USAID: A Slush Fund Masquerading as Foreign Aid

How a relatively unknown federal agency came to be the symbol of DC Corruption

USAID, or the US Agency for International Development, has been under the national spotlight as Elon and his team of tech savants tear their way through the convoluted federal agency. By now, everyone has seen the headlines and there's the beginning of an understanding that the agency is a centralized hub for massive levels of graft and corruption.

USAID, which now appears to be officially closed, wove its operations through a myriad of NGOs or non-governmental institutions—a huge misnomer as these sub-organizations only exist because they are being openly funded by the government. The quick and dirty take is that USAID was effectively a CIA cutout whose focused purpose was regime change on behalf of the State Department.

John Gilligan, USAID’s administrator in the late seventies, famously stated that the agency served as a sort of graduate school for CIA agents. “At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people,” he said. “It was pretty well known in the agency who they were and what they were up to.... The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”

The agency’s promotion of its image (really a side-hustle) as an international aid and assistance agency is where much of the graft came into play.

We’ve already written a number of times how our State Department and USAID drove the huge numbers of illegal crossings using vast sums of taxpayer money, so we won’t belabor that point here. But as you read on, bear in mind that the State Department and USAID gave the UN’s International Organization of Migration $4.5 billion in the last two years alone, by far the most on record.

Although USAID liked to promote itself using the warm and fuzzy USAID acronym, intentionally implying their primary job was humanitarian aid, that was not the agency's primary focus. Far from it. Established in 1961, USAID’s original mission was to fight the spread of Soviet-style Communism but this changed decades ago with the fall of the Soviet Union.

USAID shifted their unofficial mission to regime change, providing “assistance to strategically important countries and countries in conflict”. As many are already aware, USAID has played a role in Ukrainian politics for decades and operated behind the scenes during both of Ukraine’s coups.

With an “official” budget of roughly $50 billion, the agency’s top expenditure FYE 2023 was for the ill-defined category of “Governance” with annual expenditures approaching $20 billion.

But the true annual expenditures of USAID are actually quite difficult to fully decipher. This fact was highlighted by the Congressional Research Service which noted that “Some USAID appropriations accounts are programmed collaboratively with the Department of State, making any calculation of USAID’s current budget imprecise.”

Which is precisely the way USAID intended it to be. When we went looking to find just how much of the “Aid to Ukraine” had made its way to USAID we were somewhat surprised to realize this answer wasn’t immediately apparent.

We expected to easily locate these numbers in the Inspector General’s Operation Atlantic Resolve Reports that cover the US’s funding of Ukraine and our financial role in the proxy war with Russia. Instead, we found that the USAID budget had been intentionally blended with that of the State Department, making determination of the specific USAID funding impossible.

We assumed breakouts must be included somewhere in the report but were ultimately unable to locate them. Only when we turned to the reports provided to Congress by the Inspector General overseeing the Ukraine spending were we able to locate the numbers.

What we found surprised us. Of the $183 billion in official Ukraine Aid through September 2024, nearly $40 billion was being sent to USAID. Allocations are as follows:

• Defense Department = $125 Billion

• USAID = $39.8 Billion

• State Department = $11 Billion

• Other Agencies = $7 Billion

Moreover, of the $39.8 billion, a full $34 billion was going to an ill-defined General Economic Support Fund and specific expenditures remain unknown. This fund represented the third largest category of Ukraine spending behind direct weapons delivery from the Department of Defense and replenishment of our military inventory.

If you find yourselves wondering how much fraud resides in that massive black box account you’re not alone. Note as well that this enormous “Aid to Ukraine” number was casually left out of the official tallies of USAID’s annual budget.

Another extremely problematic area lies in USAID’s decades-long funding of Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth, the company whose gain-of-function work at the Wuhan Lab in China led to the creation of the Covid-19 Virus. The Intercept provided a total of $53.7 million in funding from USAID to EcoHealth from 2004-2022, making it the single largest funder of EcoHealth—exceeding funds from the Department of Defense and even the NIH.

The White Coat Waste Project unearthed a grant from USAID to EcoHealth that ran from 2014 through 2019 totaling $38 million (likely included in the above figure from the Intercept). Making matters even worse, USAID provided EcoHealth with an additional $13.2 million in funding AFTER the Covid pandemic had started and AFTER President Trump had ordered that EcoHealth be defunded.

But the problems don’t stop there. USAID also funded the original gain-of-function work of Ralph Baric and Shi Zheng-li (Director of the Wuhan Lab) that served as the prelude to the gain-of-function work at the Wuhan Lab.

Baric’s and Shi’s gain-of-function work was highlighted in a 2015 research paper that they co-wrote. The 2015 paper stated that Baric and Shi had been creating new and potentially dangerous viruses capable of jumping to humans. It was the re-discovery of this paper that originally linked gain-of-research funding to Anthony Fauci, setting his February 1, 2020 secret teleconference and establishment of the fake Natural Origin narrative in motion.

The 2015 paper by Baric and Shi acknowledged that “Research in this manuscript was supported by grants from the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Disease [NIAID]” which was a major problem for Fauci.

