Democrats on Capitol Hill suffered a meltdown Monday after President Donald Trump moved to rein in the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
The agency, which had been unilaterally established under an executive order by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and was ostensibly created to offer foreign financial assistance promoting sustainable development. In the nearly 65 years since USAID was created, however, the global welfare agency succumbed to the worst impulses of the administrative state, with bureaucrats exploiting their authority over tax dollars to drive international censorship and regime change.
“It’s been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out,” Trump told reporters Sunday.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., complained at a press conference of congressional Democrats that USAID could no longer be leveraged to engage in overseas nation-building.
“I am exceptionally upset about USAID,” she said, characterizing the agency as America’s vehicle of “soft power.”
In an interview with Fox News, however, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the agency had become filled with “rank insubordination.”
“They just think they’re a global entity and that their master is the globe and not the United States. And that’s not sustainable,” Rubio said.
Rubio told reporters on his first foreign trip to Latin America he is now the acting director of USAID after employees and congressional Democrats were locked out of the headquarters this week.
“There are a lot of functions of USAID that are going to continue, that are going to be part of American foreign policy, but it has to be aligned with American foreign policy,” Rubio said in El Salvador.
A review of its recent priorities reveal the agency had more to do with far-left social engineering overseas than responsible diplomacy. Here’s a look at what USAID has been funding with American tax dollars:
DEI Initiatives Abroad
Last week, the Daily Mail reported on a myriad of programs supported by USAID which will now lose funding after Trump’s executive orders “sealed the spigot of U.S. taxpayer dollars flowing to DEI projects abroad.” Items include $70,000 for a “DEI musical” in Ireland, $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia, $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru, and $1.5 million for an LGBT jobs program in Serbia.
The Daily Caller also reported in September USAID delivered a $2 million grant to Guatemalan activists “to help organizations led by transexuals perform sex changes in the country.” The program was scheduled to begin in April and run until 2027.
Electric Vehicles In Vietnam
According to the Daily Mail last week, USAID “awarded $2.5 million for electric vehicles for Vietnam” under President Biden.
“Since the huge investment of U.S. taxpayer dollars there has been at least one battery station built, avoiding a total of 260 gallons of gas, according to the USAID website,” the Daily Mail reported. “An average semi-truck holds roughly, by comparison, holds about 130 gallons of gas.”
Egyptian Infrastructure
While congressional Democrats kept the Trump White House distracted on the eve of the coronavirus outbreak with their first impeachment in December 2019, USAID delivered a $6 million grant to promote infrastructure in northern Egypt.
“The amendment to the North Sinai bilateral assistance agreement supports the Egyptian government’s efforts to spur inclusive economic development in the governorate,” reads an archived press release. “Through this agreement, USAID will build on previous investments in North Sinai including the provision of potable water to 300,000 residents and wastewater services to 100,000 residents. New activities under this amendment will provide access to transportation for rural communities and economic livelihood programming for families.”
Group Allegedly Linked To Terrorism
In February last year, the Washington Examiner reported that President Biden approved additional funding to a group under investigation by a government watchdog for alleged links to terrorists.
“The U.S. Agency for International Development‘s inspector general began investigating last February a $110,000 USAID grant issued in 2021 to Helping Hand for Relief and Development, a Michigan-based charity that lawmakers have warned shares ties to terrorists, including Pakistan’s Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation,” the story read. “Still, in October 2023, USAID dished out another $78,000 to that same charity for a program running until September, according to federal spending records.”
Meals For Terrorists
In November, the Washington Times reported that, “American taxpayers paid for hundreds of thousands of meals that went to al Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria.”
“Mahmoud Al Hafyan ran the Syrian division of the nongovernmental organization and skimmed as much as $10 million worth of meals paid for by the U.S. Agency for International Development,” the Times reported. “The meals were supposed to go to Syrian refugees upended by that country’s civil war, but Mr. Al Hafyan allowed members of the Al-Nusrah Front, the al Qaeda-linked terrorist organization, to come collect the meals.”
EcoHealth Alliance
The Washington Examiner reported three years ago that USAID gave nearly $5 million to the scandal-ridden group that was funding research at a Chinese lab suspected as the origin of Covid-19.
“The U.S. Agency for International Development gave EcoHealth Alliance a $4.67 million grant in late 2021, despite serious unanswered questions about EcoHealth’s funding of bat virus research at the Chinese lab,” the Examiner reported. “EcoHealth has been granted millions of dollars by the National Institutes of Health but ran into compliance problems prior to the unrelated award from USAID.”
Personalized Contraception
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin were awarded with a grant from USAID to engineer personalized contraception in 2022. According to an industry trade publication, scientists were given taxpayer money to “create custom additive manufactured birth control devices.”
“Using an in-house-developed 3D printing technology, a team at PharmE3D are honing a means of producing personalized alternatives to commercial intrauterine devices (IUDs), which are effective but sometimes painful female contraceptives,” reported the 3D Printing Industry in 2022.
Afghan Opium
According to Breitbart in 2018, USAID spent $330 million to support “alternative development projects (ADP)” that were intended to deter the production of opium between 2005 and 2008. The inspector general for Afghanistan Reconstruction, however, John Sopko, said the “development programs inadvertently supported poppy production” in part by “the rehabilitation and development or irrigation systems.”
Fake HIV Prevention Workshop To Engineer Regime Change
Mike Benz, a former State Department official who is now executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online, posted the screenshot of a 2014 story from the Washington Post on X highlighting how USAID “literally set up fake AIDS prevention workshops to topple foreign governments.” According to the Post, undercover Central and South Americans hired by the U.S. government opened an HIV prevention group to recruit potential rebels for an insurrection in Cuba.
Global Censorship
In another post to X last weekend, Benz asked why USAID is funding a censorship project in London. The Centre for Information Resilience characterizes itself as “an independent organisation dedicated to exposing human rights violations and threats to democracy,” but also employed former censorship czar in the Biden administration, Nina Jankowicz, between 2022 and 2024 to “malign foreign disinformation.”
According to the group’s website, the Centre for Information Resilience has received funding from USAID and the U.S. State Department.
British Broadcast Media
According to the funding page for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), American taxpayers made up roughly a fifth of the network’s top 10 donor receipts in 2023 and 2024 through USAID.
