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President Donald Trump speaks with reporters in the Oval Office at the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo/Alex Brandon).
The Trump administration insists that it is not shredding and burning “classified” employee documents at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) with personnel info that would be “essential” to rehiring unlawfully fired federal workers, as alleged by labor groups suing the president — saying in a new court filing Wednesday that the facts have been “seriously misapprehended.”
Instead, USAID officials allege they have “sorted and removed” copies of important documents from the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C., to make room for a new tenant that it’s moving in as part of the “recent restructuring of USAID,” the agency says.
“The removed classified documents had nothing to do with this litigation,” Justice Department lawyers said Wednesday in response to an emergency motion filed by the labor groups suing Trump for a temporary restraining order (TRO) to stop the alleged shredding. “They were copies of documents from other agencies or derivatively classified documents, where the originally classified document is retained by another government agency and for which there is no need for USAID to retain a copy.”
According to DOJ lawyers, documents on current classified programs were retained, as well as “all personnel records” and any document that must be under the Federal Records Act. “Moreover, USAID will not destroy any additional documents after March 11, 2025, without first notifying Plaintiffs and providing an opportunity to raise the issue before this Court,” the DOJ said.
Last month, the plaintiffs — two government employees unions led by the American Foreign Service Association, the exclusive representative for the U.S. Foreign Service — filed a lawsuit accusing Trump and agency heads of “unlawful actions” that “exceed presidential authority and usurp legislative authority conferred upon Congress by the Constitution, in violation of the separation of powers.”
On Feb. 7, the same day the suit was filed, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols granted a “limited” TRO barring the government from placing USAID employees on administrative leave and performing expedited evacuations of such employees from their overseas posts. The order rejected a request to block a 90-day pause on “foreign assistance funding.” On Feb. 21, Nichols dissolved the TRO and denied a request from the labor groups for a preliminary injunction. Things remained unchanged up until this week when the plaintiffs motioned to stop the shredding and burning of “critical” employee data after hearing about it in an email sent out by USAID’s acting executive secretary, Erica Carr, who allegedly told officials: “Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break.”
The DOJ on Wednesday described Carr’s message as an “out-of-context email” that showed no evidence of any laws being broken.
“Because USAID was not violating and will not violate the FRA and is not destroying evidence potentially relevant to this litigation, Plaintiffs’ motions lack any likelihood of success on the merits,” the DOJ said. “Moreover, Plaintiffs have not established that they will suffer irreparable harm absent relief, especially given that USAID is no longer removing documents and will not resume any removal without first notifying Plaintiffs.”
The DOJ also included a declaration from Carr, stating the move was “customary and required for proper records management.”
“The classified documents destroyed or identified for destruction were not permanent ‘records’ or they had met their retention requirements,” Carr wrote.
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According to USAID officials, an order preventing the agency from handling documents “in accordance with applicable laws” would hinder the Government’s “supervision and management of its records” — including “classified” documents — and thus would not be in the public interest, the DOJ argues.
The USAID case comes as organizations that entered into contracts or received grants from the State Department and USAID have been suing the Trump administration over an executive order by the president that required a blanket freeze of all foreign aid funding. The coalition of foreign aid groups has argued that it was an unconstitutional exercise of presidential power “in contravention of congressional will” — as well as an “arbitrary and capricious agency action” — that will lead to starvation and the deaths of many.
The Trump administration was ordered Monday to cough up nearly $2 billion in foreign aid that it owes for existing contracts and grants authorized by Congress, with a federal judge ruling that it was unconstitutional of Trump to “unlawfully impound funds” earlier this year through his USAID freeze.
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