by Frank Holmes, reporter
Until President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency zeroed in on it with laser-light precision, the average American didn’t even know USAID existed.
It turns out USAID is the government’s primary distributor of foreign aid, designed to hand out your hard-earned money around the world, funding wasteful projects while lining the pockets of warlords and dictators in all four corners of the globe.
But even conservative outlets, which have done a great job exposing how international bureaucrats set your money on fire, have missed the more important story—what appears to be the real reason the Trump administration has fired nearly all USAID employees and made the rest accountable to the secretary of state.
The Deep State has used USAID to try to overthrow the U.S. government, funded Hunter Biden, and even underwrote Donald Trump’s impeachment.
Of course, conservatives are right: There is plenty of waste, fraud, and indefensible spending amid USAID’s grants. Jesse Watters ran down some of the most outrageous budget items earlier this week, items which included:
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$43 million on a gas station in Afghanistan that had no customers
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$1.5 million to promote LGBT Jamaicans
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$4 million for trans Serbians
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$5.5 million for gay rights in Uganda
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$17 million for Vietnam “inclusion”
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$25 million to promote “green transportation” in Georgia
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$1 million for Arab and Jewish photographers
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$8 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid “binary-gendered language”
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$122 million that ended up in the hands of terrorists.
And there’s the other part of USAID’s budget, the part you’re not supposed to know about…the part dedicated to overthrowing foreign governments.
“USAID is mostly a CIA front organization–it uses foreign aid as a way to get money to activists, NGOs, corrupt politicians, and even fund the censorship complex,” wrote David Strom at HotAir.com.
“The least surprising thing ever is watching Democrats defend the CIA front known as USAID, deceitfully depicting it as just some nice organization that wants to help,” said Glenn Greenwald.
There’s a very specific reason the Democrats don’t want to see USAID funding disappear: They want to use it—illegally—to impact American politics.
They want to start a color revolution and overthrow the U.S. government.
And they’ve already tried.
The least surprising thing ever is watching Democrats defend the CIA front known as USAID, deceitfully depicting it as just some nice organization that wants to help: https://t.co/VciilIp11R pic.twitter.com/qpkD1o1btY
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 3, 2025
They started small. Remember the Biden administration official who sang Mary Poppins songs to convince people the government should censor conservatives from spread “disinformation”? “Nina Jankowicz–the disinformation queen–is currently funded by USAID,” recorded Strom.
Then they funded the Fake News media, especially their favorite “insider” website.
The U.S. government gave Politico $8.2 million, including $24,000 from USAID.
Can a “news” source be independent when it gets millions of dollars from the very government it’s supposed to cover? So much for a free press.
But that’s when things really ramped up on two fronts.
First of all, USAID funded Joe Biden’s family.
In fact, it funded Burisma.
USAID funded something known as a Municipal Energy Reform Program (MERP) in Ukraine—and the MERP inked a memorandum of understanding with Burisma Holdings Ltd. on October 13, 2014.
That’s a few months after the sitting vice president’s son joined the board, with a salary of $83,333 a month.
What coincidental timing!
Associating the U.S. government openly with someone known to be blatantly corrupt—even in the embezzlement capital of Ukraine—puzzled diplomats.
An American government employee named George Kent raised the question in several August 2016 emails dated August 13, 2016, and even brought up Hunter…thinking he was doing USAID a favor by pointing it out.
Burisma CEO Mykola “Zlochevsky [is]a corrupt mal actor,” he wrote, and then he raised “the very sticky wicket of the Hunter Biden connection on Burisma’s board.”
“[H]ow have we traditionally treated/engaged Burisma, given the Zlochevsky connection, but also perhaps US involvement beyond Hunter Biden?” he asked.
In an email from Aug. 31, 2016, Kent asked: “[W]ould we want an article on the front page of the Washington Post…commenting about this public private partnership with Burisma, the link to Hunter Biden, and the link to Zlochevsky, who almost certainly paid off” a $7 million bribe “to have the case against him closed and his $23 million in assets frozen in the UK unfrozen?”
That November 22, Kent called the whole arrangement an “ill-advised USAID co-branding effort” with Burisma.
Now, we know all-too-well what was happening: The Obama-Biden administration was funneling federal money through Burisma to Hunter…and ultimately, to The Big Guy himself.
Biden would sock away that money to run for president…but directly funding the Democratic nominee isn’t the only way USAID tried to change the 2020 election.
No, really: why was USAID backing Burisma? pic.twitter.com/gYjF2OZkS7
— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) February 1, 2025
Second—and most importantly—USAID went for the jugular.
USAID funding, paid for with your tax dollars, played a featured role in the first Trump impeachment.
The impeachment argument made by the CIA agent who acted as a “whistleblower” about Trump’s controversial phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ‘relied’ on “reporting by a supposedly independent investigative news organization called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which appears to have effectively operated as an arm of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which President Trump has just shut down,” wrote investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger.
Trump released the text of what he called a “perfect phone call,” and the impeachment came crashing down to the ground.
The Deep State took a shot at the king and missed.
Now, the king is coming back with full force, starting off his second term with the most delicious dish: revenge.
And since The Horn News doesn’t accept USAID funding, now you know why.