USAID’s Troubling Ties to the Woke Nonprofits That Called the Shots in the Biden Administration

The U.S. Agency for International Development wasn’t just spending your hard-earned tax dollars on transgender operas overseas—USAID also has troubling connections with the leftist pressure groups that infiltrated and advised the Biden administration.

My book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” exposes the woke activist groups that fed staff into the administrative state and pushed woke policies on the bureaucracy.

As President Donald Trump released information about USAID’s corruption, I started to notice a few familiar names from my research.

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The American people should understand just how connected the woke enterprise is to the federal bureaucracy, and USAID provides a powerful example of those ties.

What Is USAID?

While the acronym suggests USAID is about aid, it’s really about soft power. President John F. Kennedy established USAID as a tool to fight Soviet Communism abroad, but in recent years, the agency has promoted the classic woke causes: critical race theory (the notion that America is systemically racist against blacks and favors whites and requires fundamental reform), climate alarmism, gender ideology, and a preference for technocratic government.

The Trump administration has highlighted USAID waste, particularly $1.5 million to advance “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in Serbia’s workplaces; $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia; and more. Others have highlighted grants such as $20 million for an Arabic translation of Sesame Street and $2 million for promoting sex changes in Guatemala.

USAID has also spent $250 million on a Climate Finance for Development Accelerator, aiming to “mobilize $2.5 billion in public and private climate investments by 2030.” The accelerator seeks to help countries meet their commitments in the Paris Climate Agreement, which the Trump administration rejected on the president’s first day in office.

These initiatives echo the spending of Hungarian American billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and that is no accident.

The Soros Connection

The Open Society Foundations has bankrolled many of the leftist groups in the Woketopus, which staffed and advised the Biden administration.

While Open Society Foundations has claimed that it does not receive funding from USAID or direct the funding of USAID, its ties to USAID are undeniable. Not only has Open Society funded the same projects as USAID, but its leaders met with former USAID Administrator Samantha Power at least twice, the Soros foundations network listed USAID among its “donor partners” in 2001, and an Open Society nonprofit actually sued USAID twice, with the cases reaching the Supreme Court both times.

USAID and Open Society Foundations jointly funded the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project—an organization that attacked conservatives for criticizing Soros and that published the report that sparked the first Trump impeachment. USAID’s connections to the project raise uncomfortable questions about whether the agency was trying to oust Trump.

The Organized Crime Corruption and Reporting Project also attacked Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J.; Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah; and Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation. These conservatives made the mistake of noticing that the U.S. Embassy to Macedonia had selected Soros’ Open Society Foundations as the main implementer for USAID projects in the Eastern European country.

According to Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., USAID awarded a $2.54 million contract to Open Society for training in “civic activism,” “mobilization,” and “civic engagement” in Macedonia in February 2017.

The East West Management Institute—which has long listed Open Society Foundations as a donor and implementing partner and which received $31.2 million from USAID in the last full fiscal year ending on Sept. 30—launched court changes in Albania that critics allege resulted in the prosecution of Albanian opposition leader Sali Berisha, silencing the opponent of the country’s socialist prime minister.

As for its role in the Woketopus, Open Society Foundations or its partners, the Open Society Policy Center, the Open Society Institute, or the Foundation to Promote Open Society have funded:

• the American Civil Liberties Union (which pushed open borders in the Biden administration)
• the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Southern Poverty Law Center (which pushed the weaponization of federal law enforcement agencies against conservatives)
• the Human Rights Campaign (which pushed gender ideology)
• the Sierra Club (which pushed climate alarmism)

The Tides Foundation

USAID has awarded more than $27 million in grants to the Tides Center, which forms part of the Left’s dark money network I expose in “The Woketopus” along with its sister groups the Tides Foundation and Tides Advocacy.

USAID awarded the Tides Center four grants: a $24.7 million grant in 2016, of which $20 million has been spent; a $1.5 million grant in 2016, of which $147,000 has been spent; a $700,000 grant in 2014 that appears not to have been fulfilled; and another $150,000 grant that appears not to have been fulfilled.

The largest grants came from USAID’s Foreign Assistance Program, which “works to support long-term and equitable economic growth and advance U.S. foreign policy objectives by supporting economic growth, agriculture, and trade; global health; and democracy, conflict prevention, and humanitarian assistance.”

