The Trump administration says it has a compelling reason to ask the Senate to claw back $7.9 billion in foreign aid funds that Congress had approved prior to his taking office: evidence of what President Trump called "billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse" that his staff had uncovered.
It's an issue that comes to a head this week, with the Senate about to vote on the rescission of the nearly $8 billion (as well $1.1 billion allocated to the Corporation of Public Broadcasting). The deadline for a final decision on the package, which was approved by the House of Representatives on June 12, is midnight Friday.
Yet even as the administration has dismantled USAID, the primary agency for providing international aid, amid claims of waste, fraud and abuse, the rationale has come under scrutiny.
Paul Martin, who was the inspector general for USAID until he was fired by Trump on February 11, as well as current officials and experts who monitor aid, all say the administration has provided little to no proof to justify its actions -– and say they are politically motivated.
"As far as I know, never once has anybody in DOGE or in the new Administration referred to the [Inspector General] criminal allegations of fraud, waste, or abuse," Martin said in an interview with NPR. "Frankly, the handful of examples I am aware of were just completely made up," he said, referring to President Trump's claim in January that USAID sent $100 million in condoms to the militant group Hamas in Gaza.
A review of the reviews
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has publicly stated that staff at the State Department, along with DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, worked "very long hours" over six weeks to review 6,500 USAID programs.
It was during these reviews, according to the State Department, that evidence of fraudulent expenditures, abuse and waste was uncovered.
Rubio made these comments on March 10 when he announced that 83% of these programs would be terminated after the "thorough" review process found that the agency spent "tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States."
NPR interviewed six officials at USAID and the State Department who had direct knowledge of what transpired. They all said that a thorough review had not been done. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
The decision to terminate thousands of foreign aid programs came weeks before Rubio's announcement, the officials said, when the bulk of USAID staffers were put on administrative leave. The agency and the State Department were experiencing so much "chaos and confusion," as one source put it, that a thorough investigation or review did not take place.
The officials, who observed the reviews, all said that administration and DOGE staff did a "surface level" search for key words in the descriptions of thousands of programs, and if they found words like "gender" or "family planning", "climate" or "equality" the program was marked for termination.
"Nobody looked at the effectiveness of the programs, it was just a question of political alignment," one official told NPR.
NPR requested clarification from the State Department on how the review process had unfolded and how thorough it was, asking about the allegations made by the officials we interviewed. The State Department responded with a statement saying that in an exhaustive process "each program was reviewed individually" to ensure that foreign aid "works to make America safer, stronger and more prosperous."
In a hearing at the Senate Appropriations Committee last month, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the rescission package cuts "egregious examples of blatant government waste and abuse" that his office discovered following this review of federal programs.
But several of the officials who spoke to NPR said the administration had made no effort to weed out fraud and abuse at the United States Agency for International Development.
The USAID officials who spoke to NPR also noted that many of the targeted programs fall into the category of lifesaving humanitarian aid that the Trump administration maintains is being preserved. That includes dozens of programs supporting services to combat diseases like HIV/AID, malaria and polio as well as those that provide food aid for malnourished children and clean water for vulnerable populations.
So was there waste, fraud and abuse?
Trump officials have made several allegations about inappropriate use of USAID money.
At the Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on June 25, Vought claimed that the rescission package included "$9.3 million to advise Russian doctors on how to perform abortions and gender analysis."
Vought did not provide evidence for his claim. There is a law forbidding the use of federal funds for abortions overseas. And USAID has not operated in Russia since President Vladimir Putin expelled it in 2012.
He also claimed that the $8 billion in unspent funds targeted by the rescission package included "$35 million to address vasectomy messaging frameworks and gender dynamics in Ethiopia… $800,000 for prostitution rings in Nepal." Vought and other officials have not offered documentation to back up their claims. NPR reached out to the Office of Management and Budget about these claims but did not immediately receive a response.
The Trump administration's deletion of the USAID database and website earlier this year has added to confusion over how USAID money was spent, and which programs specifically are included in the rescission package.
All government agencies have problems with waste, fraud and abuse, says Paul Martin, the former USAID inspector general. He had previously served as inspector general at NASA for over a decade. Inspectors General work to detect and prevent such issues within federal agencies.
Martin, who was appointed to the position during the Biden administration, says he had seen no evidence that these issues were running rampant at the aid agency.
Meanwhile, in a report Martin issued on February 10, he warned that the rapid dismantling of the agency by the Trump Administration could make it nearly impossible to monitor its $8 billion in unspent foreign aid funds for potential misuse.
The report also said that hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of food and medicine were at risk of rotting or expiring after staff were blocked from delivering them because of spending freezes instituted by the Trump administration.
Martin was fired the next day. No official reason was given for his ouster.
What the future holds
"We are all waiting for DOGE to provide information, both about money saved and about the fraud, waste and abuse that they say they found," said Jonathan Katz, who researches such topics as anti-corruption, democracy and international development at the Brookings Institution. Katz was a senior official at USAID under President Obama.
"There are no internal safeguards to actually hold the government accountable for fraud, waste and abuse right now in this administration, because they've removed them," Katz said, referring to the firing of 17 inspector generals across federal institutions.
In a statement responding to NPR's request for comment, White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said that there had been decades of mismanagement at USAID and that the agency "strayed from its original mission and became a bloated, taxpayer-funded nonprofit, where unelected bureaucrats unilaterally doled out over $40 billion in taxpayer dollars every year. President Trump was elected by the American people to put America First, and he restored accountability to taxpayer dollars at USAID, State, and across the administration."
Katz and Martin say the administration is well within its rights to take a look at funding and change what it doesn't like. But they questioned the use of fraud as a justification to shut down a federal agency and cut billions of funds appropriated by Congress, emphasizing that there needs to be proof.
"It's not unusual for administrations to look at departments and agencies and scrutinize how money is being spent," Katz said. "But when you are doing things in the dark of the night, when you're making unsubstantiated claims about fraud, waste and abuse you lower the trust of the American people in governance and the governing system, and that is really important. This needs to be done in a transparent and accountable way."
The question of transparency has also concerned Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine. On Tuesday, joining the Senate Democrats, she was one of three Republicans who voted no on advancing the package for a Senate vote.
"The rescissions package has a big problem — nobody really knows what program reductions are in it. That isn't because we haven't had time to review the bill. Instead, the problem is that OMB has never provided the details that would normally be part of this process," Collins said in a statement.
The White House is eager to see the package pass, it agreed to remove $400 million of funding for the global HIV/Aids program PEPFAR, which is credited with having saved 25 million lives, from the rescission package, after several Republican senators voiced concerns over cutting the popular program. And even then,
Vice President JD Vance had to step in on Tuesday night to cast the tie-breaking vote after Collins and two other Republican senators joined Democrats in voting against starting debate on the measure.
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