Expert witnesses testified before Congress Thursday about the waste and abuse of grants issued by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), from progressive kickbacks to funding for terrorists. The testimony came in a hearing titled, “America Last: How Foreign Aid Undermined U.S. Interests Around the World,” before the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE), a part of the U.S. House Oversight Committee.

“For decades, the United States Congress has funded areas of the administrative state that have had little to no accountability for what they’re doing with the money,” said Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas), a member of the subcommittee, on “Washington Watch” Thursday.

“And what we found out,” he added, “from the past month of DOGE in the executive [the Department of Government Efficiency] and the investigations that we’ve been launching in the subcommittee of DOGE in Congress, is that so much of this money is funding left-wing pet projects in other parts of the globe.”

At the hearing, investigative reporter Tyler O’Neil testified about the close connections between USAID and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) aligned with left-wing megadonor George Soros, including the Open Society Foundation and the Tides Foundation. These connections sometimes involve direct or indirect funding, but they also include instances where USAID and Soros’s NGOs met together, then both funded other organizations.

“It was almost like USAID and federal funds were used as a donor match program, so the leftists could ‘double their impact’ by teaming up with the U.S. government, aided by U.S. tax dollars,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins proposed.

“Ask yourself, how has the Left been so effective at pushing ideologies that are so contrary to common sense — [such as], men should be in women’s sports, or men can get pregnant?” responded Gill. “No normal person believes this. But the reason they’ve had so much power is because their whole institutional movement is subsidized by taxpayers. … We’ve been funding a vast and convoluted network of NGOs that push left-wing, ideological causes. That is what has been driving the leftist movement in the United States for a very long time.”

“And those are the people, as you’ve noticed, who have been screaming the loudest as we’ve been exposing this waste and abuse,” Gill remarked. In other words, “the Left’s all worked up about the president cutting, DOGE coming in and looking at this wasteful and ineffective spending,” when “this has been an ideological slush fund for the Left,” said Perkins.

These findings do not negate USAID’s history of humanitarian accomplishments, Perkins added. “The history of USAID goes back to the 1960s, as kind of being the humanitarian outreach arm of the United States government to facilitate our foreign policy objectives and priorities,” he said. “There are some good programs that are going to poor countries helping with health-related issues, and it is building goodwill. Now, I think we spent way, way too much. But … there are some legitimate programs.”

“And the president’s been very clear that that is not what DOGE is stopping,” Gill agreed. “DOGE is not cutting off life-saving aid — food assistance, for instance — in deeply poverty-stricken nations where there is a life-or-death situation. What we’re stopping is waste, fraud, and abuse. And in these programs, that is very widespread.”

To reform and retool USAID, the Trump administration proposes that “many of these programs that are legitimate,” Gill said, “are going to be housed within the State Department, so that they can continue doing legitimate work.” The theory is that housing USAID within the State Department will bring its grants into line with America’s diplomatic objectives.

“And promoting transgenderism in Latin America certainly doesn’t do that. That doesn’t buy us any goodwill on the world stage,” Gill continued. In fact, he added, USAID’s work has “become a form of cultural imperialism. It is going to more traditional cultures than the United States and funding left-wing projects, like transgender surgeries in Guatemala or DEI projects in Eastern Europe.”

“The purpose of foreign aid should be to advance America’s interests abroad,” Gill explained. “We have a long history of being generous to other nations, but it should all be done in the context of America’s interests — our cultural interests, our political interests — not as a way of imperializing traditional cultures with secular, left-wing values. … This is what ‘America First’ means.”

Perkins related firsthand how he learned that left-wing cultural imperialism was often unwelcome in smaller countries. “In my time at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom,” he said, foreign leaders complained about “policies being pushed from our State Department that were, as you pointed out, not just contrary to American values,” but even the values of other countries. “You have countries in the African continent very religious in their orientation, and this stuff was offensive to them.”

“But there was a bigger plan here,” Perkins continued. The Biden administration worked to “push [cultural imperialism] through the State Department onto these other countries, back through the United Nations, to try to influence even our own policy.”

“I believe that the American people are tired of seeing their tax dollars actively working against their interests … and promoting values that they find repugnant and are antithetical to their moral convictions and their faith,” Gill declared. “We’re $37 trillion in debt. We’re running $2 trillion annual deficits. And, in an environment like this, we should not be subsidizing political opposition. … We are broke and we’ve got to get back to fiscal sanity. This is a part of that.”