USAID: So Corrupt They Are Burning Their Records

The New York Post reports that "USAID staffers ordered to shred, burn classified documents as agency dismantled by Trump: official." The Post reports that "[r]emaining staffers at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have been ordered to start burning and shredding classified records as the Trump administration forges ahead with dismantling the agency, an internal directive shows."

    In a Tuesday email to staffers, USAID acting executive director Erica Carr called for an “all day” effort to help destroy sensitive agency documents at the all-but-shuttered headquarters in Washington, DC.

    “Thank you for your assistance in clearing our classified safes and personnel documents,” began the email, which bore an USAID logo. 

    “Shred as many documents first,” the email continued, adding that staffers should stuff remaining classified material into designated “burn bags for when the shredder becomes unavailable or needs a break.”

    Staffers were also told to write “secret” on the burn bags with a marker.

    The email did not elaborate on why the documents should be destroyed.

So why would federal government workers be afraid of the federal government finding out what they have been doing? Especially after all the corruption and waste that has already been exposed? The intuitive answer is because there is much, much worse to be found, and the idea of pursuing RICO actions against the NGOs that received funds is being floated.

    Of course, USAID is just the most visible example of the corruption and theft--for that is really what it is. We have other examples. For instance, per Breitbart, "Ex-Georgia House Rep. Stacey Abrams said this week that she received $2 billion from Former President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to greenwash home appliances in what some have likened to an alleged Democratic 'vote buying' scheme."

    EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin recently revealed that the Biden-era EPA passed through $20 billion in “gold bars,” or grants, to leftist groups. The Abrams-linked Power Forward Communities received $2 billion as part of these grants, a sum amounting to “20 million times the organization’s reported revenue,” according to the EPA.

    “Stacey Abrams’ Power Forward Communities received $2 BILLION to be a pass through entity for Biden EPA’s $20 billion ‘gold bar’ scheme,” Zeldin wrote in an X post in mid-February. “They reported just $100 in total revenue after their founding in late 2023.”

    Abrams — a Democrat who infamously lost two Georgia gubernatorial runs — took to MSNBC in early March to claim that there was nothing nefarious about Power Forward Communities receiving billions of dollars in taxpayer funds.

    “In 2023 and 2024, I led a program called Revitalizing Desoto,” she told the network, explaining that she worked to help those in South Georgia replace their inefficient appliances with more energy-efficient models.

But the question is how many people received appliances, at what cost per appliance provided, and what were the criteria. The latter is certainly questionable: "Steve Milloy, who served on President Donald Trump’s first-term EPA transition team, described the Abrams-linked 'grift' as a 'vote buying' ploy akin to the Obama-era 'Obama phones.'"

    But as noted in the excerpt, above, this $2 billion earmarked for Abrams' NGO was part of a larger $20 billion EPA "slush fund" which an EPA manager bragged to Project Veritas was the was the metaphorical equivalent of "dropping gold bars off the Titanic."

"Shockingly, roughly 20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA. This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history and it was purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rushed job with reduced oversight. Even further. This pot of $20 billion was awarded to just eight entities that were then responsible for doling out your money to NGOs and others at their discretion, with far less transparency. Just under $7 billion was sent to one entity called the Climate United Fund."

 Also, as the new EPA Director, Lee Zeldin described in a Fox News interview:

These NGOs [such as Abrams] were created for the first time, many of them just to get this money. And their pass-throughs...So the EPA entered into this account control agreement with these entities, Treasury enters into a financial agent agreement with the bank, and they design it to tie the EPA's hands behind their back -to tie the federal government's hands behind its back. So when the money goes through the NGOs to subgrantees, many of them also pass-throughs, we don't know where it's going. We don't have the proper amount of oversight. And, as you pointed out, it's going to people in the Obama and Biden administrations, it's going to donors. It's not going directly...to remediate that environmental issue...deliver that clean air...'

 Zeldin also told the New York Post: "Of the eight pass-through entities that received funding from the pot of $20 billion in tax dollars, various recipients have shown very little qualification to handle a single dollar, let alone several billions of dollars." For instance, Abrams' NGO only had a $100 in revenue before it received a $2 billion grant.

    So when the Federalist says that "The Administrative State Is So Corrupt It Makes The 19th Century’s Patronage System Look Good," it is probably understating the problem. As that article observes:

    In only a few weeks’ time, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has uncovered truly outrageous misuse of taxpayer funds. From subsidizing electric vehicles in Vietnam to commissioning a “transgender comic book” in Peru to bankrolling infrastructure projects in Egypt, the career bureaucrats over at USAID have gone on quite the bender with taxpayer dollars over the years. But this prodigal spending only represents the tip of the iceberg.

    The transgressions against the American people don’t stop with merely using their hard-earned money to enrich their NGO allies and spread the gospel of wokeism to the four corners of the Earth under the guise of life-saving aid. They extend to siphoning public money to their allies, mounting multiple systematic campaigns of intimidation and censorship against conservatives for expressing their political beliefs, meddling in congressional legislation, and trying to utterly destroy a sitting president.

    When they’re not busy squandering our tax dollars, they’re failing at their basic duties. Look no further than the federal response to Hurricane Helene last year or to the East Palestine train derailment in 2023. None of our governmental agencies work better now than they did 10 years ago, except perhaps in facilitating corruption. Few, if any, of the guilty officials ever face consequences for their betrayals of this nation. In fact, they’re often rewarded.

    The modern administrative state has become so corrupt and unaccountable to the people that it makes the patronage system (otherwise known as the spoils system) that characterized 19th-century American politics look good by comparison.

 As the article goes on to discuss, at least under the patronage system, elections actually mattered.