At 2:30 p.m. on Friday, metal letters spelling “US Agency for International Development” clung to the side of 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C.
By 2:56 p.m., they sat in a pile next to the now-bare building.
Construction crews spent Friday afternoon removing all signage from the USAID headquarters after President Donald Trump said to “CLOSE IT DOWN” in a social media post.
Earlier that afternoon, someone taped over the agency’s name on a nearby sign and logos on the building’s windows.
Shortly before 2 p.m., a group of five construction workers were huddled outside the building. Two wore yellow harnesses. All of them had tape over a patch on their jacket.
None would comment to Business Insider on who they worked for.
Just after 2:30 p.m., a bucket crane hoisted one of the workers into the air and he began to pry the letters off the building before dropping them onto the crane. It eventually became a two-man job, taking around 15 minutes.
Once the building was bare, the construction workers ripped open a plastic garbage bag and, fighting with the DC wind, taped it over the building’s logo.
This comes just days after the Trump administration moved to gut USAID — the government’s foreign agency.
The proposed cuts mean that the agency could be forced to drastically shrink its workforce from about 10,000 to 294 employees. The agency announced Tuesday that it will put staff on administrative leave beginning on Friday at 11:59 p.m., with exceptions to people with “exceptional circumstances,” per Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents about 800,000 federal workers, filed a lawsuit on Thursday in an effort to prevent the agency from being dismantled.
On Friday, a judge sided with the workers, partially blocking the shutdown.
But the agency’s future remains uncertain. Both Trump and Elon Musk have previously said USAID is “wasteful” and supports liberal causes. Its gutting is the latest example of the Department of Government Efficiency’s promise to slash the federal budget and reform the bureaucracy.
The Trump administration did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s comment request.
DOGE’s account on X celebrated the changes to the headquarters, posting photos of the now-bare building with the caption, “Unburdened by what has been,” a reference to former Vice President Kamala Harris.
AT USAID BUILDING, letters coming off one by one. A woman yelled shame a few times; a couple police officers have gathered; the street is mainly quiet, really pic.twitter.com/hd9SvGb0t4
— Alice Tecotzky (@ATecotzky) February 7, 2025
USAID administered civilian foreign aid and development assistance around the world, including various food, healthcare, and education initiatives. Data for fiscal year 2024 shows that USAID distributed nearly $32.5 billion in aid that year, much of it to Africa and the Middle East. The proposed operations cuts would likely reduce the most assistance in Ukraine, Jordan, and Ethiopia. Still, the multi-billion aid bill is only about 1% of the federal budget.
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