Ted Cruz Rips Into USAID Partnership With George Soros

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, slammed the U.S. Agency for International Development after The Daily Signal highlighted its longstanding partnership with the leftist funding network established by Hungarian American billionaire George Soros.

“It is no surprise that the woke leftists running USAID had the same priorities as George Soros and his global NGO network,” Cruz told The Daily Signal in an exclusive statement Tuesday.

USAID has received renewed scrutiny after President Donald Trump froze foreign aid on his first day in office. The White House has cited reports from the Department of Government Efficiency, headed by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, revealing how federal funds distributed through USAID promoted so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, along with gender ideology. Over the weekend, DOGE agents entered USAID, USAID’s website went offline, and Trump selected Secretary of State Marco Rubio as acting head of the foreign funding agency.

“Under the Biden administration, USAID was weaponized to fund leftwing projects and progressive operatives,” the senator noted. “They poured uncountable amounts of money into places like the Hamas-controlled Gaza, knowing it would benefit anti-American and anti-Israel genocidal terrorists—and hid much of it from Congress and the public.”

“At the very least, the United States needs a new structure for distributing aid that is responsive to oversight and accountability,” Cruz concluded.

USAID’s ‘Insane Priorities’

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt condemned the “insane priorities” that USAID has funded, mentioning “$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces, $70,000 for a production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.”

“I don’t know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don’t want my dollars going towards this crap,” Leavitt added.

Leavitt’s remarks echo the White House’s policy against funding woke projects. As the now-rescinded memo from the Office of Management and Budget put it, the administration aims to stop funding “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.” (While the administration rescinded that memo, the White House clarified that its overarching goals remain unchanged.)

As Cruz noted, critics have also argued that foreign aid funds disbursed through USAID have bankrolled terrorists, particularly in the Middle East.

“We should not be putting money into any country or areas where a terrorist group remains in control,” Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Daily Caller. Roggio said that “aid, like money, is fungible.”

“It winds up propping up these groups,” the counterterrorism analyst added. “It allows them to use … whatever money they have to invest into their terrorist activities.”

The Biden administration gave more than $1 billion to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, through the State Department. Israel has claimed that at least a dozen United Nations Relief and Works Agency staff participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack against the Jewish state. USAID directed other funds to Gaza.

George Soros

As for Soros, the Hungarian American billionaire has funded a bevy of leftist causes, from DEI to gender ideology to climate alarmism. Open Society Foundations, the nonprofit organization he founded and which his son Alex currently runs, has a long history of partnering with USAID.

“[Former President Joe] Biden’s USAID and George Soros’s Open Society Institute frequently partnered by co-funding joint programs that promoted radical social agendas throughout the developing world,” Max Primorac, former acting chief operating officer at USAID, told The Daily Signal in an interview Tuesday. Primorac served at USAID from February 2018 to January 2021.

Former USAID Administrator Samantha Power met with Open Society Foundations at least twice and with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at least five times between 2021 and 2023, Fox News Digital reported. Foundations in the Open Society umbrella have worked with USAID for decades. In 2001, the Soros foundations network listed USAID among its “donor partners,” alongside other government aid agencies in countries such as Britain, Sweden, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria.

The Open Society Foundations’ connections with USAID run so deep, an Open Society nonprofit actually sued USAID not once but twice—and both cases reached the Supreme Court. Alliance for Open Society International sued to oppose a USAID funding requirement that nonprofits receiving tax dollars pledge to oppose prostitution.

As I expose in my book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” the Open Society Foundations is part of the Left’s dark money network that funnels millions of dollars to the far-left nonprofits that staffed and advised the Biden administration. Biden awarded Soros the Presidential Medal of Freedom last month.

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