This week, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world who leads the so-called Office of Government Efficiency have taken aim at the U.S. Agency for International Development, placing thousands of workers on administrative leave and freezing all funding from the agency.
The Trump administration has cited a range of grants focused on diversity, equity and inclusion as examples of waste and abuse at the agency.
While some of the administration's claims about the projects are true, others were overblown, a Scripps News review of federal funding data shows.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt criticized the agency's spending, citing examples such as "$70,000 for a production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $7,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, and $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru."
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"I don't know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don't want my dollars going towards this crap," Leavitt said of the programs.
According to USASpending.gov, a website that tracks federal grants, some of the administration's descriptions matched the projects, though the exact details were limited and it's unclear whether any of the examples Leavitt mentioned received funding from USAID or a different State Department program.
Additionally, the administration's claim about the "transgender opera" project was inaccurate; as it actually received $25,000 from the federal government, significantly less than the Trump administration initially claimed.
Asked about the inconsistencies, White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said President Trump was delivering on his promise to cut wasteful spending.
"This waste of taxpayer dollars underscores why the president paused foreign aid on day one to ensure it aligns with American interests," she told Scripps News in a statement.
Experts on foreign assistance, meanwhile, argue that DEI spending at the agency is "infinitesimal," with USAID's $40 billion budget representing less than one percent of total federal spending, and the proportion of funds allocated to DEI causes being significantly less than that.
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"You can say that that, at most, [a] tenth of one percent of U.S. assistance that has DEI built in it should be removed, and that's the right of a new administration," said George Ingram, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who researches development policy. "But it makes no sense for an administration to stop funding assistance and stop programs mid-career or mid-stream just to ferret out a few things they don't like."
According to a recent Congressional Research Service report, USAID funded programs in 130 countries in 2023. Now, nearly all such projects are on hold – with most employees stationed overseas told to prepare to return to the U.S. within 30 days, according to a notice posted on the agency's website.
Ingram also argues that the DEI programs the White House is targeting further U.S. interests abroad.
"Why are we spending money on programs around the world to bring women into the workplace to support women who in many countries are 80% of the people in the fields in agriculture?" he asked. "Because if you don't bring women into the development space, you've missed out on half your population, and you're not going to have a prosperous, successful, developed country."
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