In powerful testimony exposing USAID as a far-left Deep State organization, journalist and author Michael Shellenberger revealed that the taxpayer-funded organization was, amongst other things, behind the Hunter Biden laptop cover-up. He revealed as much during his appearance in a hearing on “Eliminating Waste by the Foreign Aid Bureaucracy” before the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on February 13, 2025.
Beginning his powerful takedown on the organization, he gave an exceedingly brief description of what USAID was founded to do, saying, “Since its creation by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, has had as its mission the promotion of America’s values of free speech, democracy, and free markets by helping others abroad.”
Continuing, the journalist noted that while it is ostensibly meant to help poor nations, in reality it is engaged in online censorship of the worst sort. He said, “The name suggests that the organization is focused on aiding poor nations in ways that result in their economic growth. Why, then, has USAID been spending so much money on information control and information operations, both in the form of demanding censorship by social media platforms, and financing supposedly ‘independent’ journalism?”
He then noted that the organization is behind the funding of “independent media” around the world, indicating that it isn’t really so independent after all. He said, “Why is the United States government in general and USAID in particular the largest donor to supposedly ‘independent media’ worldwide?”
Turning from that to an even more obvious way that the organization has been involved in cover-ups and narrative control, Shellenberger noted, “For example, USAID in 2021 published a ‘Disinformation Primer’ that urged greater censorship by social media platforms as well as ‘prebunking,’ a psychological technique to program people to reject information disfavored by the government without thinking.”
Then, connecting that primer to the Hunter Biden cover-up, Shellenberger noted that the very tactics the FBI and Aspen Institute used to discredit the New York Post’s story came from the USAID primer. He said, “The FBI and Aspen Institute used prebunking as a disinformation tool in the summer of 2020 to make the top censors at social media platforms and mainstream journalists believe that a future release of information relating to Hunter Biden and Burisma would be the result of a Russian “hack and leak” operation.”
Shortly afterward, Shellenberger went on to hammer the organization as a massively corrupt one that has withheld information from Congress and behaved abominably abroad, saying, “Evidence of USAID withholding information from Congress is sufficient justification for Congress to shut down the organization, which may have been hiding from Congress its support for dangerous biomedical research. And anyone who truly believes in public health for poor people in poor nations must agree that USAID needs to be reined in and cleaned up.”
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Continuing, he slammed the taxpayer-funded organization as a “hub of fraud and abuse,” saying, “That starts first with precisely the kind of audit some members of Congress are trying to stop. USAID and all other government agencies must justify what they are spending money on. The public’s interest is ensuring that every dollar of taxpayer money is accounted for and justified. The media and others in Washington, D.C., have known for decades that USAID was a hub of fraud and abuse.”
Watch him here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video