State Department continues to rebuild aid staff through contractors
The U.S. State Department is continuing to refill its foreign aid workforce, with dozens of roles posted at the agency’s global health, foreign assistance, and disaster response bureaus in recent weeks.
"It's encouraging because it's starting to address the problem,” said Tod Preston, the executive director of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, a coalition focused on U.S. aid reform. “Much more needs to be done, but they could be doing nothing — so it shows that they do want to increase the capacity to actually be able to implement these programs."
The new roles follow a surge of hiring that began late last year, when the State Department began using contracting companies to fill gaps left by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s collapse. Before the Trump administration axed the agency, USAID employed over 10,000 people across the world — and after Sept. 2, 2025, only 600 employees were estimated to be transferred to the State Department, according to early proposals sent to Congress.
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Elissa Miolene
Elissa Miolene covers U.S. foreign assistance from Washington, D.C. She previously covered education at The San Jose Mercury News, and has written for The Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other news outlets across the world. Before shifting to journalism, Elissa led communications for aid agencies in the United States, East Africa, and South Asia.
