It started with a “wood chipper.” Now it has reached the paper-shredder stage. When the shredder is tired, it will reach the burn-bag phase.
The Elon Musk-led destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that began in early February, with a freeze of federal grants and an order for personnel to cut-and-run from their posts administering life-saving international aid, has apparently accelerated to vandalism of the agency’s sensitive records.
A new memo from acting Executive Secretary Erica Carr, first surfaced by ProPublica and the tech reporter Eoin Higgins, designates Tuesday as a “clearing” event, with the agency’s skeleton staff of essential personnel instructed to join in an act of mass document destruction.
Carr’s memo calls for purging of “our classified safes and personnel documents” at USAID’s longtime headquarters…
