Just 12 Cents on the Dollar: Vance's Wake-Up Call on Aid Fraud

There's an old saying that foreign aid consists of taking money away from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries. That's in large part due to the rampant corruption in the countries to which aid is flowing; the reason they are poor, after all, is generally due to runaway corruption.

But we might not have guessed how bad things really were. On Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance presented the claim that only 12 percent of foreign aid actually makes it to the people for whom it was intended; 88 percent, then, goes somewhere else.

Appearing on a podcast with comedian Theo Von, Vice President J.D. Vance revealed that White House estimates show just 12 cents of every dollar spent on U.S. humanitarian aid actually reaches its intended recipients.
"One of the crazy things we all figured out, like the first week or so we were in the White House, is there was a payment that should be stopped, because the president signed an executive order to stop a payment. And this is like day one in the White House," Vance said. "We were like, how do we stop this payment. Because somebody is trying to make this payment, and nobody knew where, like the computer was that actually wired the money from the U.S. taxpayer to this entity."
"God..." Theo Von replied.
"The amount of waste and the amount of just grift in the federal government was off the charts. It's getting better, but there is still a lot more I think we can find."

Notice what the vice president said here: "...just grift in the federal government." Not in the corrupt foreign governments; no, this rake-off is home-grown.

Breaking: Supreme Court Hands Trump Administration Yet Another Win With Stay in USAID Funding Cases

Private charities have mixed records in such things, and when considering a donation, it's always good to check carefully on any organization you're thinking of donating to. Some are better than others. But the federal government's track record in these things is almost universally bad. And the rake-offs aren't all done by actual government employees, officials or politicians; they are done be everyone's favorite villain, the Non-Governmental Organizations, or NGOs.

"I mean, a lot of people were slurping, man," Vance continued. "You look at...So, for example, there are all these humanitarian programs that we have, where we send money for medicine, for food, okay? What I thought before I got in the government, what most Americans think is okay, so we send $100,000 to this group to buy food for like poor kids in Africa. Okay? And what actually happens is it's not $100,000 that go to the food for poor kids in Africa. The NGO, the non-government organization that gets that money, contracts it out to somebody else. Then they subcontract it out. There's like three or four middlemen."

Now that does sound a lot like government: Take money from the taxpayers, claim that money is to be used to fund X, then filter that money through several levels of bureaucracy, siphoning off a little cash at every step. Then, when you add in these cash-hungry NGOs, and then you have several more layers, and many unscrupulous ones. The possibilities for fraud and abuse here are endless, and frankly, I'd be a bit surprised if it's as much as 12 percent getting to the supposed people the funds are intended for.

This is a travesty. And we can only count on one more year of a GOP White House and a GOP-controlled Congress to fix it. Midterms are this year - get out, one and all, and vote!

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