Dr. Mark Moyar, a political appointee at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) during Donald Trump’s first term, said on Washington Watch Monday that the agency has become a bloated operation ripe with mismanagement and abuse.
USAID was established in 1961 for the purpose of providing aid overseas to promote social and economic development in foreign countries. But the agency, with a budget of more than $50 billion last year, has been hijacked by left-wing social causes sending millions to fund groups that advance the transgender lifestyle, abortion and more.
“USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die,” Elon Musk, head of the new Department of Government Efficiency, said on Sunday. At present the USAID.gov website is unresponsive.
Here’s how some of the taxpayer money has been spent:
USAID paid $1.5 million to “Group Come Out,” a pro-LGBT organization in Serbia that works to advance opportunities in workplaces and business communities, The Daily Mail reported.
The Wits Health Consortium, a South African research facility that studies the transmission of HIV among sex workers and transgenders, has received $30 million since 2018, according to federal data obtained by The Daily Mail.
USAID has helped fund the establishment of the first transgender health care clinic in Vietnam.
It has paid to increase “transgender representation” in the opera in Colombia, to publish transgender comic books in Peru and to increase efforts to expand atheism in Nepal, The Daily Mail reports.
It’s in the news now because it’s become a target of government downsizing for Trump’s second term, but none of this is news to Moyar, who sought to expose USAID with his book “Masters of Corruption.” But the empire struck back, he explains.
“There were people in the agency, including me, who thought there was a lot of waste, fraud and abuse, and when we tried to report that, we became targets. The bureaucracy has sought to protect itself and put its own interests first,” Moyar told show host Tony Perkins.
Moyar reported his beliefs to USAID officials in 2018. The pushback was swift, beginning with a Special Operations general falsely claiming Moyar had divulged classified information which resulted in his termination, the book states.
USAID has entered resistance mode as the Trump administration pushes ahead, Moyar said. It has put 60 senior staff on paid leave and over the weekend forced out its head of security who tried to keep senior officials from obtaining records, according to Moyar.
A new home for USAID
The administration aims to roll USAID into the State Department. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday told a gaggle of reporters that he is currently “the acting director of USAID.”
USAID beats to its own drum – and that’s a problem, Rubio said.
"My frustration with USAID goes back to my time in Congress. It's a completely unresponsive agency. It’s supposed to respond to policy directives of the State Department, and it refuses to do so.”
USAID operates separately from any special foreign aid package that might be designated by Congress.
Moving ahead, all foreign assistance will align with administration goals. Many current USAID projects do not.
"Every dollar we spend will be aligned with the national interest of the United States. USAID has a history of ignoring that and deciding that they're a global charity. These are not donor dollars – these are taxpayer dollars,” Rubio said.
The original plan after USAID was signed into law by President John F. Kennedy was for it to be phased out over time. It was in fact phased out in parts of Europe.
“But it’s become perpetual in much of the world, and a lot of it is simply unnecessary or wasteful,” Moyar said.
In spite of its many problems and the world’s changing landscape, USAID can be helpful. Some countries remain underdeveloped and poorly governed. That increases need, Moyar said.
“If there are humanitarian disasters overseas and other countries can't deal with it, those are things sometimes we might want to contribute to,” Moyar said. “If we want better trade deals or we want [countries] to stop illegal immigration, sometimes we may want to offer them various forms of foreign aid as an incentive.”
Masters of deception
It’s hard to separate USAID’s legitimate assistance from its waste and corruption because its leaders are “masters at hiding the money,” Moyar said.
Recently, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said he can’t find $100 billion in promised money allocated by departing President Joe Biden.
Moyar estimates USAID could easily get by without 50% of its net worth.
“One of the shocking things I found there was that three years into the [first] Trump administration, we were still finding out about programs that had been hidden by career staff. It’s very hard to get a handle on this,” he said.
