As President Donald Trump and billionaire Department of Government Efficiency czar Elon Musk effectively shut down USAID, a number of viral hoaxes about the aid agency have surfaced on X this week, including false claims that celebrities received millions of dollars from the dismantled U.S. Agency for International Development.
Key Facts
- Many false and misleading claims about the way USAID spends its money have quickly spread across X, aided by the efforts of billionaires like Musk and Bill Ackman.
Did Usaid Give Chelsea Clinton A Huge Paycheck?
No, numerous posts circulating widely on X claim that Chelsea Clinton was given a massive $84 million payout from USAID. However, the mention of Clinton refers to her family’s Clinton Foundation, and according to USASpending.gov, only one Clinton-affiliated organization received USAID funding, which is the Clinton Health Access Initiative, USAID having provided a total of $7.5 million in 2019. According to IRS papers, Chelsea Clinton did not receive any pay as a board member throughout the years for which grant money was used, and the grant given to the Clinton Health Access Initiative was spent on health services in Zambia between 2019 and 2021.
Did Usaid pay celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Ben Stiller to travel to Ukraine?
No evidence exists that USAID paid celebrities to go to Ukraine. Forbes has reached out to comment to Stiller, Jolie, Penn, and Bloom. A number of widely shared social media posts made the claim that USAID paid Ben Stiller, Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn, and Orlando Bloom to visit Ukraine and take pictures with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. However, Penn’s litigation attorney Mathew Rosengart said the allegations are “wholly false,” pointing out Penn self-funded his visit and promising to take action if the “defamatory statements continue,” but Stiller responded with his own post on X, writing the claims were “totally false” and “untrue,” as he said he was self-funding his trip to Ukraine and was not receiving funds from USAID.Through posting a fake video that seemed to have been from E! News (who responded with a statement to AFP denying the production of the film), Musk spread false claims on X.
Was COVID-19 Research Funded by Usaid?
No, Musk tweeted an unsubstantiated claim that the science-oriented nonprofit organization, EcoHealth Alliance, had taken USAID funds to fund the research that had led to COVID-19. EcoHealth Alliance has stated earlier that it found the viruses studied were not comparable enough to COVID-19 for them to have been linked with the origins of the pandemic. The group still received funding from USAID and other government groups and utilized some of the methodologies that sparked contention.
Has the government paid Politico?
Yes, but for subscriptions only and not grants by USAID. Musk, Trump, and other right-wing leaders have spread baseless claims of USAID offering Politico millions in cash to “print good stories about the Democrats.” Trump called it “possibly the biggest scandal in history,” but records available on USASpending.gov as well as the organization’s own statement reveal Politico never received funds from USAID. The service is “a professional subscription service used by companies, organizations, and, yes, some government agencies,” Politico Pro writes. For example, USAID spent $44,000 between 2023 and 2024 on subscriptions to the service, which is targeted at specialized users in the private sector who might want to track legislation, policy and news (sub-accounts reportedly start at about $10,000). Politico noted that USAID’s purchase was a “transaction,” not “funding,” and stated that it has never received any grants or subsidies from the government. After a “technical error” earlier this week delayed Politico staff paychecks, some X users assumed that USAID, which was dismantled before the payroll issue, must have been paying the publication. This sparked conspiracy theories that Politico was supported by USAID.
Did Usaid finance other media outlets, such as the BBC?
Similar frauds to Politico were perpetrated against other news organizations by X users who made inaccurate, deceptive, and sometimes outright fake allegations of USAID funds to media corporations. Similar to Politico, some of these transactions were neither grants or subsidies but rather payments for government agency subscriptions.The New York Times declared it had received no grants and stressed the federal cash it receives were “payments for subscriptions that government offices and agencies have purchased to better understand the world.” Reuters and the Associated Press stated they have received no government subsidies, and that agencies have subscribed instead. Out of the widely read media outlets with a focus on X, barely any have got funding from the USAID among other government firms, but among the international outlets, there has been some; BBC Media Action, a British charity supporting free and independent community media worldwide receives almost 8% of their revenue from U.S. grants between 2023 and 2024, according to one statement by BBC. However, the charity is totally independent of BBC News, which did not get any cash.According to federal records, the BBC’s media charity-not BBC News-received $1.9 million in donations from USAID to support its work in India. In a since-deleted tweet, Musk and billionaire Marc Andreessen fueled the rumors that BBC News was supported by USAID. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, supporting corruption reporting in the world and other journalism-related organizations in fragile democracies and free press nations, like in Russia and in Ukraine, USAID funding was provided.
Did Usaid Provide Funds for Condoms in Afghanistan or Gaza?
There is no evidence to support the many claims that DOGE discovered millions of dollars in U.S. condom spending in Gaza and the Middle East. Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, claimed last week that USAID had spent $50 million on condoms in Gaza. Leavitt might have been referring to more than $100 million in USAID grants to the International Medical Corps, a humanitarian organization that assists war victims, which included “family planning programming,” including contraceptives, as is customary for aid packages to developing nations, according to the Associated Press.In a CNN interview Thursday, Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., echoed Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., who earlier this week said that USAID had spent $15 million on condoms for the Taliban. CNN reported USAID did not purchase any condoms for the entire Middle East over the past three fiscal years as the Atlantic news outlet reported last week that it had previously used condoms to assist Afghan residents, not the Taliban that control the country’s government. The head of SpaceX falsely stated that funding for contraceptives “ended up in the pockets [of] Hamas,” and in a pair of posts on X wrote, “NOT sending US taxpayer money to buy condoms for foreigners.”
Did Usaid finance a “dei Musical” and a “transgender Opera”?
The government did fund a grant to a Colombian institution to increase transgender presence in opera, but it wasn’t USAID, despite Leavitt and a number of popular posts on X claiming that the organization had spent thousands on a “transgender opera in Colombia.” In 2021, the Universidad De Los Andes in Bogotá received $25,000 from the State Department for that reason. In 2022, the State Department, not USAID, funded $70,000 for a musical in Ireland that promoted “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.”
Was $6 million spent by Usaid on “tourism in Egypt”?
No, according to the White House, USAID announced a $6 million payment to Egypt to “increase educational opportunities and strengthen the livelihoods of the people of North Sinai.” A 2019 USAID announcement referred to in the White House fact sheet contains no mention of tourism.
Were any of the bombastic claims of how USAID spent money actually true?
The answer is, yes. Among the many USAID programs criticized by Republicans: USAID shelled out $1.5 million in 2022 “to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities” and to enhance job prospects for LGBTQ Serbians. The
The payout earned an attack from Leavitt and other House Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. The White House also attacked a $2 million USAID payment for “sex changes” in Guatemala, which isn’t true. But USAID did make a $2 million payment to “strengthen trans-led organizations” and “gender-affirming health care” in Guatemala, though gender-affirming care involves more than surgery and it’s unclear what medical services the grant was utilized for.
