Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. It was the week President Donald Trump had signed a sweeping executive order shutting off the funding for foreign aid programs.

The administration had earlier planned to keep fewer than 300 staff at the U.S. Agency for International Development out of the agency's worldwide total of more than 10,000.

The government’s foremost foreign aid agency is being gutted. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) workforce is being slashed from more than 10,000 employees to fewer than