President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, along with a team of young men at the Department of Government Efficiency, dealt a massive blow to the bureaucratic ‘Deep State’ last week with the temporary pause on funding to USAID. The organization has previously come under scrutiny for its lack of transparency in how it allocates its almost $50 billion in funding, with many suggesting that the organization is a “front for the CIA.”
J. Michael Waller, author of Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went From Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villians,” pushed back on the “front for the CIA” claim in a post on X. In it, he claimed, “It’s worse than that. USAID became its own unaccountable covert operations agency. USAID ran covert ops without presidential finding as required by law.”
While most of the “covert ops” may, in fact, be opaque and without presidential findings, not all are. On Wednesday, Just The News reported on several examples of USAID exerting influence on foreign countries to sway political winds in favor of U.S. interests.
Among them was the East-West Management Institute, a Soros Open Society-backed organization that also received more than $260 million in USAID grants over the years. This money, according to Just The News, was used to “promote rule of law in Georgia, strengthen civil society in Uganda, and advance Serbia’s accession talks with the European Union.”
Hellbound and Down 