The Trump administration, with the assistance of X owner Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is shutting down partisan spending under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), placing a freeze on all the agency’s spending while pursuing plans to shut it completely down — the website has already been taken down. In Arizona, hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants have gone to Arizona State University and the University of Arizona to address climate change overseas and other questionable purposes.
Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) (pictured above) denounced the move. “Doing away with this agency or severely undermining its capacity will not just hurt people, it will also push countries that receive our help into the arms of our adversaries, making us less safe,” he said.
According to the University of Arizona Daily Wildcat, “The UA was Kelly’s fourth largest campaign donor, bringing in $101,501 to his political campaigns since his 2020 run for the remaining two years of Senator John McCain’s term, who passed away in 2018. ASU was the fifth largest contributor with $94,369.” That money includes contributions from the universities’ employees.
Mike Benz, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, which aims to protect free speech online, posted on X earlier this month, “USAID grantee NGOs literally take their USAID money then turn around and lobby all key members of Congress to give more and more US taxpayer money to USAID each year in the budget. USAID buys an army of lobbyists with your tax dollars to give it more of your money.”
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