USAID: The Deep State Paymaster

The Trump administration and DOGE found a beast that was hidden in the federal swamp for decades. They identified USAID as the Deep State paymaster and by doing so they have already saved billions.

Last Monday President Trump temporarily closed USAID, sending its employees home and temporarily shutting off that monstrous money machine. Payments to Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and other essential U.S. Government obligations will NOT be affected, as Democrats in Congress are falsely proclaiming. In the interim the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and its Director Elon Musk will end payments that support terrorists, DEI, LGBTQ, certain domestic and foreign groups, suspect non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the other “special interest” darlings of Congress, the liberal media, the Pentagon and the CIA. In other words, DOGE is damming up the river of money flowing into the Deep State.

DEI Grants Here And Abroad

President Biden’s White House (more likely Obama’s House) organized grants totaling more than $100 million for transgender projects. Those projects included $420,386 for breast cancer screening for men who identify as women, and $900,000 for building gender-neutral restrooms in the Reagan Building. Another $1 million was spent on New York’s Letchworth State Park for gender-neutral bathrooms. Also included in the transgender spending spree was a $50,000 grant to India and a National Endowment $25,000 grant to the National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco.

Those grants were chickenfeed compared to the NIH $5 million grant to Emory University to study transgender women (biological males) who are infected with HIV.

USAID’s vaunted foreign aid programs included $47,000 for a transgender opera in Columbia, $2 million for LGBT activism in Guatemala, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru, and $70,000 for a DEI musical in Ireland. The State Department even gave a grant to Ecuador to host 12 drag shows.

Then there was the $900,000 grant to study the Art of Mailbox Feng Shui, the NIH grant of $550,000 for a Russian lab to experiment on cat’s brains and another $3.7 million grant to study monkeys and gambling.

Had enough? How about a $650,000 grant to study smart toilets,

Happily, DOGE has already found and cancelled $1 billion of U.S. government internal DEI programs. The list of those agencies includes the Department of Education, GSA, OPM, EPA, DoL, Treasury, DoD, USDA, Commerce, DHS, VA, HHS, State, NSF, NRC, NLRB, PBGC, USAID, RRB, SSA, SBA, BLM, CFPB, NPS, and NOAA.

USAID Supports Leftist Media

There are reports showing Politico, a leftist arm of the Deep State, also received USAID support. The grant description says: “Politico Pro Subscription for 37 Users” and the “Outlays” as $443,998.00. That’s about $11,999.45 per subscription! The awarding agencies were the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Then Liz Wheeler posted on X that the USAID grants to leftist media were substantially greater than the $8 million initially reported in a White House press conference. The total, she wrote, began in 2015 and amounted to $34.3 million! Among the contributing agencies were HHS, FDA, and the Department of Education. Media outlets like the New York Times and the British BBC also received grants. Needless to say, there were no grants for conservative Substack sites like mine, or Eccentrik or Elizabeth Nickson’s Welcome to Absurdistan.

Question: why were those grants awarded? Answer: to spread CIA propaganda here and abroad. Like many other writers, I believe the CIA still operates the Cold War secret program, Operation Mockingbird. That secret program was aimed at influencing American media for propaganda purposes – and it continues to this day under some newly named CIA black project.

USAID Support For Terrorists

In 2018 the U.S. Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported that after USAID granted $330 million for agricultural development projects that failed, the projects were "inadvertently" rededicated to opium poppy cultivation. Satellite imagery shows that USAID's Kandahar Food Zone program for irrigation canal construction and repair was used by the Taliban to increase the level of their opium poppy crop.

[Much of the following data was gleaned from an excellent Townhall.com article by Mia Cathell on 5 February]

In 2016, USAID contributed directly to terrorist sympathizers by granting $100,000 to Islamic Relief Worldwide, a “charity” banned in Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as a known fundraiser for Hamas. There are other such “charities” that are given grants under USAID’s Foreign Assistance for Programs Overseas.

In 2021, Unlimited Friends Association (UFA) director Jomaa Khadoura said Al-Aqsa (a Muslim complex on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem) should be "cleansed from the impurity of the Jews.” So in 2022, USAID funded construction of an UFA "educational and community center" in Gaza. In that center, UFA hosted events that provide funds for the “families of martyrs and prisoners" and meetings with prominent Hamas figures like Mustafa Sawwaf, who said "Israel's disappearance is a necessity according to the Koran."

In 2023, it was discovered that USAID sent money to an NGO tied to terrorism when the inspector general investigated the cash flow. The grants were tied to an initial $110,000 grant in 2021 to Helping Hand for Relief and Development, an NGO that Congress warned had ties to terrorists, including Pakistan's Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation, Nevertheless, in October 2023, USAID sent another $78,000 to that same “charity.”

USAID made a grant on 1 October 2023, to the Bayader for Environment and Development Association, a “charity” in Gaza with strong ties to Hamas. That grant of $15,219 was made six days before the Hamas cross-border murder of more than 1,200 Israelis – that led to the invasion of Gaza by Israeli armed forces. According to the think tank, Middle East Forum (MEF), Bayader has received almost $1 million from USAID. That cash was routed through a complex of American NGOs like the International Medical Corps (IMC). Those “charities” are pass-throughs for USAID funds to Bayader and act as agents of Hamas for doing things like building the tunnel labyrinth under Gaza’s hospitals and streets. International Medical Corps recently received grants of more than $68 million to fund such projects in Gaza.

