Cnn
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Inspector General of the American Agency for International Development was dismissed on Tuesday, one day after his office published a report criticizing the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency, said a familiar source with the issue at CNN.
Paul Martin was informed by an e-mail of the deputy director of the presidential staff office on Tuesday evening that his post as an inspector general of the USAID was “dismissed, in force immediately”.
A spokesperson for the office of the USAID Inspector General confirmed Martin’s dismissal and said there was no reason for his ouster. CNN contacted the White House to comment.
Martin had been an inspector general since December 2023. While President Donald Trump had dismissed general inspectors of more than a dozen federal agencies during his first week in power, the USAID watchdog remained in place . An IG conducts surveys and audits on any embezzlement, fraud, waste or potential abuse by a government agency or its staff, and issues reports and recommendations on its conclusions. The office of an Inspector General is intended to operate independently.
In a report on Monday, the USAID OIG said that the Trump Administration of the Trump of the USAID staff and its radical freezing on foreign assistance had made it more difficult to follow and respond to potential abusive use Of $ 8.2 billion in humanitarian assistance funded by American taxpayers.
The Trump administration has aggressively decided to dismantle the USAID in recent weeks, trying to put thousands of employees for direct USAID rental on leave and by removing dozens of entrepreneurs working for the agency. Last Friday, a federal judge temporarily blocked these plans and interrupted the accelerated dismissal of staff members of countries around the world.
Although the Monday IG report notes that the office has long “identified significant challenges and has offered recommendations to improve agency programming to prevent fraud, waste and abuses”, it is clear that reduction USAID staff and the freezing of foreign aid had a negative impact on surveillance efforts.
“The recent generalized reductions of staff through the agency … coupled with uncertainty about the scope of foreign assistance derogations and authorized communications with the performers have degraded the ability of the USAID to distribute and protect the Humanitarian aid funded by taxpayers, ”says the report.
USAID demands that programs in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Syria, West Bank and Gaza, and Yemen receive “partners ‘verification”, to ensure that taxpayers’ funds do not Do not end up supporting groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Isis, or Houthis. According to the report, these verification efforts stop due to the reduction of USAID staff.
The vast majority of the workforce of more than 1,000 people at the USAID humanitarian assistance office (BHA) has already been affected by leave or to be on leave, according to the report.
“Collectively, the actions of the staff executed and planned would eliminate, temporarily or definitively, around 90% of BHA’s global workforce,” he said.
This reduction in the endowment has also had a negative impact on the agency’s ability to respond to the reports of an abusive potential use of humanitarian funding.
This story has been updated with additional information.
Piper Hudspeth Blackburn of CNN and Kit Maher contributed to this report.