Weeks after the nascent Department of Government Efficiency effectively gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development, a Republican-led subcommittee is holding a hearing on how USAID worked against American interests.
The Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency plans to hold the hearing Wednesday, entitled “America Last: How Foreign Aid Undermined U.S. Interests Around the World.”
“What the DOGE team has uncovered with USAID is shocking, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said subcommittee Chairwoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. “Our DOGE subcommittee hearing will expose the agenda that you’ve been funding and offer solutions to prevent it from ever happening again.”
The USAID cuts came after a day-one executive order from President Donald Trump that called for a reevaluation of all U.S. foreign aid spending and a cessation of any program that doesn’t align with his foreign policy.
Trump’s team has decried examples of USAID funding diversity, equity and inclusion, electric vehicles, contraception, and LGBTQ+ ideas and activism around the world.
“Foreign aid programs have a sordid record of weaponizing and politicizing taxpayer dollars in the name of foreign assistance to support questionable programs around the world that may not align with U.S. interests,” according to the subcommittee press release.
The subcommittee has called as witnesses a former USAID official and now senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, the managing editor of the news outlet The Daily Signal and the executive director of the Middle East Forum.
