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Fact Check
Trump administration officials have misled about how the aid agency is spending its funding, in an effort to cite widespread “waste.”
Published Feb. 8, 2025Updated Feb. 9, 2025, 12:50 a.m. ET
Top officials in the Trump administration and allies in Congress, eager to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, have accused the agency of misusing taxpayer funds. But many of their claims were misleading or lacked context.
The agency, long a target for conservative critics who have questioned the value of foreign aid, has been subject to sharp upheaval in the last week. After freezing foreign aid for 90 days, the Trump administration said it would drastically reduce the agency’s work force, although a federal judge temporarily paused elements of the plan on Friday.
The speed and scale of the efforts to gut U.S.A.I.D. are part of a larger bid by Mr. Trump and his allies to cut costs across the federal government.
Here is a fact-check of their claims about the agency.
What Was Said
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“In some cases with U.S.A.I.D., 10, 12, 13 percent, maybe less, of the money was actually reaching the recipient, and the rest was going into the overhead and the bureaucracy.”
— Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a news conference on Tuesday
This is misleading. Mr. Rubio was likely referring to a January report from U.S.A.I.D. showing that about $2.1 billion, or 12.1 percent of its funding, went directly to local partners. But that does not mean that 80 to 90 percent of funding was spent on “overhead and bureaucracy.” In fact, most of the agency’s funding is channeled through other recipients like American companies and charities as well as public international organizations.
