A government inspector general on Wednesday sounded the alarm about problems with the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and underscored how “non-government organizations” receive billions of dollars from the United States in corruption-prone regions with limited accountability.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said in a new report that “since the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, the U.S. government has spent billions of U.S. taxpayer funds on projects intended to provide for Afghans’ basic needs.”
The report said the State Department and USAID have turned to Public International Organizations, its term for NGOs, “as the primary means of delivering this aid,” but “have been inconsistent in their efforts to formally require PIOs to agree to U.S. government oversight on how funding is spent and whether projects are delivering intended results” rather than being “diverted to the Taliban.”
For example, the USAID Mission to Afghanistan’s standard contract with NGOs did not require them to permit American officials to visit to see what they were actually doing.
USAID had a contract with a third-party monitoring group whose visits it could have used as the next-best thing to American eyes on the ground, but it seemingly paid that group without actually having it do any visits, the inspector general’s report said.
USAID seemed to simply trust the groups receiving the money, which were often partnerships with foreign governments. That didn’t always go well.
For example, USAID funded the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) for a “water, sanitation, and hygiene project in Afghanistan” in 2024. It never bothered to visit. The inspector general did, and “found numerous issues that UNICEF did not report to USAID. Had USAID conducted site visits, it could have identified these deficiencies and asked UNICEF to address them.”
Likewise, State Department units in highly sensitive areas, such as the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs/ Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement, paid for programs whose operators wouldn’t even let their benefactors check on them.
The weapons removal office did not make site visits part of its contracts, and some beneficiaries, including the UN Mine Action Service, “refused site visits.” Those visits would have been helpful because it turned out that the groups weren’t always forthcoming. The UN Mine group at one point “suspended activities due to Taliban officials attempting to renegotiate the PIO’s operating agreements,” but didn’t tell the State Department until months later.
Only one out of five State Department bureaus reviewed by the inspector general included language in its standard contract saying “the recipient agrees to allow access for site visits by USAID and/or its agents as necessary.”
The State Department also does not require PIOs to report instances of “diversion,” which means “instances of waste, fraud, abuse, corruption, coercion, aid diversion, and interference” by groups like the Taliban.
USAID is supposed to require its contractors to report such misconduct, but “USAID/AFG included an optional diversion reporting clause in only some of its project contributions.”
“Without diversion reporting, USAID and State will not know the true extent to which the Taliban is interfering with and benefiting from U.S. funded activities,” the inspector general said.
State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs and the weapons removal office “do not include a reporting diversion clause in their agreement templates,” meaning “the bureaus may not be receiving timely reporting on incidents of diversion or interference” despite the obvious potential for fraud or deadly interference by terror-supporting groups.
Some instances of that are known. For example, in 2024 the Taliban asked State Department beneficiaries to make a list of people who were receiving benefits, and to let the Taliban be involved in selecting who would benefit. The Taliban also forced the NGO to suspend “mental health and psychosocial support activities, as well as suspension of a female youth center.”
State’s narcotics office (INL) may have also had a casual attitude towards aid diversion and transparency.
“When we asked INL for information about aid diversion in May 2023 and February 2024, it claimed to have no information. However, in September 2024, INL provided us with an October 2023 report from the Colombo Plan that outlined eight instances of Taliban interference,” it said. “The bureau learned about these instances through meetings in December 2022 and January 2023. INL did not explain why it did not share this information when we asked.”
The inspector general said the Secretary of State should require all agreements to allow site visits, and develop a standard process for beneficiaries to report fraud or misconduct.
“Monitoring projects through periodic site visits (including by third party monitors) is an essential management tool to help ensure that U.S. taxpayer money is not being wasted on projects that are not meeting their intended goals or that are undermined by interference by the Taliban,” it said.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that most of USAID has been abolished, and its remaining programs will be moved to State. That decision came following concern that its grants and contracts often amounted to slush funds for nefarious international actors.
