In recent days, the U.S. Agency for International Development ( USAID ) intentionally stifled President Donald Trump’s attempts to rid the federal government of bureaucratic rot. The taxpayer-funded USAID has consistently resisted congressional oversight of its spending patterns, even before it started slow-walking and perhaps physically preventing Trump’s Department of Government Performance from evaluating its need for the federal government.
In a conversation with DOGE Head Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy and Republican Sen. Joni Ernst from an X Spaces conference on Sunday, the Republican revealed that USAID had issued” all kinds of risks” to the Republican and her company for her “exercise my monitoring capacity in Congress.”
In November 2022, Ernst first pressed USAID about how it used its tax dollars to pay the facilities and administrative costs outlined in the Negotiated Indirect Cost Rate Agreements ( NICRAs ) in November.
Due to the Constitution’s power over all national tax investing, Congress has the power of the handbag. USAID, despite being funded by Congres, refused to comply with Ernst’s needs, she said.
When USAID suddenly responded in February 2023, the organization claimed that it did not “have a program to track or record on this information, as it is impossible to compare indirect expenses between for-profit and philanthropic organizations at the price level.”
One week after, Ernst’s personnel debunked this state by sending USAID a website” to a formally reported NICRA repository”. USAID once more refused to comply with Ernst’s requires despite having confirmed the existence of a collection.
This day, the organization claimed that it was difficult to release NICRA information because it would contravene some national legislation, including the Economic Espionage Act, the Protection of Trade Secrets Act, and the Disclosure of Confidential Information Act.
A few days after, USAID landed on its last attempt to jack:” The Agency protects the private business knowledge of its implementing associates, including NICRAs”.
The organization informed Ernst’s business via email that it has long-standing executive branch practice, under the leadership of presidents of both parties, to prevent the disclosure of confidential business information outside the purview of a committee of jurisdiction.
In April 2023, Ernst and Republican Rep. Michael McCaul launched a formal legislative investigation into USAID investing. They asked USAID to pay$ 1.3 billion in federal taxes money again more since it started funding NICRAs in 2021. The pair put forth the need for Congress to have supervision and make sure” that such funds are not unduely wasted” according to the couple.
We are aware that some direct costs are essential when providing humanitarian aid, but we have serious concerns about the lack of supervision regarding the review and publication of your company’s NICRAs with USAID’s partners. We worry that due to a shortage of management and care, NICRAs have grown in size.
Decades later, in November 2023, Ernst demanded that USAID Administrator Samantha Powers provide important details regarding how much money her agency spent, including sending billions of dollars from American taxpayers to support animal jobs and small companies in Ukraine, but Ernst suddenly, as Ernst noted on Sunday, was ignored.
Finally, Ernst’s team was permitted entry to “very limited information” about USAID’s direct costs.
” They were allowed to go into a place and they don’t take notes. They remained constant on the scene. They don’t remove any of the knowledge”, Ernst told Musk.
Even with “very minimal data”, Ernst said her team discovered USAID spent “anywhere from 50 to 60 percentage” on indirect expenses which may range from one’s “rent in Paris” to a “fancy dinner to entertain whomever”.
USAID did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.
Musk, who criticized the company’s continued obstructiveness of her repeated attempts to investigate, was frustrated by Ernst’s struggle to hold USAID guilty.
A taxpayer-funded organization should threaten a U.S. Senator who is merely attempting to determine whether taxpayer money is being spent legitimately and no defraudfully, he said.
USAID’s antics, but, didn’t start or stop with hamstringing Ernst.
Apparently, USAID Security Director John Voorhees and his lieutenant Brian McGill were on left over the weekend after bodily preventing DOGE officials from utilizing their systems. Voorhees and McGill’s wrongdoing, which Washington, D. C. District Attorney Edward Martin Jr. hinted could result in trial, came bare days after acting company administrator Jason Gray placed dozens of USAID employees on administrative leave for, as RealClear Politics reported,” conspiring to avoid Trump’s professional orders” on global funding and diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Officials have made plans to combine USAID with the State Department in recent days. As DOGE began its investigation into USAID’s advance of what Musk called “radically left causes throughout the world, including things that are anti-American,” agency personnel were instructed to stay home by Monday, and the website went dark.
In addition to squandering a majority of its taxpayer dollars on overhead, USAID has wielded Americans hard-earned money for international censorship,  , CIA-like regime change operations, and meals for terrorists.
The Federalist staff writer and host of The Federalist Radio Hour, Jordan Boyd. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University with a political science major and a journalism minor. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