Do you think these grants suggest USAID personnel are anti-Semetic?

There is a further lesson to be learned by these USAID contributions to terrorists. When USAID grants for terrorists and other evil organizations become too obvious they are hidden in the interlocking universe of non-government organizations (NGOs). We’ll examine that process below.

NGOs Work For The Pentagon, CIA, And The Democrat Party

Some Democrat Senators like Pocahontas Warren and Chuck Schumer are in the streets and the Mockingbird media saying that grandfather’s Social Security checks and Medicare will disappear, and truly charitable initiatives around the world will fail unless USAID lifesaving checks keep flying out the door. That will not happen of course, so why are those Democrats trying to besmirch DOGE in the court of public opinion? The answer is that Democrats reward themselves, their party, their organizations, and their VIPs by using NGOs -- and they fear that gravy train is ending.

The scam works like this. Democrats who want to get taxpayer money for a Democrat initiative or a Democrat VIP will use the NGO and USAID system. First, USAID gives a grant to NGO #1 for some seemingly worthy charity. Then NGO#1 subcontracts the worthy charity to NGO#2 that is obviously Democrat-friendly or owned and operated by a Democrat ally. NGO#2 then sends most of the money to the intended VIP, Democrat organization or PAC. The worthy charity fails. Rinse and repeat.

Sound impossible? Elon Musk tweeted on X, “The DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed to always approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups. They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.”

The NGO system is even more important to the CIA – joined at the hip to the Pentagon. Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, understands why. He tweeted on X, “While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these [USAID] funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas and destabilizing movements, the rest is used to fuel dissent, finance protests, and undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda.”

Bukele gets it. In 2021 he said the Biden administration used USAID to assist a communist movement in El Salvador that opposed his government. Bukele then released WhatsApp messages from Biden administration officials as evidence of their meddling in his country’s democracy.

You never saw that? Thank our CIA-controlled Mockingbird media.

You also were never informed by our media that USAID-funded NGOs were linked to attempts to undermine and topple governments in Honduras (2009); Egypt (2011); Ukraine (2004 and 2014); Georgia (2003 and 2024) and Armenia in 2018, where the USAID-funded NGO Civitas and its online news outlet CivilNet, advocated the overthrow of Armenian leader Serzh Sargsyan. There were other attempts by NGOs to foment unrest or regime change around the world.

When the violent Arab Spring ended, even the New York Times had to print an article titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings.” Taxpayer-funded NGOs like Freedom House, the International Republican Institute (IRI), and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) trained and financed terrorist organizations and people involved in the regional unrest, such as the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, and Egypt’s April 6th Youth Movement.

It is becoming crystal clear that there are hundreds of U.S. government officials that should be in court now, trying to explain why their agencies created such global mayhem and loss of lives in the years since USAID was founded 6 decades ago. I agree with James Howard Kunstler that Samantha Power should lead the parade to jail.

Power was the head of USAID from 2021 to 2025, and so was the overseer of the war in Ukraine with its slaughter, corruption and NGOs. Through her vast collection of taxpayer-funded NGOs she also approved and monitored “color revolutions” in Hungary against Viktor Orban that failed, in Georgia that failed, in Mexico that failed, and in Brazil -- where she succeeded in arranging a massive election fraud that ousted Jair Bolsonaro. That friend of democracy was not given a passport by his illegal government to honor his invitation to attend Trump’s inauguration.

Like other members of the Deep State, Power may never have to explain those shameful American escapades in court. Kunstler notes that if she is dragged into court, at least USAID won’t be able to pay for her lawyers.

The Trump NGO Memorandum

President Trump and Elon Musk are finally able to understand what has been going on for years inside USAID and its army of taxpayer-funded NGOs -- thanks to algorithms developed by their twenty-something whiz kids in DOGE.

Last Thursday, February 6^th, President Trump signed a memorandum that orders a review of funding that any NGO receives from any government agency – including USAID. The memo is titled, “Advancing United States Interests When Funding,” and accuses the legion of unnamed NGOs of engaging in “actions that actively undermine the security, prosperity, and safety of the American people.”

The State Department estimates that there are some 1.5 million NGOs operating in the United States, and elsewhere. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said, “Many of these NGOs actually have infrastructure and operations set up in Mexico, on that side of the border, and are telling those illegal immigrants to come to them, and they will get them across the border,” She added that the Trump administration will cancel funding to any NGOs that “facilitate illegal immigration.”

When the investigation of USAID and other federal agencies is over, it will have revealed how the Deep State used NGOs to interfere and overthrow the governments of other countries – to the great embarrassment of the United States. It will even expose how NGO “charities” are interfering with the rebuilding of secure American borders.

Democrats in Congress fear those revelations will also show how they used NGOs as a slush fund to divert taxpayer money into their own coffers. Republicans, on the other hand, are working to end the USAID con game. Last Friday Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Chip Roy (R-TX) introduced a bill that would abolish USAID completely. They recognize what Elon Musk said about USAID, “They are a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”

The world is watching as President Trump designs a government that runs on common sense principles like transparency and the accountability of federal officials. The old government that relied on an ironwork of socialist regulations and federal agency controls is being demolished, piece by piece. The new government will have spending restraints that ultimately lead to lower taxes and inflation. We are already seeing new initiatives that are eliminating fraud and corruption, and those initiatives will unleash the power of the American people and bring a renaissance of our glory of yesteryear.