DOGE vs the Deep State
Corruption and scandal as USAID has its day of reckoning...
“Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.”
~ Doug Casey, Crisis Investing (1979)
Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...
Vroom... Vroom... VROOM!
What’s that we hear, dear reader? Could it be the sweet euphony of gnarled chainsaw teeth ripping into the flabby underbelly of the Leviathan?
Yesterday, greasy-palmed grifters at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) suddenly found their keys no longer fit the locks. On the bed stand lay a note:
“It’s not us, it’s you.” ~ Signed, D.O.G.E.
Conflicts of Interest
Here’s how the once serious BBC “reported” the story on Monday...
The future of the US government's main overseas aid agency has been cast into doubt, with employees locked out and the Trump administration planning to merge it with the US Department of State.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) would continue to function as a branch of the state department, but the plan involves a significant reduction in its funding and the workforce, CBS News, the BBC's US partner, reports.
On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio accused USAID's leadership of "insubordination" and said he was now its "acting head".
US President Donald Trump and one of his top advisers, billionaire Elon Musk, have been strongly critical of the agency.
But the move to shut it down could have a profound impact on humanitarian programmes around the world.
It wasn’t until the tenth paragraph of the story that the BCC thought it worth disclosing the following...
The BBC's international charity BBC Media Action, which is funded by external grants and voluntary contributions, receives funding from USAID. According to a 2024 report, USAID donated $3.23m (£2.6m), making it the charity's second-largest donor that financial year.
Hmm...
Why are American taxpayers, through USAID, funding the British Broadcasting Corporation, you wonder?
Why, to shape the narrative, of course! To train up the brave Pavlovian presstitutes of tomorrow, teaching them how to justify the fact that USAID spent $47,000 funding trans operas in Colombia... and $70,000 producing Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) musicals in Ireland... and $2.5 million supporting various other DEI programs across Serbia, to name just a few blatant boondoggles and pork barrel programs.
Billions in Babble
And to think, that’s is just the small fry... the morsels that fall from the gilded plates of decidedly more well-connected insiders, those with their snouts deep in the public trough.
Take, for example, major Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) recipients like Deloitte, which received $1.2 billion from USAID between fiscal years 2012-2023. Deloitte, based in London, is one of the globe’s “Big Four” accounting firms. According to their website (emphasis theirs):
“We believe diversity, equity, and inclusion challenges require human-centric solutions, centered on the needs of those who are the most historically marginalized. We have learned that equity is a systemic outcome of the work done within the spaces of diversity, inclusion, and anti-oppression...”
“And,” they might have added, “whatever other blah-blah buzzwords garner us the most money from our paymasters in Washington, DC.”
Then there’s FHI 360, a non-profit which received a non-trivial $3.8 billion over the same timeframe. According to their jargon basted website, FHI 360 “works with communities to expand social and economic equity” by “bringing together deep expertise and diverse perspectives” to “expand collective impact.”
More blabber... more jabber... more MBA-laced gobbledygook... and more money from poor people in rich countries going to rich people in poor countries.
There’s also Chemonics International ($4.5 billion); Development Alternatives, Inc. ($3 billion); ABT Associates, Inc. ($2.6 billion); RTI International ($2.3 billion): John Snow International ($1.8 billion); ARD, Inc. ($1.5 billion); and Jhpiego Corporation: $1.3 billion (nonprofit)... the list goes on… and on...
And while we’re at it, let’s not forget the $54 million that made its way from USAID to EcoHealth Alliance, via the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). EcoHealth, you’ll recall, was the non-profit run by Peter Daszak, which helped fund the... ahem... “questionable” research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, the very same lab from which the US Government now admits that pesky Covid-19 virus likely leaked. Oops!
Daszak and his fellow EcoHealth Alliance charlatans were issued formal, 5-year debarments and suspended from receiving any federal funding for their rolls in the scandal. Dr. Anthony Fauci, meanwhile, who served as director of NIAID at the time it was funding the research, was issued a preemptive pardon by outgoing president, Joe Biden. Naturally.
But still, we are talking little fish... or is it diminutive bats?
Warfare and Censorship
According to the Congressional Research Service, the USAID budget totaled $43.4 billion in fiscal year 2023, with recipients in more than 130 countries not named the United States of America.
A rotting organ of the deep state, USAID was also charged with funding various censorship programs around the world, under the predictable Newspeak rubric of “combatting disinformation,” and funding so-called “fact checking” operations across social media platforms. As such, it earned a special place in the cold, dark heart of deep state goons like Nina Jankowicz, who was briefly the head of the Department of Homeland Security’s Orwellian sounding “Disinformation Governance Board.”
Gurgling with The Message, Jankowicz took to social media yesterday to defend USAID publicly... right before Mike Benz, executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online, noted that the disgraced agency was funding her Centre for Information Resilience. Quelle surprise!
Here’s Benz, again, hunting down the rats as they flee the sinking ship:
What you will quickly find as you enter The Amazing USAID Vortex Of Despair is that virtually every powerful political & financial motor of American society that promotes & lobbies for USAID is either directly on USAID’s payroll, works at a place that is, or his/her donors do.
Nor was Jankowicz the only jilted stooge to be outed. Here’s what happened to notorious neoconservative war hawk, Bill Kristol, when he piped up on X:
Operation Overthrow
With a foreign policy record that makes Liz Cheney appear up-to-date on her rabies shots, Kristol never met a war over which he didn’t see, in giant cloud formation, a glistening dollar sign. Most recently, his Defending Democracy initiative (cited above) spent millions on Capitol Hill, urging Republicans to throw good money after bad by keeping the war hot and the trenches full over in Eastern Europe.
Readers will not be surprised to discover that, between fiscal years 2022 and 2024, USAID distributed more than $30 billion in direct financial support to the government of Ukraine through a mixture of NGOs and “international public organizations.”
Nor is the ongoing Ukrainian tragedy the only foreign entanglement USAID is directly involved in fomenting. As Michael Shellenberger wrote on his excellent Substack, PUBLIC, yesterday:
USAID is among other US government organizations that have promoted regime change abroad, including the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Even “To its proponents,” notes the Washington Post, “USAID is an indispensable arm of U.S. foreign policy” that spends $40 billion per year to influence politics in 130 nations.
USAID was the main funder for the groups behind overthrowing governments during the so-called “Arab Spring” and the Eastern European “Color Revolutions.” USAID was among the first donors on the ground in Tunisia, giving $19 million to political parties and activist mobilizations, as well as millions for similar activities in Egypt.
USAID funded the Serbian youth movement Otpor!, which played a key role in overthrowing Slobodan Milošević, and the independent media outlet Rustavi-2, which was instrumental in mobilizing public opinion against the government to support the Rose Revolution in Georgia.
Yes, dear reader... forever wars... global lockdowns... syphoned billions... and the censorship industrial complex working around the clock to keep we lowly citizens in the dark.
It all comes at a cost, and it’s a cost the deep state is only too glad for you to pay.
Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
P.S. As mentioned in this space before, America's trust in mass media is plumbing all time lows, with less than a third of recent Gallup Poll respondents expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.”
According to Gallup, 2023-2024 was the third consecutive year that more U.S. adults registered no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount. Another third (33%) of Americans expressed “not very much” confidence.
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Even if all that Trump, Musk, et al. manage to do is to expose all this corruption, I will consider their efforts a success. If they actually manage to clean up a bunch of it, I will be profoundly amazed and grateful.
Thanks for covering this Joel. USAID is a key cog in the DC grifting machine.