5mo ago

U.S.A.I.D. Official Orders Employees to Shred or Burn Classified and Personnel Records

www.nytimes.com

A senior official at the main U.S. aid agency, which is being dismantled by the Trump administration, told employees to clear safes holding classified documents and personnel files by shredding the papers or putting them into bags for burning, according to an email sent to the staff.

The email, sent by Erica Y. Carr, the acting executive secretary, told employees of the U.S. Agency for International Development to empty out the classified safes and personnel document files on Tuesday. “Shred as many documents first, and reserve the burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break,” Ms. Carr wrote, according to a copy of the email obtained by The New York Times.

19 comments

This is the year 2025, and you all are worried about paper records?
Stop to think...where does a paper classified record come from? If "printed from a classified computer" didn't cross your mind, I suggest you check your underinformed outrage. Anything old enough to be historical should already be at the National Archives.
USAID is moving out of all its offices, so getting rid of paper copies of records falls squarely into Federal records retention policies.
- And you think Elmo hasn't already purged the computer records? Sweet summer child.
  
  Lol, not without Rubio authorizing it and a lot of tedious legwork in Virginia data centers. Friendo, you clearly don't understand these systems and for some reason think you do.
  Also, why would he even purge anything of he could? His people wanted to see what was in the paper records 5 weeks ago and got pissed they were denied access. They came, they saw, they didn't get anything they wanted, and they left. Meanwhile, Peter Marocco is still there with read access all along. All the financial records are still there, still public.
  
  NARA's got it's own air-gapped servers to store the classified stuff. And Lightbrite can't get in the door there.
- There's likely a ton of shit from before personal computers were ubiquitous, that was never digitized.
  
  That was all digitized during the Obama administration. NAR has it all.
  FOIA your face off, see how much you end up with. It'll be plenty.
Isnt this something that should regularly happen? Its not an embassy under attack…
Probably to hide the decades of evidence of US foreign interference and deliberate instability they helped create or facilitate. Do the CIA, NSA, and Pentagon next plz.
- I... don't think USAID is the one doing those things.
  
  Don't worry, someone will be along to claim it's always been a CIA front.
  
  Not a Trump or Musk fan but it’s safe to assume all government agencies do this to some degree even if minor.
  The issue here is Trump and Musk will take whatever they find, however minor that is, and exploit it. They’ve been blowing everything waaay out of proportion and exposing every government secret they can in an effort to try and make themselves look good and others in the government look BAD.
  In reality it’s only making the US in general look extremely untrustworthy to everyone else in the world.
  But then again that may be the whole purpose of their little exercise.
  
  Why wouldn't they be? International development sounds exactly like the kind of agency that would/could be concerned with those things.
- More likely they're trying to keep sensitive documents out of the hands of Trump and Musk, because any foreign interference wouldn't be a bad thing to them.

19 comments