When workers at the United States Agency for International Development got an email earlier this month informing them they were soon to be put on administrative leave, veteran staffers took note of the name and title appended to the bottom—Peter Marocco, a former USAID political appointee now serving both as USAID’s deputy administrator and as director of foreign assistance in the State Department. 

“All the AID people hate him—not because he’s a rightist or leftist, but because he’s an asshole,” says one person who worked in the agency during the first Trump administration. In 2018, while working for the State Department, Marocco took part in a secret meeting with Serbian separatist leaders, causing a diplomatic incident. After he moved to USAID two years later, his behavior prompted a 13-page “dissent” memo from agency staffers. Online sleuths have picked him out in photos of the crowd storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021—an allegation he has called a “petty smear,” but not formally denied.

But Marocco is not the only State Department name that has raised eyebrows at USAID. According to a different email sent to agency staffers last week, another right-wing activist has been selected to play a key role in the dissolution of the agency Elon Musk said should “die” and President Donald Trump ordered to be folded into the State Department. Helping to lead the “Coordination Support Team” tasked with bringing home overseas USAID personnel, according to the memo, was Marcus Thornton, a “member of the Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff” reporting directly to Marocco. Until now, Thornton has been better known as the founder and president of Feds for Freedom. The group was founded to fight the Biden administration’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate for federal workers, and has since promoted conspiracies about public health, campaigned against DEI, and participated in the planning of Project 2025.

Thornton, who according to his Feds for Freedom bio joined the State Department as a foreign service officer in 2016 following a stint with Border Patrol, launched the group as “Feds 4 Medical Freedom” in 2021. On the organization’s podcast, “The Feds,” Thornton described himself during a 2023 appearance as “staunchly pro-life” and said that he was opposed to the mandate, in part, because “there were aborted fetal cells used in every single product on the market.” (As the New York Times has explained, while fetal cells were used to develop Covid vaccines, the vaccines themselves do not use or contain fetal cells.) 

The organization led a lawsuit against the vaccine mandate on behalf of more than 50 government employees and contractors in 2021, winning an injunction from a federal judge in Texas before being blocked by the Fifth Circuit. Feds for Freedom appealed to the Supreme Court, but the end of the mandate in 2023 rendered the case moot.

That activism brought Thornton and his organization into a wider coalition that included prominent anti-vaccine activists and other conspiracy theorists. In 2022, Thornton spoke at a Stop the Mandates Rally in Los Angeles, where anti-vaccine activist and RFK Jr.-ally Del Bigtree claimed that 25,000 people had been killed by “the jab.” The official Feds for Freedom podcast recently featured an interview with a guest who argued that both the pandemic and the accompanying vaccines were part of a eugenicist global population control project. Other episodes have asked if “mRNA gene therapy supports one world government,” warned the US was “sliding into totalitarianism,” spread conspiracies about the “Deep State” and the Federal Reserve, said that the FBI was becoming a “secret police,” and called DEI “the manifestation of Marxism in America.” (The co-host of that last episode—Feds for Freedom’s then-vice-president—is now the interim director of FEMA.)

Years before he was helping to coordinate USAID’s recall program, it was Thornton who was being taken away from an overseas assignment against his wishes. In late 2023 he posted a video on YouTube from the airport in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, explaining how he was being sent home from his foreign service posting by the US ambassador as “reprisal and retaliation” for “exercising my constitutional rights”—in other words, because his political activism. (The State Department did not respond to a request for comment; Thornton responded to a request for comment by sending a version of Feds For Freedom’ mission statement.)

For both Thornton and his group, what started as resistance to the vaccine mandate has evolved into a larger structural attack. “What we found in the process of fighting this battle was that the vaccine mandates were just one symptom of deeper root issues within our government,” he told conservative podcaster Jerry Cirino Jr. in 2023. “The government as it is now primarily consists of an unelected bureaucracy that is not reflective of the values of the people that it serves.” 

Thornton, who slammed his fellow bureaucrats as “unaccountable” and “untransparent,”  said that reforms should focus on bringing the “level of fear and accountability that we have in the private sector and bring that to government.” 

His more recent work has paired neatly with the Trump administration’s DOGE-driven efforts to radically transform both the State Department and the broader bureaucracy. Last year, in a Feds for Freedom YouTube video filmed outside Independence Hall, Thornton invited federal workers “to get involved in agency-level working groups” to identify “who the bad actors are” within the government. An op-ed he co-wrote in The American Conservative titled “A Plan to Infuse American Values Into State Department Hiring” proposed combating “DEIA extremism” by, among other things, replacing the current foreign-service recruitment process with a system in which members of Congress would nominate people from their districts. (Around the same time, the Heritage Foundation awarded Feds for Freedom a $100,000 “innovation prize,” for its work in what the think tank called “the pronoun fight.”) 

The second Trump term has been a nightmare for many USAID staffers and their families, including those whose “orderly, safe, and voluntary return” is now part of Thornton’s remit. But it has represented a career-making opportunity for others. Early last year, Thornton and Feds for Freedom led a workshop to encourage federal employees to submit their resumes as part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which produced a planning document for a new Trump administration that has served as a model for much of what’s unfolded over the last month.

“The 2025 Presidential Transition Project (Project 2025) was created to ensure the next administration can move quickly to execute badly needed government reforms,” Feds for Freedom wrote in a March 2024 Instagram post. “There is a pressing need for political appointees at all grade levels – not just executives, but starting from GS-7 and up – to carry out this critical mission. In January 2025, these appointments will be filled by PATRIOTS just like YOU.” 

This post was shared from Mother Jones.