A former U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) director appeared Wednesday on Fox News to reveal details on what he said were the agency’s misused resources and deeply rooted corruption.
Dating back to the early days of the Trump administration, former director Mark Moyar, who took office in Feb. 2018, recounted, on “Jesse Watters Primetime,” what he said was an agency culture steeped in inefficiency and malpractice, starting with an unconventional orientation exercise that labeled him as a Scandinavian woman in a “privilege walk.” This exercise, meant to highlight systemic privileges and disadvantages, instead served as a prelude to the deeper issues plaguing USAID.
“So I get there in February, and we have what’s called a privilege walk as part of the orientation where you are given an identity, and I was a Scandinavian woman. And so when they read these, they read lines like, you know, I get discriminated against because of government services or people don’t look how I look,” Moyar told Watters. “So you took a step forward if it applied and if it didn’t. And so I ended up near the front, and the indigenous woman with, you know, unwanted pregnancy and the male prostitute were at the other end, and then we talked about our privileges.”
The former director described how, under the guise of national interests and counterterrorism, USAID repurposed initiatives to align superficially with the first Trump administration’s objectives.
“They’re very effective at rebranding things. So in the first Trump administration, the priorities were [to] support national interests as they are now. Another thing was countering terrorism and promoting self-reliance. So I went to a country, to give one example, they had a feminist women’s book club that had been started under the Obama administration, and then they now said this is a counter-terror program because feminist women are key fighters in the battle against terrorism,” Moyar said when asked about how the agency disguises projects.
The director’s tenure at USAID was marked by his attempts to combat these problems. He said that he reported a subordinate for a criminal conflict of interest. The response, however, was discouraging.
“The first discouraging sign was I was told, ‘Well, you know, that’s nice you want to do that. Most people here don’t want to report corruption.’ Now, they didn’t tell me why. I later figured out it’s because you get in a lot of trouble. So I was accused of publishing classified information and something I had written two years earlier, which had never been subjected to any prior question,” Moyar said. “And so they ultimately used that to fire me. Now, the people who were engaged in the corruption managed to hold on to their jobs. And so there’s a culture of corruption that says, if you are going to criticize anything corrupt, we’re going to come after you.”
Moyar also discussed what he said was a trend at USAID where accountability is often sidestepped and transparency is obstructed.
“So they ended up firing me based on this bogus accusation. And I’ve been in court for the last three years trying to get them to turn over the facts. And this is, of course, what we’ve seen with a lot of cases with Senator Ernst, for example. They refuse to turn over information to the courts or to members of Congress. And so this is why people are fed up,” Moyar added.
Moyar then discussed the Department Of Government Efficiency’s efforts to restructure USAID.
“From what I’ve seen so far, they seem to be doing a good job. I do think you’re going to need forensic accountants to go in there. And it’s probably going to take a long time because these bureaucrats have devised very crafty ways to hide money,” Moyar added.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk disrupted USAID on Monday by closing its office and declaring the agency’s impending shutdown. After Musk announced on an X Spaces chat that he and Trump had decided to close USAID, the administration instructed employees from the agency’s Ronald Reagan building to telework. By Monday afternoon, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stepped in as acting director. Republican Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst also said that members of USAID have hindered and even threatened her attempts to supervise how the agency distributes money.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Fox News)
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