Fired officials of the shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department are teaming up in an effort to combat Trump as they worry about the “future of democracy” under his leadership, according to NOTUS.
The State Department moved to cut USAID, with the agency officially closing its doors July 1. Now former USAID and State officials are finding ways to undermine Trump, ganging up together to hold workshops on the topic of “noncooperation” to help build a community willing to engage in minor rebellious acts and perhaps eventually a national strike, former officials told NOTUS. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: State Department Ends Decades-Long Program Paying Under-Performing Diplomats)
“Take it from those of us who worked in authoritarian countries: We’ve become one,” a current federal official told NOTUS. “They were so quick to disband AID, the group that supposedly instigates color revolutions. But they’ve done a very foolish thing. You just released a bunch of well-trained individuals into your population. If you kept our offices going and had us play solitaire in the office, it might have been safer to keep your regime.”
Others are reportedly sharing an old CIA pamphlet on “Simple Sabotage” with officials in the government who are perceived as allies.
“Widespread practice of simple sabotage will harass and demoralize enemy administrators and police,” the pamphlet reads. “The saboteur may have to reverse his thinking … Where he formerly thought of keeping his tools sharp, he should now let them grow dull; surfaces that formerly were lubricated now should be sanded; normally diligent, he should now be lazy and careless; and so on.”
DemocracyAID is one organization being run by former USAID officials that is seeking to create a community aimed at sabotaging Trump’s administration, NOTUS reported. Their Instagram, @friendsofUSAID, has more than 88,000 followers.
The organization has held dozens of meetings and teaches their community how to communicate and train, NOTUS reported. Some of the trainings are simply, “letter writing: how to write op-eds to a local newspaper for a local story,” Danielle Reiff, a former USAID diplomat and founder of the group, said.
We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.
Could gone to some great parties.
Did that instead. https://t.co/0V35nacICW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2025
“The whole point of it is to start off slow. People are just taking coffee breaks together. And that’s what we’re encouraging them to do,” Ro Tucci, co-leader of DemocracyAID, told NOTUS.
After a federal judge allowed the Trump administration to move forward with its staffing purge, USAID gave ousted employees 15 minutes to retrieve their personal belongings from the agency’s headquarters in February, the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported.
Staff were warned not to bring “prohibited items” like billy clubs, brass knuckles, martial arts weapons, axes or hatchets, BB guns, bows and arrows, dynamite or chlorine for pools and spas when they came to retrieve their stuff, according to the DCNF.
“Fascism is not creative,” one former government conflict expert told NOTUS, pointing to “Star Wars” to illustrate their point about fascism. “There’s only so many ways to do it. That’s why it’s almost cliché to the point where we ask, ‘What are we, Darth Vader? The Empire? The Nazis?’ The comparisons draw ridicule because people who don’t know enough about it don’t realize there aren’t too many ways to do it. So, the tactics to counter them will still work, and there’s way more ways to be creative.”
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