Millions of Americans must feel like their heads were just unplugged from the Matrix this past weekend. Historians are going to be talking about the unfolding USAID scandal for hundreds of years and marveling at the sheer scope of the corruption that the Trump administration just exposed.
Trillions of dollars have been ripped off from the American taxpayers with no oversight and no one to put the brakes on the program.
Elon Musk, heading up the DOGE project for President Trump, has turned over a rock and exposed the poisonous, beating black heart of the “Uni-Party” that has been destroying America from within for decades.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) doles out taxpayer money to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are supposed to be working toward “international development.” Whatever that is.
President Trump had been considering the option of folding USAID into the State Department to get a better handle on its spending. However, when members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team try to get into the USAID building to examine the books, directors and employees physically blocked them from accessing their computer systems.
They were willing to risk going to jail rather than let anyone audit their books. They may end up going to jail anyway, based on everything that DOGE has discovered.
“USAID is a criminal organization,” tweeted Musk. “Time for it to die.”
USAID is a CIA front. Most people understand that and it’s been public knowledge for some time. The agency gives money to NGOs and those NGOs go to work in foreign countries, staging coups on behalf of the CIA to advance “American foreign policy interests.”
What Musk has now uncovered is the fact that tons of high-profile American political figures and government employees have been using USAID as a piggy bank to enrich themselves and their family members.
Sadly, this includes some current members of the Trump administration. Prepare to feel extra cynical after reading this.
Want to become fabulously wealthy in Washington, DC? Just start an NGO.
Here’s just one example (we’ll get to a bunch more examples in a moment):
Bill Kristol.
Remember Bill? He was the founder of the Never-Trump movement and former editor of National Review. He’s one of those True Conservatives of Conservatism™ who has always recoiled in horror from Donald Trump’s policies.
It turns out that Bill Kristol is the President of an NGO called “Defending Democracy.” That NGO has been the recipient of $46 million in taxpayer money, which has been used to smear Donald Trump for the past decade.
An NGO called the National Democratic Institute has also raked in gobs of taxpayer cash. Its directors include familiar names like Barbara Mikulski, Tom Daschle, and Stacey Abrams.
The International Republican Institute appears to be its GOP counterpart. Its directors include a large number of current and former Republican Senators. You’ll recognize most of their names:
Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham, Joni Ernst, Dan Sullivan, Tom Cotton, Kelly Ayotte, and Mark Kirk. If you feel like throwing up on your shoes right now, you should also know that current Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also served as the Director of this particular NGO.
Then, there’s the National Endowment for Democracy. The current Vice Chair of this NGO is the incompetent Mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass. Mel Martinez, the former Republican US Senator from Florida, is a director for this NGO. Another Director is Elise Stefanik, who Donald Trump chose to be the US Ambassador to the United Nations.
Now that USAID’s books have been made public, it’s stunning to see how much fraud, waste, and abuse is directly connected to current and former members of the US Congress. The National Endowment for Democracy has raked in $1.6 billion in grants from USAID. The Institute for International Education has received $640 million from the taxpayers. The Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening has taken $528 million.
Members of Congress and their relatives are dug in like ticks at these NGOs. USAID gave loan guarantees to Burisma in Ukraine for “every phase of the development of oil and gas” while Joe Biden was Obama’s vice president and Hunter Biden was on Burisma’s board. Congress approved the loan guarantees for Burisma in 2014, even though Burisma was an established and wealthy foreign oil and gas company.
USAID is now shut down and Musk’s DOGE auditors have only begun to scratch the surface of this corruption.
Here’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Tucker Carlson describing just one of the ways that USAID has abused the American taxpayers and people around the world:
RFK Jr. revealed that USAID was actually a CIA front, secretly funneling $5 billion in 2014 to ignite riots in Ukraine.
According to him, these CIA-backed riots triggered a coup d'état that toppled Ukraine's neutral, democratically elected government.
Just one month before the… pic.twitter.com/alcyCYdwaf
— Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra) February 2, 2025