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

9. Agency for International Development · Minor

Reduce the Global Health Bureau's contractor-to-direct-hire ratio

Not started

266 9. Agency for International Development

“The Global Health Bureau should address its own management challenges by modifying the high ratio of contractors to direct hires, holding career leadership accountable for effective management, and building more flexibility in emergency responses.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Playbook §3b, an ask addressed to a body that no longer exists. Every limb of this Quote is something the Global Health Bureau does to itself — "its own management challenges", its own ratio of contractors to direct hires, its own career leadership, its own emergency responses — so the Bureau's abolition defeats the ask rather than delivering it. USAID's Global Health Bureau ceased to exist with the agency on 2025-07-01; USAID's own Federal Register notice records "the transition of certain foreign assistance functions to the Department of State and a reduction-in-force of nearly all USAID personnel". That abolition is carried here as the record moving the other way. The record also moved nearby: the America First Global Health Strategy attacks the ratio from the contractor side and commits to more government staff on the other, calling the implementing-partner structure "duplicative and highly inefficient" with "multiple layers of overhead cost" (Uganda alone had 57 implementing partners and more than 300 sub-recipients in FY2024) and committing to a U.S. government staff presence on the ground "with a larger number of staff dedicated to geographies with the highest risk of an outbreak". No contractor-to-direct-hire ratio is published for the successor, and State reduced domestic Civil Service and Foreign Service personnel in FY2025, which moves the direct-hire side the other way again.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • The counter-current: State’s Report to Congress on The Reduction of Department of State Personnel During Fiscal Year 2025 (https://www.state.gov/the-reduction-of-the-department-of-state-personnel-during-fiscal-year-2025/) records a strategic workforce reduction of domestic Civil and Foreign Service staff. It is dated Primary and allowlisted; it is kept here rather than in the Status record because it bears on the successor bureau’s staffing, not on USAID’s Global Health Bureau, which is the object of this Quote.

Researched 2026-08-28.

Re-leveled 2026-09-01, under the rule for an ask addressed to a body that no longer exists: partial → not started. The successor bureau’s commitments were being read as progress on a ratio that no longer has a body to belong to. Contrast #690, whose object is programs rather than the Bureau’s own staffing, and which stays leveled on the state.

Action
restrict
Object
Global Health Bureau contractor-to-direct-hire ratio
ID
694