GAI President and New York Times bestselling author Peter Schweizer blasted the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) during a recent media appearance. Schweizer says the agency has done some things that are “very troublesome.”
Schweizer’s comments come as President Donald Trump and DOGE head Elon Musk have publically blasted the agency as corrupt and rotten beyond repair.
Schweizer says the problem with USAID is twofold.
“Number one, there are certainly things that USAID has done … that are very troublesome. It used to be that USAID was supposed to be an extension that protected American interests. Under Barack Obama, that changed,” Schweizer said during an appearance on Redacted News. “It then became the focus of advancing the so-called millennial goals that have been established. It no longer became about projecting American power or American influence. It became about affecting climate change and migration.”
“It’s totally gone off its Cold War mission.”
Schweizer continued: “The second problem is … a lot of the money does not go to help poor people overseas, it goes to consultancies in places like Arlington, Virginia or Bethesda, Maryland that are run by former politicians that rake in cash by doing ‘consulting work.'”
“This is an enrichment program not for people in the developing world but for the political, Beltway class,” Schweizer said.
Watch the clip above.
Recently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was put in charge of the USAID as acting director while DOGE head Elon Musk began dismantling the agency. Rubio said, initially, the plan was to reform, but it’s looking more and more like the agency will be shuttered altogether.
“Well, that was always the goal was to reform it, but now we have rank insubordination,” Rubio told Fox News’s Rich Edson in an interview. “Now we have basically an active effort — their basic attitude is, ‘We don’t work for anyone, we work for ourselves, no agency of government can tell us what to do.’”
“So the president made me the acting administrator,” he added. “I’ve delegated that power to someone who is there full-time, and we’re going to go through the same process at USAID as we’re going through now at the State Department.”
“They have basically evolved into an agency that believes that they’re not even a U.S. government agency, that they are out — they’re a global charity, that they take the taxpayer money, and they spend it as a global charity irrespective of whether it is in the national interest or not in the national interest,” Rubio said Monday.