USAID staff will be put on leave starting on Friday

The Free Press, TGIF, 07.02.2025

This past week, the clandestine coders of DOGE are looking at the flabbiest-seeming government agency: USAID. It’s already being dismantled.

USAID turns out to be lining coffers for Dems who are between jobs, kind of like the MyPillow of the left. I honestly had no idea how big this grift was. For example: Nina Jankowicz, Biden’s would-be disinformation czar, who resigned after an uproar over her Ministry of Truth, then spent some time at the Centre for Information Resilience, which was partially funded by USAID. USAID was apparently partnering with Burisma, the Ukrainian group where Hunter Biden sat on the board. USAID was also the second-largest funder of the BBC’s charity arm. Which is crazy. We fought a war (a revolutionary one!) so we wouldn’t have to tune in to British propaganda. And now we’re footing the bill?

USAID had their own grand theory of the world and of American power. And that was that American power could and should expand, but only through transgender DEI art. Drag brunch and DEI language are our greatest military assets, the longest arm of American might. USAID spent $70,000 for a production of a DEI musical in Ireland and $1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workforce. USAID spent $47,000 to put on a transgender opera in Colombia and $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru (must have been a collectors edition, though our fact-checker notes that this seems like a fair price for the production of a comic book). It spent $7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid “binary-gendered language,” which—guys, this absolutely should have been sent to The Free Press instead. I can promise you we needed that reeducation badly and that if you rounded up to $8 million, I would personally escort from the building anyone who said guys.

It may well be better to be feared than to be loved, but have you ever seen an opera about climate change performed by deaf people? You’d feel a lot of things, and fear might be one of them.

And then there were the random handouts—which is a high bar for this department. Case in point: They sent $2 million to Morocco for pottery classes and promotion, because what do Moroccans know about pottery?

USAID funded regime change in America too: The group sent $24 million to Tides Foundation, which became the nonprofit sponsor of Black Lives Matter in 2020 (though there have since been issues). The DOGE boys are airing all of our bureaucracy’s dirty laundry, and boy, does it stink. Not as much as the laundry of the boys Elon has working 120 hours a week exposing reckless federal spending—but close.

→ Even people who used to like USAID have turned on it: Secretary of State Marco Rubio has changed his tune on USAID now that he is technically overseeing what’s left of it. Back in February 2017, Rubio said “Foreign aid is not charity. We must make sure it is well spent, but it is less than 1% of the budget and critical to our national security.” In 2022, he even said that USAID’s funding was a key tool to “counter the Chinese Communist Party’s expanding global influence,” and pushed Biden to keep funding it.

Now, he called USAID a “global charity,” saying: “They have basically evolved into an agency that believes that they’re not even a U.S. government agency.”

I agree with both Marco Rubios. USAID did some good regime change (helping tip Bashar al-Assad al-OUT by supporting civic organizations, which didn’t work at first but I guess eventually did?). They also funneled taxpayer money into a thousand gay operas. So, yes: a charity that’s also not a charity that should objectively no longer be the tip of American diplomacy’s spear. Unless the Slovenian DEI plays work really well and I’m just being closed-minded?

→ It’s just 1 percent (about 40 Billion US Dollars) of the budget: The left’s response to all of this hasn’t been to defend the operas. It’s been to say that this spending is such a small number. Such a small number that like, who cares? Why do you need all your tax dollars to go somewhere productive? Liberals have been so browbeaten by bureaucrats over the years that it’s seen as sort of hilarious and lunatic to want government efficiency at all.