In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that 5,200 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contracts were canceled, amounting to 83% of the agency’s programs.
This after President Donald Trump, who said the foreign aid agency was being run by “radical lunatics,” had moved the agency under the purview of the State Department.
Democrats and their allies in major media were livid, insisting that cuts to USAID would result in dire consequences for millions of people worldwide.
According to data revealed by Rubio in congressional testimony on Tuesday, those millions of people were seeing almost nothing in the form of actual aid while third party organizations were getting rich off USAID contracts.
Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that just 12 cents of every dollar spent by USAID reached recipients. The other 88 cents was pocketed by third parties.
“That means that in order for us to get aid to somebody, we had to spend all this other money supporting this foreign aid industrial complex,” Rubio said.
“We’re going to find more efficient ways to deliver aid to people directly, and it’s going to be directed by our regional bureaus, and it’s going to sponsor programs that make a difference, and it’s going to be part of a holistic approach to our foreign policy,” he added.
Rubio went on to compare American foreign aid spending to the strategy maintained by communist China.
“China doesn’t do humanitarian aid. China does predatory lending. That’s what Belt and Road Initiative is,” Rubio said. “They have zero record of doing humanitarian aid in the world, and frankly, they don’t know how to do it. They have no interest in doing it.”
Rubio said that China is instead adept at “going into some country, making you a loan, and then holding that debt over your head.”
Mind Blowing information from Marco Rubio
- Only 12 cents of every dollar spent from USAID went to recipients, the other 88 cents went to NGOs who pocketed the money - Even with the reforms we put in place and what we're suggesting in changes to our foreign aid, we still will… pic.twitter.com/Tf5LQRNpaR — Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) May 21, 2025
