Trump Fired Them. Now They’re Plotting to Stop Him
Former USAID and State Department officials worried about the future of democracy in America say they’re actively organizing to resist Trump, inside and outside of government.
Some of the democracy-building experts President Donald Trump fired this year from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department are now reapplying the skills and knowledge they built up over decades to undermine Trump’s power.
For years, these officials were stationed across the globe actively supporting opposition movements in autocratic nations. Now they’ve got time, a network of former colleagues and a growing sense of moral indignation.
The community is composed of diplomats and human rights activists who were once on the U.S. government payroll encouraging Latin American dissidents to fight dictators and supporting African independence movements. They were involved to varying degrees with an ultimately successful uprising in the Middle East.
Some have found post-government work in academia and nonprofits. Others are still looking for jobs. Several have begun moonlighting as strategic advisers to American activists, protest organizers and federal employees willing to engage in civil disobedience.
DemocracyAID is the brainchild of Danielle Reiff, another former USAID diplomat who retired from government work in late 2024. As Trump targeted her former agency this year, she started a group chat on the encrypted app Signal to “keep the community together.”
“We started to have really robust, good conversations, and we realized this was not going to be a quick incident. We really needed to start organizing for the longer haul,” she told NOTUS.
The focus quickly shifted from salvaging the foreign assistance infrastructure to redeploying inside the United States. Reiff and Tucci joined forces, held dozens of meetings, sketched out a general structure and split it up into working groups that concentrate on separate missions like communications and training. They now have 200 volunteers and an Instagram account, @friendsofUSAID, with over 88,000 followers. A recent post shared “5 ways to keep up the momentum” of last month’s “No Kings” protests.
Reiff said that some of the training sessions are “just letter writing: how to write op-eds to a local newspaper for a local story.”
“We’re democracy officers at the end of the day. We’re still in a strategic planning process. We’ve got a lot of different irons in the fire,” she told NOTUS.
Deputy White House press secretary Anna Kelly attacked the effort in a statement to NOTUS. “It is inherently undemocratic for unelected bureaucrats to undermine the duly elected President of the United States and the agenda he was given a mandate to implement,” she said.
“For all of us who are conflict experts, everything is blinking bright red. We’re well beyond early-warning signs here in the U.S.,” said one person who spoke to NOTUS on condition of anonymity.
This government, even if it weren’t populated by the biggest morons on Earth, cannot do what it is threatening to do,” they said.
NOTUS.