5 of the Worst USAID Scandals in History
The agency's low points, from working with child sex abusers to enabling drug trafficking
To build the case for taking down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the White House has highlighted some of the most egregious-sounding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs the U.S. has funded abroad, such as an LGBT empowerment program in Serbia. It has also pointed to USAID's controversial medical research in Wuhan.
It hasn't always gotten its facts right, as when it claimed that a $100 million grant to a global medical charity was "condoms for Gaza." Some conservative commentators have even claimed that USAID staff subscriptions to Politico were proof of a conspiracy to manipulate the media, a theory repeated by President Donald Trump himself.
Pundits often mock the way foreign aid is used as a punching bag; they often note that though such aid makes up less than 1 percent of the overall federal budget, polls consistently show that Americans believe it's around 25 percent. But maybe the people in those polls aren't as confused as that makes them sound. A 2019 study by the center-left Brookings Institution made a good case that when Americans talk about wasteful "foreign aid," they also mean the costs of military adventures abroad, which take up a much bigger part of the budget.
Foreign aid often is connected to wars overseas. The top five recipients of U.S. aid (including both USAID and non-USAID programs) from 1945 through 2023 were Israel, Egypt, the former South Vietnam, Afghanistan, and South Korea.
The largest portion of USAID spending in FY 2023, the most recent year for which complete data are available, was $18 billion in "economic development"—which was almost entirely taken up by a $14.4 billion grant to Ukraine to keep its wartime economy afloat. Humanitarian assistance, meaning deliveries of food and other essentials, took up $9.4 billion, while $7.2 billion was allocated to health care. Another $3.7 billion went to administrative costs.
The most politicized categories—"Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance," "Education and Social Services," and "Peace and Security"—made up $3.3 billion in USAID spending that year. These are the types of programs that try to identify "change makers" in other countries, steer U.S.-style political reforms abroad, and export American cultural ideals.
And of course, a program can be relatively small and still be wasteful—and the damage they do can often exceed the price tag. There's a long history of USAID projects supporting bad actors, fostering anti-American resentment, building an unhealthy dependence on foreign money, and doing more harm than good. Here are some of the most infamous examples:
Funding drug production in Afghanistan ($1.46 billion)
Drugs were the elephant in the room during the failed U.S. war in Afghanistan. Because opium was such a large part of the poor and war-torn country's economy, the fighting between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Afghan republic often looked more like a turf war between rival narco gangs, with the U.S. military protecting some opium fields and bombing others.
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.
The failed war on drugs was not the only USAID boondoggle in Afghanistan. In a 2021 review of the war effort, 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. Asked by SIGAR about its poor planning, USAID declared that micromanaging these projects would be "counterproductive" to the goal of "increasing Afghan self-reliance."
Child sex abuse scandals in Africa ($29.6 million)
A USAID-funded charity in Kenya allegedly covered up rampant sex abuse of children, and USAID funded a second charity in the Central African Republic a month after a major sex abuse scandal broke, Bloomberg reported last year.
The Children of God Relief Institute, which ran an orphanage for Kenyan children affected by AIDS and similar projects, received high praise from the U.S. government. From 2013 onward, USAID gave the institute $29.3 million. In 2018, then–Vice President Mike Pence welcomed its founder, Mary Owens, onstage at a World AIDS Day event.
In 2021, a whistleblower told USAID that the charity was harboring a dark secret. USAID's inspector general soon determined that Children of God Relief Institute officials "knew or should have known of multiple incidents" of child sex abuse "but failed to take effective remedial measures to address the abuse." In some cases, the victims were forced to apologize for provoking their own abuse, The Washington Post reports.
USAID cut off the funding in 2023 and handed over the materials to Kenyan police. The charity's U.S.-based fundraising board also cut ties, and its Kenyan board forced Owens to resign.
In November 2019, CNN revealed that the charity Caritas Centrafrique in the Central African Republic was being run by Luk Delft, a convicted child molester from Belgium, and accused Delft of continuing to abuse Central African children. The following month, USAID began funding Caritas Centrafrique through a joint United Nations program.
Although Delft had been sent back to Belgium—he was later convicted of possessing child porn, but acquitted of abusing Central African children for insufficient evidence—USAID's inspector general found that Caritas Centrafique "potentially lacked the necessary structures and policies to prevent sexual exploitation and abuse in USAID-funded programming." Still, USAID officials declined to cut funding and questioned "the veracity of the evidence" against Delft, according to documents obtained by Bloomberg. An agency spokesperson told Bloomberg that the comments about "veracity" were not about "undermining the victims' stories."
