The agency that has been in the crosshair of the duo of President Donald Trump and tech billionaire, Elon Musk for almost a month now, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), has gotten itself in another seemingly intractable mess as it has been accused of funding terrorist organisations, including Boko Haram, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda.
A United States lawmaker, Scott Perry, has made the accusations during the first hearing of the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE), The Economist reported.
The session, titled, “The War on Waste: Stamping Out the Scourge of Improper Payments and Fraud,” focused on allegations of misappropriations of taxpayer funds.
Perry, a Republican from Pennsylvania said, “Who gets some of that money? Does that name ring a bell to anybody in the room? Because your money, your money, $697 million annually, plus the shipments of cash funds in Madrasas, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, ISIS Khorasan, terrorist training camps. That’s what it’s funding.”
He said the USAID’s reported funding of $136 million for building 120 schools in Pakistan had “zero evidence” of the schools’ construction.
“You are funding terrorism, and it’s coming through USAID. And it’s not just Afghanistan, because Pakistan’s right next door.
“USAID spent $840 million in the last year, the last 20 years, on Pakistan’s education-related programme.
“It includes $136 million to build 120 schools, of which there is zero evidence that any of them were built. Why would there be any evidence? The Inspector General can’t get in to see them.
“But you know what? We doubled down and spent $20 million from USAID to create educational television programmess for children unable to attend physical school.
“Yeah, they can’t attend it, because it doesn’t exist. You paid for it.
“Somebody else got the money. You are paying for terrorism. This has got to end.”
USAID is one of the agencies of United States government that had been hardest hit by Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under Musk’s supervision, and it has been practically shut down by President Trump since his presidential comeback on January 20.
Only on Thursday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate funding for foreign aid contracts and other awards to USAID while litigation moves forward, delivering yet another setback for the president as he seeks to make sweeping changes to the federal government.
U.S. District Judge Amir Ali partially granted a request for a temporary restraining order from a group of organizations that receive funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, and other agencies, but have since been cut off from federal dollars or had to suspend their work in the wake of Trump’s executive action ordering a 90-day pause on foreign development aid.
The nonprofit organizations argued that Trump’s directive and a subsequent memorandum from Secretary of State, Marco Rubio issued late last month, which temporarily stopped new obligations of funding for foreign assistance programmes and called for stop-work orders, was an unlawful and unconstitutional exercise of executive power.
They warned that the directive has “created chaos in the funding and administration” of USAID and other foreign assistance programmes.
“One cannot overstate the impact of that unlawful course of conduct: on businesses large and small forced to shut down their programs and let employees go; on hungry children across the globe who will go without; on populations around the world facing deadly disease; and on our constitutional order,” lawyers for one group of challengers, led by the Global Health Council, wrote in a court filing.
