DOGE wants to see where our tax dollars go, and we should let them. No surprise that the “government industrial complex” will resist every effort to bring transparency and accountability to how those funds are spent when the system is ripe with problems.
I’ve had first-hand experience with USAID and other international aid organizations, such as the World Bank, UNESCO, and even the Red Cross, during my 40-plus trips to Haiti after being invited by then Haitian President René Préval to help rebuild the nation following the devastating 2010 earthquake.
And I’ve seen how USAID, along with other NGOs, delivered on very few of their promises, failed to coordinate relief activities, and even skimmed money off the top.
The continuing disaster status in Haiti and so many similar places is in part a product of these agencies’ handiwork.
What happened in Haiti captures, at the very least, the incompetence — if not the outright corruption — of these international relief organizations. There is probably no more corrupt government agency than USAID.
Since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti killed as many as 300,000 people, the US government has disbursed around $4.4 billion in foreign assistance to the small island nation.
At least $1.5 billion was disbursed for immediate humanitarian aid, while another $3 billion went to recovery, reconstruction and development.
Of the at least $2.13 billion in contracts and grants for Haiti-related work, less than $50 million, or 2% went to Haitian organizations or firms. By comparison, $1.3 billion, or 56%, has gone to firms located in or near the US capitol. Little wonder USAID is so threatened by the sudden scrutiny.
It remains unclear how exactly the billions have been spent and whether US tax dollars have had a sustainable impact. USAID and its vendors have generally failed to make such data public.
This lack of clarity has led to an inefficient and often deceptive distribution of donations. USAID, other international relief organizations, and their NGO partners are not required to publish reports of budget and financial breakdowns along with their project outcomes.
With so little financial data available, it’s nearly impossible to analyze how effective the use and impact of these relief funds were on reconstruction and recovery.
In 2010, the Nonprofit Disaster Accountability Project attempted to conduct a report on the transparency of NGOs in Haiti a year after the earthquake. They reviewed 196 organizations, out of which only eight had readily available information about their activities in Haiti.
In the end, only 20% of the organizations responded to the survey request. Overall, the responding organizations reported receiving more than $1.4 billion in donations, but only spending about $730 million, or half of that, on Haiti relief efforts. As for the rest, the answers are not forthcoming.
USAID is not alone in the lack of accountability. One of the largest non-profit organizations involved in the Haitian emergency response, the Red Cross, raised an impressive $500 million for Haiti following the earthquake.
Yet, five years later, many, including former Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive, questioned whether most of these funds actually reached the Haitian population.
For instance, the Red Cross claimed they provided housing to over 130,000 people, but the organization only constructed six verifiable homes.
The Red Cross has refused to make available a list of the specific activities they conducted in Haiti, only providing a breakdown of the funds into large and non-descript “sectors” on their website.
One of these sectors, shelter, proved to be particularly misleading, having promised residents new homes, health centers, and sanitization systems in the Campeche neighborhood. But three years later, none of these promises were kept.
USAID and their NGO partners, such as the Red Cross, fail because of what Center for Global Development report authors Vijaya Ramachandran and Julie Walz call the “trickle-down” effect of humanitarian aid.
Money from donations passes through “multiple layers of connected subcontracts and subgrantees” before it reaches those who are carrying out the projects. This all but guarantees that relief efforts ultimately fail to meet their objectives despite the considerable amounts of money spent.
Money is lost when charities give funds to other organizations to implement the work they had promised. For example, the Red Cross set aside some of the original Haiti funds for their own administrative fees. Then, the charities they hired took a cut of their subsequent administrative fees.
Finally, the Red Cross had yet another charge which they described as “program costs incurred in managing third-party projects,” or an oversight fee.
Ultimately, this lack of transparency allows for ineffective and misleading uses of large donations that might otherwise have the potential to make an important impact in long-term relief.
The lack of information required by these organizations also complicates further analysis of this distribution of money and its long-term success.
The US provided $72 billion in aid to 180 countries in 2023, with USAID serving as its lead agency. DOGE attention to USAID is much deserved and long overdue as American goodwill and generosity have been repeatedly squandered.
The Haitian experience is the best case study of the failures of the American foreign aid program’s lack of transparency and accountability.
Governmental agencies such as USAID and their NGO partners and collaborators act as if they are sovereign nations — accountable to no one.
Paul Vallas is a policy adviser to the Illinois Policy Institute and was the first CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
