second term would see ways to use the organization for his own objectives, like jump-starting job opportunities abroad so fewer foreigners would try to immigrate to America illegally.
But even if Mr. Trump couldn’t see value in USAID, Mr. Bradley believes other politicians – like his congressman, Tom Emmer, the GOP majority whip whose deep red district covers the northern and western outskirts of Minneapolis – should have.
“Are you running or watching?”
Walking into the Teamsters Union Hall, he finds Ms. Polzin taping participants’ name tags on the stage. As a local Democratic chair, Ms. Polzin has struggled in past cycles to find a single Democrat willing to run in the 6th district, one of the most Republican in the state. But now, more than a year and a half out from the 2026 midterms, she already has 13 interested candidates, including Mr. Bradley and five others taking the stage today to practice speaking in front of a friendly audience.
“The excitement in the district is more than I’ve ever seen,” says Ms. Polzin. People have been protesting every week, she says, angry about deportations and cuts to Veterans Affairs, despite Mr. Emmer’s claims that the local VA has only dismissed seven probationary employees. A new energy was injected into those protests, she adds, after the recent shootings of two Democratic state lawmakers.
Mr. Bradley takes a seat in the second row, as other observers fill in behind him.
“Are you running or watching?” a man behind him asks.
“Just watching,” Mr. Bradley answers.
The event begins with a moment of silence for state Rep. Melissa Hortman, who was killed along with her husband on June 14, in their home just eight miles away. “We’re going to forge ahead and we’re going to show that they can’t deter us and that the best way to honor the memory of Melissa and Mark is to have the seeds of democracy sprouting up all throughout the 6th Congressional District,” says state Rep. Matt Norris, the event’s moderator.
Mr. Norris asks the five potential Democratic candidates questions about infrastructure, unions, science research, and Social Security. Throughout, Mr. Bradley takes notes on three-by-five index cards. He stays silent for the 90-minute event until the end, when one candidate, a flight attendant, talks about feeling an “ethical compulsion” to run for office.
“That’s right,” he says quietly. “That’s right.”
By Monday morning, though, that compulsion to run feels more like an impractical whim. For his family’s sake, he decides he probably needs to focus on finding a private-sector job.
He spends his last days as a USAID employee offering follow-up advice to the other candidates who participated in Ms. Polzin’s forum and speaking with a political action committee focused on supporting foreign assistance. He gets some satisfaction picturing a “diaspora” of USAID employees fanning out across the world – bringing their expertise into the realm of politics and private companies. But at the same time, he can’t help but think about what his country has lost.
“We’re an asset for the people of the United States,” he says wistfully. “When we go out, it’s from the American people.”
His wife still remembers when USAID came to her village. Seeing those American flags gave her – she stops to ask Mr. Bradley the word for what happened to her arms. “Goosebumps,” he says, and she nods.
“They represent America doing good,” she echoes. “That they are here to help.”