Tides, like Open Society, has funded many of the leftist groups that called the shots under Biden. The Tides Foundation, Tides Advocacy, or the Tides Center have funded:

• the Center for American Progress (which fed more than 60 officials into the Biden administration, pushing both open borders and climate funding)
• the Natural Resources Defense Fund and the Sierra Club (which pushed a crackdown on oil and gas)
• the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund
• the ACLU

The Tides Center launched an organization, Palestine Legal, that represents anti-Israel rioters in court and gives them legal advice. A Palestine Legal senior attorney told a leftist magazine in January that the group has “represented or advised hundreds of students” since Oct. 7, 2023.

A Revolving Door

Former USAID staff have gone to work at groups in the Woketopus.

Olivia Callahan, for example, served as a law clerk at USAID before taking roles at the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Ann Van Dusen, who spent 25 years at USAID, now serves as a senior associate at Arabella Advisors, a for-profit company that launched nonprofit entities that funnel money to the Woketopus.

Anne-Marea (Tangee) Griffin, who worked for one year at USAID, now works as a senior fellow for Africa at the Center for American Progress.

Miriam Rashid, an associate director of racial equity and justice at the Center for American Progress, worked as a graduate research fellow at USAID.

Brandon Hooks, deputy director of creator and partnership strategy at the Human Rights Campaign, served as an LGBTI office intern at USAID.

Jay Gilliam, who served as an LGBTQI+ coordinator at USAID until January, previously worked as director of global programs at the Human Rights Campaign. Before joining HRC, he spent four years at USAID.

Chika Nwankwo, who worked as a research assistant for USAID, now works on vaccines via a contract with New Venture Fund, one of the Arabella Advisors-established nonprofits. New Venture Fund sponsored Governing for Impact, a shadowy nonprofit that enjoyed tremendous access in the early Biden administration.

Cuthbert Tinavapi, who served as a USAID regional auditor, now works with the Open Society Foundations as a finance consultant.

Tinatin Tsertsvadze, an advocacy adviser at Open Society Foundations, previously worked as a USAID assistant in the nation of Georgia.

Beth Dunlap, a director at the Open Society Foundations, served as a “senior transition adviser” at USAID. In this role, she “provided strategic guidance, facilitation, and operational support to programs funding political transition in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East,” according to her LinkedIn profile. Her profile lists countries served: Myanmar, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Libya, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Colombia, Yemen, Somalia, Ukraine, and North Macedonia.

Andrea Guardo, a former “human rights specialist” at USAID, now works in Democracy Protection for Latin American and the Caribbean at the Open Society Foundations.

Diego Garcia Devis, drug policy team manager at the Open Society Foundations, previously worked at USAID for nearly five years.

Rajiv J. Shah, president at the Rockefeller Foundation, part of the Left’s dark money network that funded climate activist groups such as the Nature Conservancy and the World Wildlife Fund, previously headed USAID under President Barack Obama.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s chief of staff, Mike Muldoon, and its vice president for innovation, Andrew Sweet, also had elevated roles at USAID—as senior investment officer and senior adviser to the administrator, respectively.

(The Washington Examiner’s Robert Schmad assisted with this research.)

Over the past four years, USAID has given more than $4.2 billion in grants to “miscellaneous foreign awardees,” which—as the Capital Research Center’s Parker Thayer explained—is code for “we don’t want to say who got the money.”

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to hide some of this money—perhaps USAID wants to withhold the identity of recipients in order to protect them from terrorist cells or foreign adversaries. Yet the idea that any federal agency would direct $4.2 billion of taxpayers’ money without disclosing the recipients is shocking.

It also raises the question of whether that money is supporting the woke activist groups that enjoy close ties to USAID.

A Snapshot of the Left’s Woke Bureaucracy

USAID’s connections to the Open Society Foundations, Tides, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Human Rights Campaign, the Center for American Progress, the ACLU, and Arabella Advisors confirm the basic premise of “The Woketopus:” that the Left’s massive dark money influence campaign has immense power, regardless of who’s in the White House.

USAID provides a snapshot of the Left’s massive infrastructure, and combating its influence is no easy feat.

Reprinted with permission from The Daily Signal – By Tyler O’Neil

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.