Before President Donald Trump shuttered the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Biden-Harris administration used it to advance a radical leftist agenda across the globe, former USAID officials told the Daily Caller.
Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) ordered all USAID employees to work from home in early February amid a funding freeze for the agency. Musk said that Trump supported a full shutdown of the agency.
“With regard to the USAID stuff, I went over it with him in detail, and he agreed that we should shut it down … And I actually checked with him a few times. I said, ‘Are you sure?’ He’s like, ‘Yes.’ So we’re shutting it down,” Musk said in a conversation in an X space.
We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper.
Could have gone to some great parties.
Did that instead. https://t.co/0V35nacICW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2025
While Musk’s DOGE found a number of seemingly inexplicable expenditures from the agency — including millions for subscriptions to leftwing media outlets and $50 million for condoms in Djibouti — Democrats pushed back hard on the proposal to shutter the agency.
The reason for their fervor is becoming clear, as former USAID officials explained in detail how Democratic administrations have increasingly used the agency to promote a radical leftist agenda worldwide.
“They were literally trying to export this agenda, to create the rest of the world in their radical image,” Max Primorac, who served as USAID’s acting chief operating officer, senior agency vetting official and regulatory reform officer in the first Trump administration, told the Daily Caller.
Primorac, who also served in the Departments of State and Defense in George W. Bush’s administration, said that the Biden administration’s focus on spreading ideas like diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and transgender ideology weakened America’s influence abroad.
“It did tremendous harm to our national security interests by alienating a lot of people around the world,” Primorac told the Caller.
He noted that in generally liberal European countries, like France, leaders rejected the American left’s woke ideology. French President Emmanuel Macron warned his country against participating in the “woke nonsense” of policing language in a 2021 speech.
“The rest of the world tends to be far more conservative than us, and especially in Europe, this just simply does not fly. It really did harm our relationships abroad at the same time that it wasted so much money,” Primorac said.
While the agency’s unelected career bureaucrats exported their ideology using taxpayer dollars to every corner of the globe, Dr. Mark Moyar explained, they hid their actions from the political appointees whom Trump selected to carry out the will of the electorate. (RELATED: Leftist Org Raked In Millions From Foreign Aid Agencies)
Moyar, who Trump appointed to the USAID in 2018, ran the outfit’s office of civilian and military cooperation. He described the moment that he discovered, over a year into his tenure, that unelected bureaucrats were hiding where the agency’s money was going.
“The LGBTQ kind of stuff, climate change, they would conceal that by saying, ‘Well, this is really economic growth or health or something else,’” Moyar told the Caller.
Tree, a bartender at the Stonewall Inn, takes a photo of US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power (C) and Stonewall Inn co-owner Kurt Kelly as she convenes an informal meeting of the United Nations’ LGBT Core Group at the Stonewall Inn on June 16, 2016 in New York. (BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP via Getty Images)
USAID had been funding programs like a $2 million grant for gender affirming care in Guatemala, and $20 million for the creation of a Sesame Street facsimile in Iraq, according to the New York Times and NPR. USAID and the State Department also spent a great deal on promoting LGBTQ causes overseas, such as $25,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia through the State Department, “to raise awareness and increase the transgender representation“, and also:
$3,315,446 for “being LGBTQ in the Caribbean” through USAID.
$1.5 million to promote job opportunities for LGBTQ individuals in Serbia through USAID.
$32,000 for a comic book “featuring an LGBTQ+ hero” in Peru through the State Department.
$55,750 for a climate change presentation warning about the impact of climate change in Argentina to be led by female and LGBT journalists through the State Department.
$80,000 for an LGBTQ community center in Bratislava, Slovakia through the State Department.
$16,500 to foster a “united and equal queer-feminist discourse in Albanian society” through the State Department.
$8,000 to promote DEI among LGBTQ groups in Cyprus through the State Department.
Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, who accused the agency of obfuscating her investigation into its spending habits, also revealed USAID spent over $2 million on pottery classes in Morocco, “despite the fact that Moroccans have been making pottery for thousands of years.”
Despite the fact that Moroccans have been making pottery for thousands of years, USAID spent more than $2 million for Moroccan pottery classes and promotion.
The idea clearly wasn’t fully formed, because the translator they hired didn’t even speak English.
