The Trump administration’s sudden elimination of U.S. international humanitarian aid dealt a swift blow to many Vermont nonprofits, companies and workers.
Jen Peterson was one of the 150 or so people who worked in Winooski for Tetra Tech, which is part of a global $5 billion company that is the third-largest USAID contractor in the U.S. She was furloughed from her position last Friday; her husband has been let go from Tetra Tech, too. She estimated that about two-thirds of the employees had been furloughed and said the rest of the staffers were put on reduced pay.
“We still have health care until the end of March,” she said.
International development firm Resonance Global, which is based in Burlington and has a widely scattered workforce, laid off five Vermont employees, according to a spokesperson. Overall, the company reduced its workforce from 90 to 36 by last Friday.
Plenty of people in Vermont have had roles in the delivery of international aid. While there is no readily available count, interviews reveal that dozens of Vermonters have lost their positions suddenly and that some organizations with decades of international experience have lost funding. Some people who live in Vermont have been working remotely for aid organizations that are shedding employees. Many have no expectation those jobs will return.
President Donald Trump has called for shutting down USAID, claiming “radical lunatics” were running the agency. A number of other orders — or threatened orders — that have streamed from the White House since his inauguration have economic implications for Vermont. The specter of a trade war with China, Mexico and Canada — Vermont’s largest trade partner — galvanized Vermont firms that rely on cross-border trade. The president announced sweeping tariffs but then pulled them back from all but China, before saying on Sunday that he intended to levy tariffs on steel and aluminum.
Trump has also set out to trim the federal workforce, which is 8,000-strong in Vermont, warning federal employees they could be furloughed if they don’t take a buyout. And he’s ordered remote workers back to their desks in Washington, D.C., a directive that has some Vermonters looking for new employment.
But the attempts to dissolve USAID have had the most immediate impact on employees in the Green Mountains. The $40 billion agency delivers humanitarian aid to dozens of countries, and Vermont nonprofits help coordinate those efforts and run projects overseas.
The Trump administration has fired all but a few hundred of USAID’s 10,000 workers, according to the New York Times. A judge has ordered a halt to some of those layoffs, but there’s no timeline for a ruling, leaving workers uncertain about the future.
Among the affected for-profit companies is ThinkMD, a Burlington-based medical software startup that in 2023 received $1.5 million from USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures.
ThinkMD cofounder Dr. Barry Finette said the money supported a study in Nigeria of technology meant to enable nonphysicians to evaluate patients in settings where trained practitioners aren’t available.
“The study had ramifications globally, and there are three to four years of work that people put into this grant that has now gone by the wayside,” Finette, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Vermont, said on Sunday. He said two ThinkMD contractors in Vermont will lose their jobs.
Waitsfield-based PH International, a nonprofit previously called Project Harmony, has received more than $100 million in the past 40 years from USAID, the U.S. Department of State and private donors to operate civic education projects and cultural exchange programs. It put its six Vermont administrative employees on reduced pay on February 1, executive director Meg Harris said.
PH employed about 35 people in Armenia, Georgia and Ukraine until it suspended its two USAID projects, Harris said. The programs were run out of PH’s offices in Georgia and Armenia; the nonprofit’s headquarters in Waitsfield was responsible for all of the financial reporting.
“Their careers are finished. USAID is really the only game in town.” Thomas Buck
Other Vermont workers have been laboring remotely for aid agencies. One woman who consults for a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that provides health care services in the developing world said she had been delivering the news of furloughs to the employees who report to her. She was being moved to part-time status; her future was uncertain. She said she wanted to stay in Vermont, but she wasn’t sure if she could.
“I have to go where I can get paid,” she said. Like several others who spoke to Seven Days, she asked to remain unnamed because she wasn’t authorized by her employer to talk about the cutbacks.
USAID’s employees and its contractors aren’t the only ones affected, according to Sarah Stroup, a Middlebury College political science professor who wrote an essay about the upheaval. Employees of other nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, such as World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, CARE and Save the Children, work with USAID and are uncertain about their future, too. Some of them have employees in Vermont.
The office of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been responding to pleas from Vermont aid workers. Sanders emailed a foreign aid consultant in Montpelier expressing concern about mass furloughs and abrupt stop-work orders. The consultant, who also asked to remain unnamed, works remotely in public health for a USAID contractor that is not based in Vermont. She said half of her team, about 200 people, have been furloughed in February. She was moved to part-time status.
After Trump issued an executive order on Inauguration Day imposing a pause in foreign aid spending, USAID contractors started circulating a link to a site called USAID Stop-Work. It says more than 52,000 U.S. workers could lose their jobs.
“All of this for just 1 percent of the federal budget,” the website says of USAID’s funding.
Service in the Peace Corps is a common conduit to international aid work, and the Green Mountain State — particularly UVM — has traditionally been one of the country’s most prolific producers of Peace Corps volunteers. The agency sends about 3,500 mostly young people overseas each year, said Wendy Rice, president of the Green Mountain Returned Peace Corps Volunteers. The Peace Corps itself is not the target of cutbacks.
Katherine Daniels, a South Burlington resident who served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the West African nation of Guinea in the late 1990s, worked until last week as an independent consultant for a range of USAID-funded nonprofits. A chaplain, she’s been drawing on her pastoral skills to counsel others in her community of aid workers. She said many are devastated over the plight of the vulnerable people they have been helping overseas.
“I had no idea it would change on a dime, so drastically,” Daniels said. She doesn’t expect the work to return anytime soon. “I don’t foresee I’ll be needed by my typical clients, because there won’t be funding available.”
The Burlington firm Resonance was founded in 2005 by Steve Schmida and Nazgul Abdrazakova, a pair of community development workers with experience in the former Soviet Union. Schmida has complained publicly that the sudden cuts mean that the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is illegally withholding payments to USAID contractors for work already completed. He wants Congress to investigate.
“DOGE has weaponized the Treasury Payments System and are already using it to sow fear,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “We have to stop them before this spreads to the rest of the federal government.”
U.S. Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) signed on to a bill last Friday that calls for strengthening congressional oversight of foreign aid. U.S. Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) and dozens of colleagues voiced their concerns in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“USAID helps stabilize fragile states, reducing the risk of them becoming havens for terrorism,” the lawmakers said.
Thomas Buck, a Burlington resident who has spent his career in overseas aid, knew USAID would probably take a funding hit when Trump assumed office. Buck moved to Vermont in 2002 for a position at the Institute for Sustainable Communities, a Montpelier nonprofit that was then working on international development but has evolved to domestic work. Buck worked for years on USAID-funded projects and has a network of Vermont associates in international development. He now consults part time.
He did not anticipate the breadth of the change that has swept through his network.
“The suddenness was shocking,” Buck said. “The way it was done — it sounds like a coup d’état, like it’s one of the first agencies to be attacked.”
He doesn’t expect the jobs to be restored because there’s no comparable funding source.
“Their careers are finished,” he said last Thursday of his Vermont compatriots. “USAID is really the only game in town.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Cuts Abroad Hit Home | Trump’s cancellation of U.S. foreign aid means lost contracts and jobs in Vermont”
Related Stories
This article appears in Love & Marriage Issue 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!