President Donald Trump listens while Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks at the Shield of the Americas Summit, Saturday, March 7, 2026, at Trump National Doral Miami in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell).
Dozens of fired USAID employees have sued in federal court, alleging the Trump administration's move to "eject older legacy" foreign aid agency workers and replace them with DOGE-approved "new, younger employees" was unlawful age discrimination.
Nearly 80 pages of the 124-page complaint filed in Washington, D.C., were dedicated to the naming the ousted foreign service plaintiffs, ranging in age from their 40s to 60s.
The suit was brought against the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the State Department, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was the acting administrator of USAID from February to August 2025, when Elon Musk took his chainsaw to an agency he called "criminal," declaring it was time "for it to die." Amy Gleason, the acting DOGE administrator now, was also sued.
According to the complaint, the Trump administration's teardown of USAID and discarding of "decades of institutional knowledge and expertise the Plaintiffs had amassed" was always framed by the defendants as a result of a need to do away with the "dinosaurs" and bring in "younger, more energetic, more tech-savvy" employees.
That was the point of having an employee dubbed "Big Balls," 19, send them packing, the lawsuit alleged.
"Defendants openly referred to federal workers as 'dinosaurs,' a term that inherently refers to obsolescence and extinction, due to environmental change. No legitimate doubt can exist as to the motivations of the discriminatory actors who were arrogant and abusive in their disdain for older workers," the complaint said. "Indeed, older workers were subjected to the spectacle of a 19-year-old Musk DOGE placed employee known as 'Big Balls' taking on significant roles in their terminations, with the juvenile description being publicly lauded and promoted by the Defendants."
But the tone was set from the top, with President Donald Trump praising DOGE and Musk because he "attracts a young, very smart type of person," the complaint further alleged.
"As the Defendants' derogatory language towards older workers reverberated, other high-ranking officials adopted and endorsed the same age-based messaging to justify the terminations at USAID," the filing said. "Sources close to the administration boldly stated that: '[t]his is a Gen Z, millennial takeover of the federal government,' adding that DOGE, by conducting mass firings, was addressing 'the geriatric, the kind of nursing home regime that has been pushing the country into oblivion. Now the young guns are taking over the country for the better.'"
The problem with the administration's "messaging campaign to convince the public to put [a] premium on the youth and vigor of the officials behind the terminations, as juxtaposed to the claimed age-related lethargy of the employees they were terminating" is that it revealed the "unlawful attack" for what it was, "evidence of direct and intentional age discrimination" under the guise of reducing the deficit, the plaintiffs claimed.
"As part of this age-related truncation of workers, the persons responsible routinely peddled in code words indicative of age discrimination, including transition towards a more tech-savvy federal workforce, closely associated with youth. In fact, some of the decision making in terminating these employees appear to have been carried out by neophytes to federal service in their twenties," the lawsuit continued. "The messaging and conduct employed was intended to, and did, create intolerable working conditions for older workers, replete with specific efforts to force them into resignation or early retirement."
Worse yet, the plaintiffs alleged, they were lied to when they were told their "positions were not being retained." Rather, they were or are being replaced by "younger cheaper counterparts."
"[T]he Defendants have sought, and continue to seek, new, younger employees to conduct the same or similar functions as Plaintiffs," the complaint stated. "This has been done at the Department of State through a discriminatory job screening pattern and practice, that disproportionately disqualifies older employees and is intended to exclude Plaintiffs from returning to work for the federal government. The Department of State's ongoing recruitment for the same and similar positions from which Plaintiffs were terminated solidifies the pretextual nature of the [reductions in force, or RIF] that upended Plaintiffs' lives and unlawfully destroyed their retirement plans and benefits. It is a ruse to replace older established workers with greater salary and benefits with younger cheaper counterparts."
As a result, the civil lawsuit brought seven counts against the administration, several of them alleging violations of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. The last count claimed the government violated the Administrative Procedure Act because it knew most of the workers it fired were 40 or older and yet "failed to assess the adverse impact of an abrupt, arbitrary, and pretextual RIF on this older workforce and failed to take any meaningful steps to mitigate the harmful impact of the RIF on older workers."
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