While Democrats and corporate media outlets rail against President Donald Trump’s freeze on foreign aid, they fail to mention that Washington bureaucrats have poured billions into programs abroad that yield questionable value to American taxpayers.
The New York Times, CNN, NPR and other liberal outlets have painted Trump’s day one executive order halting most foreign aid grants for 90 days as an effort to leave the world out to dry, with lawmakers such as Democratic New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and Democratic Delaware Sen. Chris Coons joining the chorus of condemnation against the loss of taxpayer funding for multi-billion dollar humanitarian programs. The new Trump administration’s goal of reducing government waste has put the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in its crosshairs, with the agency responsible for numerous boondoggles that went unchecked for years, such as large grants for Palestinian initiatives, Afghan aid programs that have a high risk of ending up in Taliban hands and indirectly funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
As bureaucrats willingly spent billions overseas to aid foreign nations, the U.S. has grappled with stagnant wages, a hollowed-out manufacturing base and crumbling infrastructure.
“Trump’s been purging and intimidating USAID employees,” Schumer said on X Jan. 31. “Now there’s a rumor he’ll dissolve USAID as an independent agency. It was created by JFK and established in law to further our national security and spread hope. This’d be illegal and against our national interests.”
Meanwhile, the NYT went on to claim that Trump’s freeze was intensifying worldwide humanitarian crises, pointing out cuts to programs like “firewood” for Ukraine and soup kitchens in Sudan. CNN noted how the freeze could have “catastrophic implications,” and could cause “thousands to die,” citing humanitarian officials.
However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly clarified in a waiver on Jan. 28 that the aid freeze did not apply to “core life-saving programs,” instead targeting “activities that involve abortions, family planning conferences … gender or DEI ideology programs, transgender surgeries, or other non-life-saving assistance.”
The U.S. gave out $68 billion of foreign aid in 2023, according to USAID and State Department statistics. Most of the aid that year went to Ukraine, taking up over $17 billion in obligations from USAID and the State Department. USAID has held a footprint in Ukraine for decades and disbursed billions to the country after its president was ousted in 2014.
“The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values,” the aid-freeze order reads. “They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”
The freeze also excludes emergency food and military assistance to Israel and Egypt, according to Reuters. Cutting wasteful government funding was one of Trump’s many campaign promises, with his flagship initiative, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked specifically with the effort.
Elon Musk, the main surrogate of DOGE, has been a frequent critic of USAID, saying the agency should be shut down. Trump appointed Rubio to acting director of the organization on top of his State Department duties, marking the effective end of the agency as a standalone entity, according to an agency announcement.
Republican Indiana Sen. Jim Banks called on Rubio Thursday to investigate the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a government agency that made foreign aid grants to Sierra Leone contingent on the nation’s adoption of pro-abortion policies. Among U.S. funding to Sierra Leone includes an award of $480 million in September 2024 over five years to upgrade the nation’s energy infrastructure. Meanwhile in America, some parts of the energy grid cannot withstand slightly colder-than-average winters, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a power grid watchdog.
“Holding assistance hostage for the sake of pressuring another nation to adopt pro-abortion legislation is shameful and wrong,” Banks wrote in a letter to the State Department. “It is unconscionable that the United States has used the MCC to threaten the Sierra Leonean’s protection for the unborn.”
USAID told Congress in August 2024 that it planned to spend $1.5 million in Latin America and the Caribbean on various LGBTQ causes, ignoring Congress’ freeze of those funds, an anonymous source previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
USAID sent 65.5 million condoms, 9.8 million injectable birth control products and 334,000 IUDs abroad in fiscal year 2022 as part of its efforts to facilitate family planning, especially in the third world. Among the recipient countries were Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Guatemala, Haiti, Pakistan and Uganda.
Moreover, USAID linked climate change and the importance of family planning, asserting in 2023 that “access to rights-based planning and girls’ education are among the most impactful climate solutions” and that “climate change-related displacement can worsen already entrenched gender inequalities,” according to the DCNF’s previous reporting.
The State Department, in partnership with USAID, spent over $81 million across the Biden, Trump and Obama administrations to promote human rights, civic engagement and peace in the Palestinian territories before the Israel-Hamas war began.
Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing more than 1,400 people and taking around 250 hostages, some of whom died in captivity.
Much aid given to Palestinian causes ends up in the hands of Hamas, such as a $75 million payment to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in October 2024. It is “likely” that UNRWA staff participated in the Oct. 7 attack, a UN spokesperson previously told reporters. In response to the allegations, USAID was prohibited from making grants to the UNRWA under a May 2024 directive.
Women Wage Peace, an Israeli feminist organization dedicated to solving the Israel-Palestine conflict, received $500,000 from the Biden administration in September 2023 to negotiate peace between Israel and Palestine by investing in “leadership training in peace activism [with] a track for women religious leaders and a track for climate activists.”
Additionally, USAID spent roughly $102 million on “Democracy, Gender and Rights Programs” in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan up until April 2024. Agents were routinely arrested by the Taliban in their efforts, with the program being scrutinized under “the regime’s general directorate of intelligence,” according to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s (SIGAR) quarterly report.
SIGAR also found that there was an “increased risk” that at least $293 million in aid disbursed by the State Department in Afghanistan between March and November 2022 could fall into Taliban control, who could use the funds to “funnel money to terrorist groups.” The Taliban took control of the nation after President Joe Biden withdrew from Kabul, the Afghan capital city, in August 2021, which some critics called one of his administration’s largest blunders and resulted in 13 Americans being killed and billions of dollars in weapons and equipment being left behind.
USAID was also one of four government organizations involved in funding EcoHealth Alliance, which funneled money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which multiple federal have agencies have pegged as the likely origin point for COVID-19.
An inspector general’s report also reveals that USAID had a lack of standards in tracking progress on its projects, making it difficult to judge overall successes and failures.
A USAID Inspector General report in 2009 found that the agency’s reported results of missions were “frequently inaccurate” and did not fully implement “performance-based contracting” when working with partners.
For example, one USAID project claimed, without proof and relying on “partners” for the figure, that an “area of 6,848,500 hectares of Amazon forest has been secured under improved natural resource management.”
“It’s a completely unresponsive agency. It’s supposed to respond to policy directives with the State Department, and it refuses to do so,” Rubio told reporters Monday. “Every dollar we spend and every program we fund, that program will be aligned with the national interest of the United States. USAID has a history of sort of ignoring that.”
USAID did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Featured Image Credit: Staff Sgt. Danny Gonzalez
