A majority of Americans think that U.S. foreign aid is being wasted, according to a new survey from the Financial Times.
Of those surveyed, more than 60% believe that funding set aside for humanitarian aid was being “wasted on corruption or administration fees,” according to the survey published Monday. The survey’s findings comes amid growing scrutiny surrounding wasteful spending across several federal agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
USAID has come under fire recently amid growing reports of the agency wasting billions of taxpayer dollars to disburse funds for various costly international programs, some of which had high risk of ending up in the Taliban’s hands. The fate of USAID is currently unclear after the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)’s Elon Musk announced on Feb. 3 that he and President Donald Trump had agreed to overturn the structure of the government agency.
“It’s a completely unresponsive agency. It’s supposed to respond to policy directives with the State Department, and it refuses to do so,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Feb 3. “Every dollar we spend and every program we fund, that program will be aligned with the national interest of the United States. USAID has a history of sort of ignoring that.”
Shortly after returning to the Oval Office on Jan. 20, Trump signed an executive order to pause funding for foreign aid, leading to backlash from many Democratic lawmakers. Still, some Democrats have expressed support for decreasing foreign aid funding.
DOGE’s ongoing efforts to eliminate waste across the federal government have been backed by many voters and Republican lawmakers who have been calling for various government agencies to cut out wasteful spending.
Musk has been a vocal critic of USAID over the past several weeks, writing in a Monday post on X that the agency “was funding DEI abroad while America goes broke at home.”
Notably, while foreign aid agencies like USAID have sent billions to aid countries overseas, the U.S. has struggled with faltering infrastructure and various economic hurdles such as stagnant wages. USAID appropriated more than $40 billion in foreign aid in fiscal year 2023, according to the Congressional Research Service.
A methodology for the FT poll was not available at the time of writing.
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