♦ Secretary Marco Rubio has moved forward with instructions to fire all overseas USAID staff.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered U.S. embassies around the world Tuesday to move ahead with a directive to fire all remaining staffers with the U.S. Agency for International Development. He said the State Department will take over USAID’s foreign assistance programs by Monday.
A federal judge had temporarily blocked an executive order by President Donald Trump for mass firings at multiple federal agencies, including the State Department, and plaintiffs say Rubio’s reorganization plan appears to violate that court injunction.
The Trump administration says the plan was already underway when the president issued the order, so there’s no possible violation. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston has yet to make a determination. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said Tuesday that Rubio’s directive “wasn’t a surprise.”
“So this was a cable, telling our posts exactly what they were expecting to be told, which is that those positions were being eliminated. So it wasn’t a surprise. It’s nothing new,” she said. “And, it is exactly what we previewed, in February and March of this year.”
Rubio told embassies to stick to the department’s plan “to abolish all USAID overseas positions” by Sept. 30. (link)
Meanwhile, in an ancillary story that only begins to make sense in hindsight, we discover that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, a name very familiar to those who followed the Trump-Russia collusion nonsense, was removed from his DOJ-NSD oversight role and has been transferred to the Federal Reserve office.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz begins his new position on June 30th, with the announcement date noted as June 6th:
PRESS RELEASE – “Michael E. Horowitz has been appointed to lead the Federal Reserve Board’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) effective June 30, 2025. By statute, the Federal Reserve’s OIG also serves in that same role for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an agency financed by, but autonomous from, the Federal Reserve. The OIG is tasked with making recommendations to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the agencies, as well as preventing and detecting waste, fraud, and abuse.” (more)
♦ The press release date about Horowitz’s move becomes interesting when contrast against the timing of the Intelligence Community hit against DNI Tulsi Gabbard, also on June 6th.
WaPo …”Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard installed one of her top advisers to a position within the office of the inspector general of the intelligence community, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter. […] The adviser, Dennis Kirk, was placed within the watchdog office on May 9, but reports to the DNI, according to one of the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity. […] In a statement to The Washington Post, Gabbard’s press secretary, Olivia Coleman, accused the intelligence community inspector general of failing to fulfill “the responsibility to be an independent organization unbeholden to partisan interests.” Coleman said that Kirk was assigned to the watchdog office as part of the transition team and found “evidence of overwhelming and intentional politicization by the current IC IG team.” (details here)
The timing here does not appear to be, well, coincidental. Remember, Horowitz is part of the ICIG system because he has IG oversight for the DOJ-National Security Division (DOJ-NSD). The departure of DOJ-NSD Inspector General Michael Horowitz is made simultaneous to the ICIG pushing leaks about DNI Tulsi Gabbard having put Dennis Kirk inside the ICIG to keep an eye on them.
[As an ancillary footnote, Inspector General Michael Horowitz was installed as the inspector general of the DOJ in April of 2012. The story that exploded in April 2012 was the IRS targeting of ‘conservative’ and ‘patriot’ groups, which originated from within…. wait for it…. the DOJ.]
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Good job Tulsi and Marco!