By pausing foreign funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, President Donald Trump has dealt a major blow to the ecosystem of nonprofits that promote woke ideology against America’s interests.
It is no accident that USAID’s funding has dovetailed with the grantmaking of leftist billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations—and the foreign funding pause will undermine his efforts.
Trump placed a 90-day freeze on foreign assistance on his first day in office. This weekend, agents of the Department of Government Efficiency entered the USAID facility and the USAID website shut down. On Sunday, Trump named Secretary of State Marco Rubio acting head of the agency.
The administration placed about 600 USAID staff on leave Sunday night, and it will place 1,400 more on leave Tuesday, Politico reported. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment to confirm or deny this report.
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 As the now-rescinded memo from the Office of Management and Budget put it, the administration aims to stop funding “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social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 (While the administration rescinded that memo, the White House clarified that its overarching goals remain unchanged.)
The Soros Connections
Yet this “crap” is exactly what the Left’s most notorious donor—George Soros—intends to fund. Soros, a Hungarian American billionaire who has funded nearly every leftist cause, established the Open Society Institute, which later became the Open Society Foundations. Open Society Foundations has worked with USAID to fund these kinds of programs.
“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. She also met with the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, left-leaning nonprofits that operate in similar orbits as Open Society.
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.
2 USAID Supreme Court Cases
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.
The story traces back to 2003, when Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed the United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act. The law provided federal funds to private groups to combat AIDS and other diseases across the world, but it came with one condition. Congress and Bush wanted to restrict funding to groups that pledge to oppose prostitution. Specifically, the law required “a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking.”
AIDS agencies preferred to remain neutral on prostitution to avoid alienating prostitutes who would spread the sexually-transmitted disease.
Alliance for Open Society International sued, and the case reached the Supreme Court. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the anti-prostitution pledge, ruling that it violated the First Amendment.
“By demanding that funding recipients adopt—as their own—the Government’s view on an issue of public concern, the condition by its very nature affects ‘protected conduct outside the scope of the federally funded program,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.
Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented, warning that to strike down the requirement as unconstitutional would significantly hamstring the federal government’s ability to fund anything.
“The First Amendment does not mandate a viewpoint neutral government. Government must choose between rival ideas and adopt some as its own: competition over cartels, solar energy over coal, weapon development over disarmament, and so forth,” Scalia wrote. “This Policy Requirement is nothing more than a means of selecting suitable agents to implement the Government’s chosen strategy to eradicate HIV/AIDS. That is perfectly permissible under the Constitution.”
Yet the Alliance for Open Society International sued again, this time arguing that requiring Open Society’s foreign affiliates to take an anti-prostitution pledge violates the First Amendment. This time, Open Society had gone too far. In USAID v. Alliance for Open Society International (2020), the Supreme Court ruled that foreign nonprofits affiliated with U.S. nonprofits do not have First Amendment rights under the Constitution.
The fact that USAID did so much work with the Open Society network that Alliance for Open Society sued not once but twice reveals the extent to which George Soros’ network has been working with USAID. The Open Society Foundations did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
Why It Matters
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.
Alex Soros, the son of George Soros, took over at Open Society Foundations in 2022. Soros also accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from then-President Joe Biden on behalf of his father in January. The foundation has bankrolled groups that advocate for critical race theory (the notion that America is systemically racist against black people), gender ideology, climate alarmism, and a preference for technocratic government.
Under Biden, it worked like this: The Open Society Foundations bankrolls a leftist group, say the Center for American Progress. That group then feeds staff into the federal government—more than sixty officials in CAP’s case. Working with those staff and via guidance documents, the group pushes the administration to take extreme stances on climate, immigration, gender ideology, and more.
My book highlights how these woke activist groups influenced policy on education, labor, energy, LGBTQ issues, the weaponization of law enforcement against conservatives, immigration, Israel, and elections.
None of these groups have disappeared since Biden left office. In fact, many of the woke activists who went from a nonprofit into the administration have since returned to woke nonprofits, creating a sort of government in exile. Others are planning to stay in the administration and oppose Trump’s agenda from within. A recent poll found that 64% of the D.C.-based federal bureaucrats who voted for Kamala Harris in the last election said they will refuse to follow a lawful Trump order if they consider it bad policy.
By temporarily closing USAID and restructuring it long term, Trump is undermining one of Open Society Foundations’ key partners in pushing its woke agenda. Let’s hope the restructure lasts.
Reprinted with permission from The Daily Signal by Tyler O’Neil.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.
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