More than a year ago, Jordan Kimball was working on the 35th floor of a skyscraper in Bangkok, Thailand, in an office for the U.S. Agency for International Development. It was the latest stop in his globe-trotting career.
On a chilly and sunny morning this month, Kimball clipped twigs from a branch of a dogwood shrub at Viles Arboretum in Augusta, as part of his new career with the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.
The change has been jarring for Kimball and others who worked for USAID and lost their jobs when the government dismantled the 64-year-old agency in early 2025. Some former workers, like Kimball, have worked to rebuild their lives and start new careers in Maine.
“The curtain came down on all of us,” Kimball said of the agency’s closure. “No one knew it was coming. People spent their lives and careers to better the world and our country. The rug was pulled out from under everyone.”
Kimball, whose career was in natural resources management and renewable energy, scrambled to find work, applying for over 30 jobs in Thailand. Then the Boston native landed the job in Maine, where he had owned a home since 2009.
USAID had provided humanitarian aid around the world since the 1960s. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was instrumental in the agency’s closure, resulting in thousands losing their jobs.
Workers “spent all this time, decades, building goodwill, and then suddenly we just left,” said Christy Owen, who worked for USAID contractors in natural resource management and lives in Camden. “It’s like it never happened.”
Allison Hodgkins, executive director of the nonprofit World Affairs Council of Maine, helped host a job networking event in January at the University of Southern Maine’s Portland campus for those who had worked with the federal agency.
“People are still in mourning for what was lost, and the majority of people who worked for USAID are still finding it very difficult to find employment,” Hodgkins said. “They have a resume that might look weird to the average HR department, but they have these invaluable skills.”
In interviews with the Portland Press Herald, former USAID employees and contractors who are carving out new opportunities in Maine talked about the work they had done across the world — and how they have started over.
‘FEELS LIKE IT WASN’T REAL’
Kristin Shouba remembers hearing the news about USAID while working in El Salvador, where she was helping to coordinate several economic development, trade and pro-democracy initiatives.
“The swiftness of how it happened was breathtaking and devastating,” said Shouba, 46, of Walpole. “It sometimes still feels like it wasn’t real. I kept thinking, ‘How is this happening? It can’t be happening.’”
She and her husband, Neil Shouba, also a former USAID employee, had friends in Maine and would visit often when on stateside leave. They purchased a house in Walpole in 2024 as a home base for their visits and thinking it would be a place they would consider moving to when they retired from the agency.
That plan accelerated and they moved there with their now-12-year-old daughter.
“I have some ‘survivor’s guilt’ because we happened to have a place to land,” Kristin Shouba said. “Everyone else I knew was like, ‘What am I going to do?’”
Kristin Shouba’s ties to international service run deep. Her father was a member of the U.S. Foreign Service, so she grew up in Virginia and overseas, she said. After earning a graduate degree at The American University in Cairo, Kristin Shouba worked as a USAID contractor before landing a job with the agency in 2015.
She’s worked in several countries, including Afghanistan, the Republic of Georgia, Thailand, Kyrgyzstan. She said she also worked in Peru on ways to sustain the Amazon rainforest.
She’s now working as an office manager for a primary care practice in Damariscotta. Neil Shouba, 53, who worked as a democracy and governance specialist for USAID, is still looking for work. He said that, with the tight job market in Midcoast Maine, he spends time volunteering.
Kristin Shouba said they are settling into their lives in small town Maine, a “calm and quiet transition” from the intense jobs they had working abroad. They’re going to their daughter’s soccer and basketball games, and sailing with friends.
“It’s a nice place to heal our wounds,” she said.
‘GOOD FORTUNE’
John Kuehnle grew up in Cambridge, and has mostly worked overseas since 2002, aside from a short stint with the Boston Public Health Commission. He worked to improve public health in South Africa, Zambia and Kenya before moving to Maine in 2024 to be closer to his ailing parents. His father died this year.
Kuehnle was working for USAID, commuting every week to Washington, D.C., while living, at the time, in Kennebunkport. He was coordinating programs to help reduce malaria, tuberculosis and HIV in African countries. Kuehnle said USAID was portrayed by critics as wasting money, but that they worked hard to make programs more efficient.
“We’ve had a huge reduction in human suffering,’ Kuehnle said. “The potential now for backsliding is very real.”
The 47-year-old is now CEO of Partners for World Health in Portland, a nonprofit that sends used medical equipment and surplus medical supplies to countries that need them, and lives in Falmouth with his wife and two children.
Kuehnle said he had “extraordinarily good fortune” to find a job in Maine that “exactly matched my skills.”
EMBRACING CHANGE
On a recent April morning, Kimball, an assistant coordinator for the Maine DEP, collected branches for educational programs he conducts to help homeowners and contractors learn about shoreline conservation.
Part of the programs show how planting “live stakes” of shrubs and trees like the dogwood is an environmentally friendly method.
The 53-year-old has been working for DEP for less than a year. He said it was the only job he had applied for in Maine after USAID closed. While he loves the state, Kimball said it was a stressful few months trying to find a job and figure out how to return once it became clear his USAID career was ending.
He had been doing aid work before purchasing his home in Wilton in 2009. Kimball said he tried to make a living farming it in 2011, focusing on eggs, goats and vegetables. When that failed, he returned to working overseas as a USAID contractor.
Jobs took him to Liberia, West Africa and the Congo. He went from being a contractor to working for USAID in 2022. At the time the agency closed, Kimball was working on renewable energy infrastructure projects in Thailand, Laos, the Philippines and Vietnam, increasing usage of electric vehicles, hydro and solar power.
It was surprising how abrupt the shuttering was in the end, Kimball said.
“Every meeting the news kept getting worse and worse,” he said. “One meeting they said they were going to keep some people. The next meeting they told us everyone is gone.”
He moved back to Wilton with his wife and their three sons. Kimball, a forester, grew up in Boston and remembers frequent vacations to Maine to visit Moosehead Lake and Baxter State Park. He said he and his family enjoy skiing, canoeing and fishing and has embraced the state’s rural nature.
‘HAD TO REINVENT MYSELF’
Christy Owen started working as a USAID contractor 25 years ago to “do something with my life that helps others thrive.” She worked in natural resource management in countries that included Venezuela, the Philippines and Thailand.
She said the programs she helped run combined protecting the environment with economic and public health investments, such as access to clean drinking water and ecotourism.
“I went to places I never thought I would go, spending my life solving problems,” Owen, 52, said.
Originally from Maryland, Owen moved with her husband and son in 2023 to Camden, where she had continued to work remotely as a USAID contractor until the closure. After losing her job, Owen said she “felt a loss of identity. It was very disorienting.”
She said it took several months of searching before she found a job as director of the Maine Conservation Corps.
“I had to reinvent myself, to figure out how my skills could apply domestically,” Owen said.
Owen said she had always wanted to move to Maine, after spending summers in the state with her grandmother. Her job helps preserve natural resources, which is similar to the work she did overseas. She now oversees volunteers who work on conservation and outdoor projects in the state, such as maintaining hiking trails.
“We help the local population conserve the lands for the future,” Owen said.
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Joe Lawlor can be reached at [email protected].
