According to the Congressional Research Service ( CRS ), USAID managed over$ 40 billion in combined appropriations. Taken together with other government agencies like Defense and State, the U. S. president’s full foreign aid came to just over$ 71 billion.
Advertisement
USAID has been spying for the CIA since its founding in 1961, in addition to contraception for Palestinians in Gaza and an Gay “empowerment system” in Serbia. No outside, of training, but USAID is the most despised aid organization in the world because the CIA has rarely used the organization to gather intelligence and even to destroy regimes, which the CIA  , doesn’t very much like.
The largest one purchase made by USAID in its history was the Global Health Supply Chain Program. A program that USAID promised would never need to fund something like it again received more than$ 9 billion in funding.
Large opportunity. Only 7 % of packages are delivered on time. An analysis by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, a British volunteer, and Devex, a magazine covering the foreign aid market, identified stunning stupidity, fraud, and corruption. Chemonics, the main contractor, was rewarded with a$ 2 billion contract despite the gigantic waste of money.
A previous Chemonics individual claimed to the writers,” We had purchasing experts who were just making it up.” ” We had garbage data, and then there were people who didn’t know how the goods for humanitarian aid operated.”
Additionally, according to the research, 39 additional people have been detained and 39 have been charged with fraud connected to the job. In response to questions by Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks ( R–Iowa ) about the report, USAID official Atul Gawande insisted in February 2024 that the agency was” not aware of any overbilling or corruption”. Nine months later, Chemonics paid the U. S. Department of Justice a$ 3.1 million arrangement for forgery by one of the company’s suppliers. Chemonics continues to deny any wrong.
USAID has just begun awarding contracts for an even larger$ 17 billion health supply chain initiative known as NextGen. The company said its purpose was to “help nations become self-reliant, thus ending the need for international support”. If at first you don’t thrive…
Advertisement
The most significant USAID expenditure in 2023, the last year that numbers are available, was$ 18 billion in “economic development”. More than$ 14 billion was invested to keep the Ukrainian economy afloat. We’re however awaiting a record detailing that agency’s scams and fraud.
Another boondoggle funded by USAID was the establishment of rose farms in Afghanistan. Of course, USAID didn’t need to finance rose fields. However, the$ 1.6 billion initiative the agency launched to eradicate flowers as a cash crop for Afghan producers failed badly.
USAID tried to change this state of affairs, spending$ 1.46 billion on “alternative growth programs” from 2002 to 2017. The objective was to encourage farmers to shift away from heroin by providing fertilizers, gear, and other support for non-opium gardening. But some of that money “inadvertently supported poppy production”, the U. S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction ( SIGAR ) reported in 2018.
 , In other words, Afghan producers were happy to take USAID’s support while continuing to grow morphine. For instance, opium production increased by 119 percentage in the Kandahar Food Zone between 2013 and 2015, after USAID helped develop the water systems it, according to SIGAR. Nevertheless, the size of the opium fields grew from nearly nonexistent in 2001—the Taliban had tried to maintain a drug restrictions on the day of the U. S. invasion—to 350, 000 acres ( an region somewhat bigger than Rhode Island ) in 2017.
Advertisement
Good job, well done USAID.
“SIGAR noted that USAID spent$ 335 million on a power plant that was rarely turned on,$ 175 million on roads that floods washed away within a month, and$ 7.7 million on an industrial park that had no power”, among other boondoggles. When asked why the agency didn’t pay more attention to the way the money was spent, USAID said that “micromanaging” these projects would be” counterproductive” to the goal of “increasing Afghan self-reliance”.
They certainly had a good understanding of bribes from American taxpayers.
