According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), USAID managed over $40 billion in combined appropriations. Taken together with other government departments like Defense and State, the U.S. government's total foreign aid came to just over $71 billion.
In addition to condoms for Palestinians in Gaza and an LGBTQ "empowerment program" in Serbia, USAID has been spying for the CIA since its inception in 1961. Not everywhere, of course, but USAID is the most distrusted aid agency in the world because the CIA has occasionally used the agency to help gather intelligence and even overthrow regimes the CIA doesn't very much like.
The Global Health Supply Chain Program was the largest single USAID investment in its history. Over $9 billion was committed to a program that USAID promised would never have to fund something like it again.
Fat chance. Just 7% of shipments are delivered on time. An investigation by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, a British nonprofit, and Devex, a magazine covering the international aid sector, uncovered shocking ineptitude, fraud, and corruption. Chemonics, the main contractor, was rewarded with a $2 billion contract despite the gigantic waste of money.
"We had procurement analysts who were just making it up," a former Chemonics employee told the reporters. "We had trash data, and then we had people who didn't understand how humanitarian aid cargo worked."
The investigation also found 41 people had been arrested and 39 more indicted for fraud related to the project. 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 settlement for fraud by one of the company's subcontractors. Chemonics continues to deny any wrongdoing.
USAID recently started awarding contracts on an even bigger $17 billion medical supply chain project known as NextGen. The agency said its goal was to "help countries become self-reliant, thus ending the need for foreign assistance." If at first you don't succeed…
The most significant USAID expenditure in 2023, the last year that numbers are available, was $18 billion in "economic development." More than $14 billion went to keep the Ukrainian economy afloat. We're still awaiting a report detailing that program's fraud and corruption.
Another boondoggle created by USAID was funding poppy farms in Afghanistan. Of course, USAID didn't want to fund poppy farms. But the $1.6 billion program the agency set up to eradicate poppies as a cash crop for Afghan farmers failed miserably.
USAID tried to change this state of affairs, spending $1.46 billion on "alternative development programs" from 2002 to 2017. The goal was to encourage farmers to move away from opium by providing fertilizers, equipment, and other assistance for non-opium farming. 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 farmers were happy to take USAID's help while continuing to grow opium. For example, opium cultivation increased by 119 percent in the Kandahar Food Zone between 2013 and 2015, after USAID helped expand the irrigation systems there, according to SIGAR. Overall, the size of the opium fields grew from almost nil in 2001—the Taliban had tried to enforce a drug ban on the eve of the U.S. invasion—to 350,000 hectares (an area slightly bigger than Rhode Island) in 2017.
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 sure learned well how to fleece the American taxpayer.
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