— Joni Ernst (@SenJoniErnst) February 3, 2025
Primorac described the agency as “a slush fund for the progressives.”
Moyar also pointed the finger at USAID’s Complex Crises Fund, a program that responds to “emerging or unforeseen complex crises overseas,” according to an archived government webpage. Outlays for the program include $4.2 million to “counter misinformation” in South Sudan and $2 million for addressing security concerns in the West African nation of Burkina Faso.
USAID has appropriated over $322 million to the program since its 2010 inception.
The agency’s career staffers, Moyar said, had utilized the program t0 enrich their cronies. (RELATED: Most Americans Say US Foreign Aid Is ‘Wasted On Corruption,’ Survey Reveals)
They “had devised ingenious schemes for hiding money from political appointees, which enabled them to steer money to their preferred projects and to their friends who worked for contractors, non-profit organizations, and multinational organizations,” Moyar wrote in his 2023 book “Masters Of Corruption.”
Besides exporting woke ideology abroad, the agency also insisted upon indoctrinating its own employees, Moyar told the Caller. He described being forced to undergo a ritual he referred to as a “DEI privilege walk.”
“Basically you stand in a row, and you’re given an identity. Well, in our case, we picked them out of a hat. So I was a woman of Scandinavian descent. And then there was the male French development official, and he was the most privileged because he’s a guy, and then you had all these other categories … there’s the indigenous woman with unwanted child and a male prostitute,” Moyar recalled.
“They read things like, ‘I get treated better when I ask for government services,’ or ‘people make negative stereotypes.’ And if the thing applies you step forward or back. At the end the white guys are farthest forward. I, as the white female, was second, and then other people are behind. It’s to show your privilege,” he recalled to the Caller.
The privilege walk, Moyar detailed, was far from the worst part of career bureaucrats having their hands on the wheel.
Upon learning how deep and far-reaching the agency’s corruption was, Moyar attempted to blow the whistle. Instead, he says, he was fired.
“I ended up reporting four or five people, four of my subordinates and somebody above me, and most serious of this was criminal conflict of interest,” Moyar told the Caller.
He recalled how someone in his office — while working as a government employee — was also serving as the chairman of the board of a company that was receiving government business.
“He was using his job to help them, which is pretty clear criminal conflict of interest,” Moyar told the Caller.
The employee in question, Mirko Crnkovich, was simultaneously serving as the agency’s acting deputy director and as the chairman of the board for IMPL Project, a defense contractor, according to Moyar.
“USAID employees, in and out of CMC, attested that Crnkovich was using government time and government information to pursue government contracts for IMPL. They also stated that Crnkovich had directed select CMC staff to gather information for IMPL’s benefit at Defense Department sites. Witnesses inside the Defense Department corroborated this information,” Moyar wrote in his book.
However, when Moyar sounded the alarm, he was told “people usually just don’t say anything about this.”
“I eventually found out why,” he told the Caller, alleging he faced retribution for reporting his colleagues.
Shortly after blowing the whistle on the alleged malfeasance, Moyar became the subject of an investigation into whether or not he published classified information in a previous book.
“If I had actually done that I would have gone to jail,” he told the Caller.
The agency suspended his security clearance based off the accusation.
“Another bureaucrat used that accusation to say that I should be fired, even though it wasn’t substantiated,” he told the Caller. “The argument was, ‘Well, someone accused you of something’ … the term they used was gospel. They said, ‘It was a two star general at Special Operations Command.’ They said, ‘Oh, well, two star general must be a big deal, and therefore we have to take his word as gospel.”
“They ended up firing me for that reason,” he continued.
Moyar filed a whistleblower retaliation complaint with the USAID’s office of the inspector general (OIG).
The agency slow-rolled the complaint, arguing that as a political appointee Moyar was not eligible for typical whistleblower protections, including an expedited review.
The delay prompted Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley to take notice and write to the agency’s head under then-President Joe Biden, Samantha Power.
Power “led the charge on DEI and transgenderism,” according to Moyer.
Grassley complained that USAID did not investigate Moyar’s whistleblower claims, but simply their own removal of Dr. Moyar from his position.
Grassley also noted the accusations that Moyar published classified materials were “unfounded.”
“I will further note that DOD has yet to provide Dr. Moyar with what is alleged to have been classified information in his book —information that is still available for public purchase online, Grassley wrote in a letter provided to the Daily Caller.
