Sen. Ernst: USAID Is a 'Rogue Bureaucracy'

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, called the U.S. Agency for International Development "a rogue bureaucracy" after she and her staff independently uncovered partisan and wasteful spending by the agency.

President Donald Trump's advisory Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, has been subject to Democrat anger after exposing alleged fraud, corruption and waste at various agencies, including USAID.

Ernst, Senate DOGE caucus chair, sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday to detail how USAID had misled, lied, and deceived Americans by blocking her extensive efforts to get answers into how tax dollars were spent at the agency.

She also wrote of her experience in dealing with USAID in a Monday opinion column for The Wall Street Journal.

"The U.S. Agency for International Development, entrusted with disbursing tens of billions of aid dollars to other nations annually, is a rogue bureaucracy," Ernst wrote. "I’ve uncovered that the agency often acts at odds with our nation’s best interests and uses intimidation and shell games to hide where money is going, how it’s being spent and why."

The senator said USAID, after repeatedly rebuffing her requests for a list of recipients of U.S. tax dollars sent to Ukraine, permitted her staff to review documents under surveillance in a highly secure room at department headquarters, with note-taking prohibited.

"We learned that the aid that was supposed to alleviate economic distress in the war-torn nation was spent on such frivolous activities as sending Ukrainian models and designers on junkets to New York City, London Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week, and South by Southwest in Austin, Texas," Ernst wrote.

Ernst wrote that she faced similar stonewalling after asking USAID about tax dollars being diverted from project missions for largely unrelated costs, known as the negotiated indirect cost rate.

"The agency claimed that it wasn’t possible to track. My team debunked that by providing USAID staff with a link to a public database," Ernst wrote. "The agency fired back, warning that divulging this information would violate federal laws, including the Economic Espionage Act.

"When I launched a formal investigation in cooperation with the House Foreign Affairs Committee, USAID relented. Turns out, the agency is allowing grantees to skim significant amounts of money, up to and even beyond half of the total, for themselves."

Ernst said USAID has learned to exploit loopholes in the law, and referenced the start of the COVID pandemic as an example.

"The watchdog organization White Coat Waste Project was the first to release evidence that both USAID and Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases were financing bat studies involving coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology," she wrote.

"Yet no grants to the Chinese lab appeared in USAspending.gov. Audits later uncovered that more than a million dollars from the U.S. government were paying for the dangerous research. The bulk of the money was provided by USAID, not Dr. Fauci."

Ernst cited that more than $9 million intended for civilian food and medical supplies in Syria ended up in the hands of violent terrorists, and another $2 million was spent promoting tourism to Lebanon, a nation the State Department warns against traveling to due to the risks of terrorism, kidnapping and unexploded land mines.

"Many other groups supported by USAID are doing great work, such as caring for orphans and people living with HIV. Imagine how much more good work could be supported with the dollars that instead ended up enriching terrorists, sex traffickers, mad scientists and drug cartels," Ernst wrote.

"The question we should be asking isn’t why USAID’s grants are being scrutinized, but why it took so long."

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