ANALYSIS: USAID Targeted Foreign Governments and Americans at Home

By | February 20, 2025

NEW YORK, February 21 (C-Fam) Many Americans are reeling after the White House Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) revealed in recent weeks that USAID spent hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to influence foreign elections and instigate revolutions in other countries. They are only now realizing what most of the world already knew.

For decades, the U.S. foreign aid agency has used a variety of social engineering programs to undermine foreign regimes considered hostile to America. These covert political operations were carried out around the world, in many cases to effect regime change, under the guise of promoting democracy, gender equality, LGBT rights, climate change and reproductive health.

The Administrator at USAID under the Biden administration, Samantha Power wrote an essay in the prestigious Foreign Affairs journal to explain how every dollar of U.S. foreign aid is leveraged to achieve the desired political results of the U.S. government, including to oppose the rise of “populist parties with xenophobic and antidemocratic tendencies.”

That is why you haven’t heard foreign governments complain about the shutdown of USAID and the sudden interruption of all U.S. programs that are not strictly humanitarian aid like food and health. They know that many of the USAID programs that have been shut down are political in nature. Those affected by the halt in funds are in large part federally backed journalists and non-governmental organizations.

Americans are only now realizing how their taxes were being used. What’s more, they are discovering that their own perceptions about what is happening in the world have been shaped for decades by censorship and even propaganda directed against the American people by federal agencies.

Long before DOGE publicized wasteful and fraudulent USAID programs, Mike Benz of the Foundation for Freedom Online warned of this. According to Benz, USAID political operations abroad cobble together coalitions of racial, regional, gender and LGBT minorities to destabilize the governments of countries where ruling political majorities are unlikely to bow to the U.S. government and business interests. Benz says, once U.S. favored regimes are installed the agency helps them consolidate power by funding censorship and propaganda campaigns carried out through private companies and non-governmental groups. These include censorship and propaganda campaigns directed against the American People to shore up political backing for official U.S. government policies abroad, Benz charges.

Chief among these censorship programs are federal funding for ratings agencies like the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard. These agencies compel mainstream media to only publish government-aligned information and suppress populist political narratives. They favorably rate only those news agencies and websites that do not promote such narratives. The ratings are then used by advertisers to essentially boycott websites that publish conservative or populist political messages, thus starving them of funds and depriving them of influence.

Benz also warned against federally backed public-private initiatives to directly censor Americans on social media like the Election Integrity Partnership. These partnerships suppressed information favorable to Donald Trump in the 2020 election as well as information that cast doubt on the Biden administration’s official response to COVID-19, including information questioning vaccine efficacy or raising fears about vaccine side-effects. These warnings were confirmed in the findings of the Twitter Files and the report of the House Judiciary Sub-committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

 

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