Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

9. Agency for International Development · Notable

Purge nonconforming material from USAID websites and social media

Partially done

272 9. Agency for International Development

“A priority for these positions (combined with hires under Schedule A) should be the review and editing of the agency’s public-facing web pages and social media accounts to eliminate material that does not conform to the new Administration’s policies.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    USAID's own Federal Register notice records the 2025 reorganization and "a reduction-in-force of nearly all USAID personnel" — the Primary record that the agency's public-affairs capacity, and with it any capacity to review and edit its web pages, ended. usaid.gov today serves only a Cloudflare challenge to automated fetches, so what if anything remains on it cannot be verified from here.

  2. Partially done

    usaid.gov went offline in the early hours of 1 February 2025 and the agency's X account was deleted. The material the Quote wanted edited out was removed by taking the site and the accounts down entirely rather than by the review-and-edit the Quote describes, and no Schedule A hires or LPA political appointees did the work. No allowlisted Primary record of the takedown was found; only one allowlisted outlet could be read (thehill.com answers 403 to automated fetches), so this event is corroborated by the Primary record of the agency's dismantlement below rather than by a second outlet.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • Negative search recorded 2026-09-03. Half the open question is now answered, and half cannot be answered by us at all.

    • Answered. State’s archive-websites page (https://www.state.gov/u-s-department-of-state-archive-websites) opened and was read in full. It lists exactly five archive sites, all of them on state.gov (Biden 2021-2025, Trump 2017-2021, Obama 2009-2017 with the Foreign Press Center and Keystone XL, Bush 2001-2009, Clinton 1997-2001), plus the Library of Congress snapshots and the “U.S. Department of State X Archive”, which the page describes as hosting “content pre-dating January 20, 2025, that was archived and removed from official Department X accounts”. The word “USAID” occurs nowhere on the page. So State’s own public archive inventory neither holds nor claims to hold USAID’s material: the X Archive is scoped to State’s own accounts. That is a real, quotable negative about where USAID’s material went — but it is a fact about State’s index, not about the state of USAID’s site, so it does not move this item’s Status and is not cited as Evidence for it.
    • Not answered, and not answerable by us. https://www.usaid.gov/ refuses to open, behind an interactive challenge that only a person in a browser can pass; https://usaid.gov/ returns an 83-character JavaScript shell. No change in how the request is made gets past it — re-tested 2026-09-03 with every method we have for reading a page, twice. https://social-archive.state.gov/ opens to an empty application shell (142 characters of text) behind a staff login and asks search engines not to index it; it is an authenticated staff tool, not a public browse site. pdf.usaid.gov and data.usaid.gov have no DNS record.
    • What remains open is exactly what it was: whether anything is on usaid.gov and whether what remains conforms. Only a person with a browser can see it.

  • Boundary: an alternative reading is done, on the §642 logic that taking everything down overshoots an eliminate ask in the direction asked. Held at partial because the Quote pairs elimination with a review by named appointees, and because the state of the site cannot be read. Re-tested and unchanged on 2026-09-03: the site still cannot be read, so the second half of the reason for holding the Status still holds.

Action
eliminate
Object
USAID public-facing web pages and social media accounts
ID
727