It’s unclear whether the U.S. Agency for International Development has been officially shuttered or essentially commandeered by the State Department, but one thing is clear: President Donald Trump’s administration plans to do away with the agency as we know it.
Founded during the John F. Kennedy Administration, USAID was supposed to be an emissary for America’s goodwill to the poorest of the geopolitical poor, building their economies and infrastructure.
And that’s what it still does, say Democrats, who claim that USAID has been unfairly targeted by conservatives and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Conservatives and the DOGE, meanwhile, contend that USAID has become an opaque maze of spending that has little do with projects that make the lives of the world’s poorest better and everything to do with shuffling money to non-governmental organizations and causes favored by the left, all with no transparency to Congress even when asked to provide information about where its $44 billion budget is going.
Which narrative is true? Is USAID an indispensable part of American soft power, making the lives of those in the third world better for little cost, or is it a convenient way to shuffle money to the obsessions of the woke under the guise of humanitarian assistance?
When fact-checking which of these most closely comports with reality, it’s important to note the spending items that have been identified — i.e., that aren’t buried under layers of deliberate opacity — that your taxpayer dollars are going toward, courtesy of USAID. From a White House fact sheet:
- $1.5 million: To “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities.”
- $2 million: For “LGBT activism” and gender-transition surgeries in Guatemala.
- $6 million: For Egyptian tourism.
- $2.5 million: For electric vehicles in Vietnam.
- $32,000: For a Peruvian “transgender comic book.”
- $47,000: For a Colombian “transgender opera.”
- $70,000: For a “DEI musical” in Ireland.
Non-specific outlays include hundreds of millions for “irrigation canals, farming equipment, and even fertilizer used to support the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan,” millions of dollars to controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology-linked American NGO EcoHealth Alliance, “[h]undreds of thousands of meals that went to al Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria,” and another few hundred thousand dollars to a non-profit that an inspector general’s investigation had already determined was linked to terrorist organizations.
And again, that’s what they were able to uncover.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, formerly a senator from Florida, noted lawmakers couldn’t get answers as to where USAID funds were going: “When we were in Congress, we couldn’t even get answers to basic questions about programs,” he said, according to National Review.
Iowa GOP Sen. Joni Ernst told a similar story in an appearance on Newsmax, noting she had to start an investigation with a fellow Republican, Texas GOP Rep. Mike McCaul, to figure out where the money was going.
“We know in the example of Ukraine — and this is what I was very focused on — is the humanitarian aid wasn’t getting distributed to humanitarian aid contractors. Instead, it was being sent to the United Nations, where we have absolutely no idea where that money is going from that point forward,” she said.
“I would rather see us feeding impoverished nations. But we need to know that those dollars are doing it and not going to fund terrorist organizations, not going to support a gender ideology in certain regions. We have to know that it’s going for a specific goal that is approved by Congress, and unfortunately, USAID has abused this system.”
And Ukraine might represent one of the biggest failures of USAID in terms of delivering results vs. delivering money to pet causes. Ernst’s investigation, National Review revealed, “discovered that more than 5,000 Ukrainian businesses received foreign assistance funded by American taxpayers through several USAID programs. These included the Competitive Economy Program and the Investment for Business Resilience. Up to $2 million was provided to each Ukrainian business.”
Spending money propping up businesses in Ukraine as opposed to inoculating African children, say, isn’t the only problem. Wokeness has also infected USAID, National Review noted, in much larger numbers than the White House’s fact sheet reported on when dealing with Peruvian transgender comic books.
“More recently, the Biden administration inflicted great damage on USAID, injecting its twin obsessions of climate change and DEI into the agency,” the conservative outlet reported.
“There’s no reason for American taxpayers to support a $400 million digital technology project for LGBTQ people in Africa, or to spend $53 million ‘to enable and empower local governments and vulnerable communities to realize their own resilient, low-carbon futures.’
“None of this is a one-off, and the problem isn’t just a handful of programs. The agency elevated its fight against climate change into a central pillar of U.S. development work akin to poverty reduction — a woeful distraction from its work in war zones and in countries suffering famine.”
That’s become the talking points for conservatives on Capitol Hill; in a five-page memo obtained by Fox News, Republicans noted that the Trump administration’s foreign-aid freeze “is needed because it’s nearly impossible to evaluate foreign aid programs when they are on autopilot.”
“America is spending $40 billion in foreign aid annually. Much of those aid dollars are not even reaching the intended recipients and are instead propping up an NGO industrial complex that has, for years, swindled the American taxpayer,” one of the memo’s talking points read.
“A 90-day review period, with commonsense waivers for truly life-threatening situations, is the only way to give the State Department the time needed to root out waste.”
Will that time show that USAID had come to function as a taxpayer-to-NGO money-laundering pipeline? Well, perhaps the examples given are outliers — but these are an awful lot of outliers piling up for an agency that has eschewed transparency, meaning that there’s enough smoke to suspect a factual fire is in progress.
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