A medical supply boondoggle ($9.5 billion)
USAID promised that the Global Health Supply Chain Program would almost pay for itself. The multibillion dollar investment, the largest in USAID history, was supposed to improve target countries' ability to obtain medical supplies so much that USAID would never have to fund something like it again. Spoiler alert: That didn't happen.
As in many cases, the government overpaid and underdelivered. In 2017, three years into the project, only 7 percent of shipments were completed on time in full. By the middle of 2019, USAID happily reported over 80 percent of shipments were on time—even though the average time had more than doubled. USAID ended up extending the contract with Chemonics, the main contractor, by two years and $2 billion.
An investigative report by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, a British nonprofit, and Devex, a magazine that covers the international aid sector, revealed just how bad the situation was. "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…
Covert warfare during the Cold War
USAID was founded in 1961, just as Washington was getting more heavily involved in Vietnam. The Kennedy administration's Special Group (Counter-Insurgency) quickly tasked USAID "to coordinate economic assistance programs with military civic action programs." More bluntly: The agency worked hand in glove with the CIA's proxy wars.
In Laos, one of Vietnam's neighbors, USAID helped the CIA arm and feed ethnic Hmong guerrillas fighting communist forces—and, sometimes, to compel the Hmong to do that fighting. "Since USAID decided where the rice was dropped, the Hmong had no choice but to stand and fight," writes historian Alfred McCoy. His 1972 book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, also made waves when it claimed USAID was helping Hmong militiamen and other warlords smuggle opium.
"Chief of border customs paid/by Central Intelligence's USAID," sang the beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg, who worked with McCoy. "The whole operation, newspapers say/supported by the CIA."
Meanwhile, USAID's Office of Public Safety helped train police and security forces of U.S. allies, including unsavory dictatorships. The office set up an extensive surveillance network in Vietnam and founded an International Police Academy for other anticommunist allies. National Security Adviser Robert Komer argued in 1962 that these programs were "more valuable than Special Forces in our global counter-insurgency efforts."
The controversy came to a head in 1970 when Uruguay's Tupamaros guerrillas kidnapped and murdered USAID adviser Dan Mitrione, who the guerrillas accused of teaching torture to the Uruguayan police. Congress ordered USAID to shut down its Office of Public Safety in 1973. "It matters little whether the charges [of torture] can be substantiated," the Senate Foreign Relations Committee stated. "They inevitably stigmatize the total United States foreign aid effort."
The U.S. government still provides training to foreign police forces—including ones notorious for torture—but those programs are now largely handled by the State Department.
Sending an aid worker to be arrested in Cuba
Although USAID insists that it is no longer a spy agency, many in both Washington and foreign capitals still treat it like one. Since the 1990s, Congress has budgeted millions of dollars for USAID to undermine the government of Cuba, and the Cuban government in turn has made it illegal to cooperate with USAID.
These programs became an embarrassment for USAID—and gave Havana leverage over Washington—with the arrest of USAID subcontractor Alan Gross in 2009. Gross had been sent to set up uncensored internet access for the Jewish community of Cuba, where internet access is both expensive and controlled by the government. He was caught in his hotel with military-grade communications equipment and convinced of spying.
The decision to send Gross to Cuba was highly questionable. He spoke little Spanish and had no experience working in Cuba. (Even after Gross' arrest, the Associated Press found USAID was sending staff on sensitive missions in Cuba with little training.) And the small, precarious Jewish minority did not necessarily want the "help" USAID was offering. A leader in the community "made it abundantly clear that we are all 'playing with fire,'" according to Gross' field notes, which were later obtained by the Associated Press.
"Nothing about USAID's Cuba programs is covert or classified in any way," deputy assistant USAID administrator Mark Lopes told the A.P. at the time. "We simply carry out activities in a discreet manner to ensure the greatest possible safety of all those involved."
The Obama administration traded three members of the Wasp Network, a Cuban spy ring that had been broken up in Florida in the 1990s, for Gross' freedom. As with police training in the 1970s, former U.S. officials and members of Congress worried about what Gross' case—and the program that led to it—would mean for other American aid workers overseas. Mixing secret political activity with charity work puts a target on both, they argued.
But today, Democrats seem eager to do exactly that. "USAID fights terrorist groups all across this world," Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) said at a rally to save the agency last week. "It supports freedom fighters everywhere in this world."