Critically, although it was overlooked by most at the time, additional funding was provided from the U.S. Department of Defense through a combined USAID-EPT-PREDICT grant that was made to Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance, who in turn gave the money to Shi’s lab.

This 2015 research paper by Baric and Shi proved that Fauci, the NIH and USAID had not only funded gain-of-research at the Wuhan Lab, they had continued to provide funding for Baric’s and Shi’s gain-of-function experiments AFTER the 2014 gain-of-function moratorium was put into place.

USAID’s funding of the 2015 gain-of-function research is particularly notable because USAID Administrator Samantha Power testified before Congress on April 26, 2023 and denied that USAID had ever funded gain-of-function research—similar to the claims that Fauci had made about NIH funding to Congress. Power was confronted about this by Rand Paul on April 20, 2024:

Bear in mind that at the time that Power was being confronted by Rand Paul, USAID was still actively funding EcoHealth—a matter which Power again denied.

USAID, particularly under Power, had a notorious reputation for acting as a wholly independent agency that was somehow not beholden to Congress. Indeed, in 2022, nine senators signed a letter to Power, demanding the USAID terminate its funding to EcoHealth immediately. Their request was ignored.

In May 2024, Senator Joni Ernst wrote another letter to Power, asking for confirmation that all EcoHealth funding from USAID had been finally terminated:

Unfortunately, the USAID has continued funding EHA with taxpayer dollars despite the overwhelming evidence of EHA’s waste, abuse and noncompliance. Federal records show that your agency and others have awarded $60 million to EHA just since March 2020.

It remains unclear if Ernst received a definitive answer to her questions, but we know that she recently stated that “USAID did everything possible to stop me from finding out where tax dollars were going.” Ernst remains a vocal critic of USAID and has called for an audit of the agency.

For his part, Daszak appeared to be very protective of the funding received from USAID, writing in 2020 that “It’s extremely important that we don’t have these sequences as part of our PREDICT release to GenBank at this point. As you may have heard, these were part of a grant just terminated by NIH. Having them as part of PREDICT will bring very unwelcome attention to UC Davis, PREDICT and USAID.”

USAID has funded a variety of ridiculous activities that range from a $2.5 million grant to promote DEI in Serbia, to a $47,000 grant for a transgender opera in Columbia—but they’ve also funded any number of organizations that engaged in active censorship. USAID even provided a new round of $20 million in funding to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project who had produced several crucial hit pieces on Rudy Giuliani in the leadup to Trump’s impeachment.

The original purpose of USAID had been to push back against Communism, but with the fall of the Soviet Union that mission became mostly obsolete. However, as Center for Security Policy’s Michael Waller notes, “after the Soviet collapse, the Clinton administration turned USAID into a cash machine for its friends.” They turned it into a cash machine for themselves too. As far as we can tell, this statement is entirely true—and continues to this day.

Which, of course, helps to explain the outsized and totally insane responses that we are seeing in real time from Democrats as they watch their personal tax-payer funded piggy bank being taken away.

Elon has publicly stated that USAID was made DOGE’s first target because “they checked to see which federal organizations were violating the @POTUS executive orders the most. Turned out to be USAID, so that became our focus.”

Our guess is there was a bit more behind it than that. USAID was the perfect place to start: a front for CIA-driven regime change, a primary funder of the myriad of NGOs and a source of cushy revenue for Democrat officials everywhere.

During a recent interview, our new Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the massive problems he was encountering at the agency. Rubio said that USAID was rife with “rank insubordination” and that “we had no choice but to take dramatic steps to bring this thing under control."

"They have basically evolved into an agency that believes that they're not even a U.S. government agency...they're completely unresponsive. They just don't consider that they work for the US. 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."

“The goal was to reform it. But now we have rank insubordination. Their basic attitude is we don't work for anyone. We work for ourselves. No agency of the government can tell us what to do."

USAID represents less than 1% of the federal budget. But it’s the canary in the proverbial coal mine. People are seeing the financial waste everywhere they look. And they are starting to look.

As we stated on X, the biggest story never told is unfolding in real time. The Washington Elite stole trillions of taxpayer dollars. In the process our government has become twisted into a vehicle of bureaucratic self-enrichment at taxpayer expense. The decay spread throughout our government—impacting our social, domestic and foreign policy. No matter what happens, there's no going back now.

Editors Note: As we were finishing this article a notice was posted on USAID’s previously shuttered website. USAID is no more:

On Friday, February 7, 2025, at 11:59 pm (EST) all USAID direct hire personnel will be placed on administrative leave globally, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs. Essential personnel expected to continue working will be informed by Agency leadership by Thursday, February 6, at 3:00pm (EST).

For USAID personnel currently posted outside the United States, the Agency, in coordination with missions and the Department of State, is currently preparing a plan, in accordance with all applicable requirements and laws, under which the Agency would arrange and pay for return travel to the United States within 30 days and provide for the termination of PSC and ISC contracts that are not determined to be essential. The Agency will consider case-by-case exceptions and return travel extensions based on personal or family hardship, mobility or safety concerns, or other reasons. For example, the Agency will consider exceptions based on the timing of dependents’ school term, personal or familial medical needs, pregnancy, and other reasons. Further guidance on how to request an exception will be forthcoming.

Thank you for your service.