Matheu Schwenk loved his job. “I loved helping people on behalf of the U.S. government,” said Schwenk. “I’m a patriot, and I believe foreign aid makes America great and makes us safer.”
Schwenk lost his job Friday. He was a Personal Services Contractor with the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, which the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE are pushing to dissolve. Schwenk is married to Heather Schwenk (formerly Lee), a 1991 Iola High School graduate and the daughter of Dr. Vernon and Karen Lee. The couple live in Lawrence with their two boys.
Schwenk was stationed in Nairobi, Kenya for a nine-week assignment working with the World Food Program and other international organizations to deliver food, nutrition, health, and shelter to Sudan, where more than half the country’s population has been affected by a brutal civil war.
“I worked to make sure basic needs were met for the most vulnerable, including food — mostly sorghum, pinto beans and wheat, which definitely came from Kansas farmers — made it to where it needed to go.”
It was a challenging task. Before leaving his assignment, Schwenk helped coordinate a shipment of 10,000 metric tons of food aid to the people of Sudan. Getting the food from its home ports from the U.S. redirected from its original port in Yemen via the United Arab Emirates for milling the grain, and finally arranging safe arrival at Port Sudan for distribution, all before the food spoils — it’s a huge task. “Just getting the food to Sudan was a feat in and of itself,” he noted.
“We depended on local partners to get food and other humanitarian assistance into and distributed throughout Sudan. Sudan is a post we can’t enter, and we depend on those partners to distribute the assistance in conflict zones, so much so that we actually had templates for condolence letters to send out. We had partners risking their lives every day, dying just to get food distributed in a war zone,” said Schwenk.
Then, about three weeks ago, everything changed. “We received word that we can’t communicate with our partners. No new obligated projects. So we sat on our hands and waited. We had work to do internally, but then the whole USAID website went blank. My laptop said my account didn’t exist. My email, time sheets, travel, applications, Google Drive, all of it was gone. And then on February 4, the USAID website popped up with a notice saying we no longer had a job.”
Schwenk didn’t know what to do. The notice was unsigned. He didn’t have any contact information. No one could approve his return travel. He was ordered to leave Nairobi, 8,500 miles from home, on his own by Feb. 7. He flew back to Kansas only when a former colleague reached out to arrange his travel home.
Then, on Friday, Feb. 21, the email titled: “Letter of termination for convenience,” arrived.
There was no name in the “to” field, no reference to his title or him personally.
It read: “This memorandum serves as notice that your Personal Services Contract is hereby terminated for Convenience of the Government. It is no longer in the best interests of the United States Government to continue with this contract.” 
AT FIRST, Schwenk said he felt sorry for himself. He was angry. Confused. Frustrated.
But those emotions faded as the scale became overwhelming: over 400 contractors like Schwenk, working for the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance and the Support Relief Group were fired Friday.
Then, this Sunday, an update appeared on USAID’s website. It announced that all USAID employees around the world are being placed on an indefinite administrative leave, except for designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions.
Schwenk began to realize the profound effects that would come from shutting down USAID. “I don’t mean to be dramatic,” said Schwenk. “But people will die. When this aid dries up, no one else will step in to fill the gap.”
