Former USAID Official Speaks Out Against Decades-Long Agency Corruption

The U.S. Agency of International Development has become President Donald Trump’s and the Department of Government Efficiency’s poster child for waste, fraud, and abuse of American taxpayer dollars.

And there is arguably no one in Washington, D.C., who knows more about how USAID works—or doesn’t—than Max Primorac, who formerly served as USAID’s chief operating officer and chief assistant to the acting deputy administrator during the first Trump administration. 

Primorac, now a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, joined me this week on “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss what we now know about USAID’s corruption, how it was corrupted in the first place, and what other revelations could be coming down the pike.

One of Primorac’s early interactions with USAID was as a member of a nongovernmental organization while working in Eastern Europe after the breakup of former Yugoslavia. Primorac said he “came to know USAID operating in the area and already had identified some problematic things,” 1990s precursors to “a lot of the woke stuff that we see today.”

Though USAID was founded in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy to counter the Soviet Union’s exportation of communism, it appears the fox is now in the henhouse. 

Just one month into the Trump administration, DOGE, led by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, has exposed millions of dollars worth of USAID contracts devoted to exporting Western progressivism, such as $45 million for diversity, equity and inclusion in Burma; $520 million for environmental, social, and governance investing in Africa, $20 million on creating an Iraqi version of “Sesame Street,” and $1.2 billion for “undisclosed” purposes.

USAID became “something that the Left saw as an opportunity to wage their culture war, not only on America, but on the entire world,” Primorac said.

“President [Bill] Clinton, but particularly [then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton], started inserting these sexual reproductive rights—abortion—into all of our programming,” Primorac explained. “And then when [President Barack] Obama came in, oh boy, they started really pushing the LGBT issues, the climate ideology.”

Things ratcheted up once more under then-President Joe Biden’s administration. “Some of the first things that he did as president was issue these directives to tell everybody we’re going to use foreign aid to promote DEI, gender-fluidity, population control, abortion, climate ideology, and all these crazy ideas,” Primorac told me. 

But bad contracts are only part of the USAID story. Though USAID’s annual budget is about $40 billion, according to Primorac, “half of [the money] doesn’t leave Washington, D.C. …. 50% of that [money] stays here through overhead, salaries, and things of that sort.”

And the $20 billion that doesn’t go out the door often finds its ways into the coffers of Democratic political campaigns or liberal organizations. While at Heritage, Primorac and his colleagues have done a deep dive into Federal Election Commission disclosures from USAID staffers and USAID-funded organizations. 

“What did we find? For the State Department, it was like 94% [of political donations] went to the Left. At USAID, it was like 98% that went to the Left,” he said. 

“And then we started looking at all of the partners, the international NGOs, the contractors, and started looking at all of them where the billions and billions are going,” Primorac continued. “The vast majority, well over 90% of the political donations, were going to the Left.”

“The Left, which was misusing USAID, and they’re doing this across the federal government, [are] misusing taxpayer money as a slush fund to finance their own people,” he contended. 

Primorac only needed one word to describe what has gone on at USAID: “Corruption.”

“It’s a patronage system, and we spend so much money to try to end these patronage systems all over the world, and yet that same money has been misused to create one here,” he added.

Trump and Musk’s vigorous dismantling of this system proves “there’s a real leader in the White House, and he means business,” Primorac concluded. “The era of baloney is over.”

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