USAID’s Nefarious Activities Go Beyond Foreign Aid Corruption

DOGE has exposed USAID as a vast global progressive political operation far beyond a mismanaged foreign aid agency.

Worker removes building lettering from United States Agency for International Development main building, Washington, DC, February 7, 2025. Image credit to Business Insider/Alice Tecotzky.

This article published in AIER’s The Daily Economy, February 20, 2025.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was established by President John F. Kennedy on November 3, 1961 with Executive Order 10973. Kennedy created USAID to implement the noble objectives of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 and consolidate several existing foreign assistance organizations and programs into a single agency under the U.S. State Department.

The purpose of the Foreign Assistance Act was clear. It stated:

“a principal objective of the foreign policy of the United States is the encouragement and sustained support of the people of developing countries in their efforts to acquire the knowledge and resources essential to development and to build the economic, political, and social institutions which will improve the quality of their lives” and “that development concerns be fully reflected in United States foreign policy and that United States development resources be effectively and efficiently utilized.”

In 1998, USAID split off from the State Department, becoming its own stand-alone agency. This eventually led to USAID being used as a tool of the State Department and the CIA for domestic political agendas and foreign covert operations intended to escape transparency and accountability. Thus, USAID’s original mission became corrupted.

On Inauguration Day, President Trump issued Executive Order 14158 to establish and implement the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Led by Elon Musk, DOGE hit the ground running. It immediately began reviewing and terminating hundreds of wasteful contracts, leases, and grants across several government agencies.

While DOGE has not yet established a system to report running cost savings by agency, it has set up a “DOGE Clock” to provide live tracking of the cost savings it is achieving in aggregate. As of February 17, the DOGE Clock was reporting $49 billion in aggregate cost savings. Not bad for only 28 days of cost-cutting work.

The one agency that quickly caught the attention of the DOGE team for its shocking level of waste, fraud, and abuse was USAID. During a live X Spaces discussion on February 3, Musk made the following comments about the DOGE team’s review of USAID:

"As we dug into USAID, it became apparent that what we have here is not an apple with a worm in it, but we have actually just a ball of worms. If you have an apple with a worm in it, you can take the worm out. If you have a whole ball of worms, it's hopeless. USAID is a ball of worms. There is no apple. And when there is no apple you just need to get rid of the whole thing."

On the previous day, February 2, Musk posted several critical comments about USAID on X:

“USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America” and “USAID is/was a radical-left political psy op.”

Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) authored an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal on February 9 describing USAID as a “rogue agency” that has a history of stonewalling congressional requests for information about its activities. Excerpts from Senator Ernst’s piece:

“After keeping its spending records hidden from Congress and taxpayers, USAID employees are now protesting the review of the agency’s records by President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. It’s no surprise that Washington insiders are more upset at DOGE for trying to stop wasteful spending than at USAID for misusing tax dollars. The question we should be asking isn’t why USAID’s grants are being scrutinized, but why it took so long.”

Criticisms of USAID by Musk and Senator Ernst are backed up with detailed lists of waste, fraud, and abuse uncovered by the DOGE team and congressional committees.

On January 31, DOGE reported on X that it had terminated seven DEI-related USAID contracts with a total contract value of $375.1 million. The Trump White House issued a fact sheet on February 3 entitled “At USAID, Waste and Abuse Runs Deep” and the House Foreign Affairs Committee followed with a press release on February 4 that listed numerous egregious examples of wasteful USAID spending, such as millions of dollars spent promoting DEI and LGBT activism in multiple countries around the world, and hundreds of millions of dollars paid to support poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan that benefitted the Taliban regime.

USAID development programs are no longer wanted by recipient countries in some cases. On February 2, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, posted to following on X:

“Most governments don’t want USAID funds flowing into their countries because they understand where much of that money actually ends up.

While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.

At best, maybe 10% of the money reaches real projects that help people in need (there are such cases), but the rest is used to fuel dissent, finance protests, and undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda.

Cutting this so-called aid isn’t just beneficial for the United States; it’s also a big win for the rest of the world.”

DOGE’s revelations about USAID’s wasteful and fraudulent spending on foreign aid activities is only part of the story. Even more disturbing are its activities beyond foreign aid into radical leftwing cultural and political activism. According to former State Department official Mike Benz, this has been exacerbated in recent years with USAID’s embrace of disinformation campaigns and censorship efforts in collaboration with the State Department and the CIA.

Mr. Benz, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), provided a detailed report of USAID’s censorship operation from USAID’s own internal documents on March 14, 2024. The most shocking revelation from Benz’s investigation is that USAID’s censorship program was implemented domestically against Americans. Excerpts from the report:

“USAID — the foreign-facing wing of the federal government that purports to use taxpayer dollars for ‘strengthening resilient democratic societies’ and exporting American democratic ideals abroad — has been quietly pushing private sector technology companies, media organizations, education ministries, national governments and funding bodies to adopt social media censorship practices, according to newly revealed internal documents.

USAID’s 97-page proprietary ‘Disinformation Primer,’ labeled ‘for internal use only’ was obtained by America First Legal (AFL), a public interest law firm conducting a number of major investigations and lawsuits into the censorship industry and its government partner agencies, after a lengthy process in which the US Department of State failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and was compelled to turn over government documents after AFL succeeded in a formal lawsuit. 

The USAID Disinformation Primer reveals a detailed compilation of the agency’s advocacy for some of the most economically damaging censorship strategies — many of which had been deployed in America to throttle populists in the 2020 elections and afterwards — and endorses recommendations from some of the most controversial censorship industry institutions under scrutiny by the US Congress.

USAID’s ‘“Disinformation Primer’” outlining its censorship promotion strategies is dated February 2021, the first month after the Biden administration took office after the 2020 election. It proposes censorship action items for virtually every governmental, non-governmental and private sector commercial actor across society …”

Benz has explained in recent interviews with Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan that the CIA cannot lawfully engage in covert operations without a presidential finding; there is no such requirement for USAID. Thus, Benz claims that the CIA and the State Department use USAID to carry out covert operations that they want hidden from the president and Congress.

Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger corroborates Benz’s comments in his February 3 Substack piece, “USAID’s History Of Regime Change, Destabilization, And Censorship Justifies Its Closure By Trump” and expands further on USAID’s funding of global censorship. Shellenberger writes:

“As part of US government efforts to overthrow governments abroad, or simply influence what they do, USAID has in recent years been funding censorship advocacy worldwide through its “Countering Disinformation” program, which is part of its Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening (CEPPS).

After DOGE exposed USAID’s extensive waste, fraud, and abuse over many years, the Trump administration shut down USAID’s head office in Washington, DC on February 7 and is reportedly planning to fire over 10,000 USAID staff and retain only 294. Both Trump and Musk favor abolishing USAID as an agency and moving any legitimate foreign aid functions into the State Department. Whether Trump has the legal authority to abolish USAID by executive order is legally questionable, but, at a minimum, Trump and Musk are right to dramatically downsize USAID, restore its transparency and accountability under the State Department, and return it to the basics of its original mission as envisioned by John F. Kennedy in 1961.