The USAID demolition derby

Breaking up a key censorship node and some first-hand insights from working on an Internews project funded by USAID

Last week, DOGE dismantled USAID's demolition derby style. The cheers and roars echoed as fragments of the agency splintered across the internet.

However most of the scandalous grants that magnetised the attention of X users didn’t come as the result of any DOGE files, but from USASpending.gov, a government website publishing government grants and contracts online. A lot of dubious government funding was finally facing public scrutiny, but often the story seemed to be “look what we discovered” when much of the information has been online for years.

I may be wrong but I haven’t yet seen any new information that wasn’t already public, but I will very happily be corrected if there is.

In that sense, the story is in part a continuation of the “Where did all the journalists go?” saga. The data was there for years, and very few people were paying (or could get) the public's attention. Of course, the new civic scrutiny is also to be welcomed with open arms and hopefully fosters a stronger push for more government transparency and citizen engagement.

At the same time, a lot of the story has become messy. Claims were made of USAID pumping hundreds of millions of dollars through an empty office in rural California belonging to media NGO Internews when Internews also has an office less than a mile from the Whitehouse. Or that Internews is “secretive”, whereas its grants are available online through USASpending and are often detailed through its website. Others suggested the nearly 500m USAID gave to Internews was to push the “woke agenda” - a small part likely was, but more was probably spent on a more Neocon style militarism through its activities in Afghanistan, Ukraine et al. Or that Internews is a subsidiary of USAID, when it gets its funds from other US government departments, as well as a host of corporations, private foundations, and European governments.

In the same vein, it was claimed that USAID ran a “common network” of anti-disinformation organisations when the site just hosts a listing of anti-disinformation groups.

I’ve worked with Internews, including at least once on a USAID-funded initiative, and know they can be highly problematic, though how problematic I only really understood once I worked on the Twitter Files.

EngageMedia, the Asia-Pacific NGO I used to lead, was contracted several times by Internews to run training on digital security for journalists, develop media training curriculum, and create web platforms. There was little to nothing that was “woke” about that work, my concerns were more about proximity to very non-woke hard power interests in Washington. More recently Internews has been rolling out a host of dubious anti-disinformation work and generally promoting that flawed rubric through the international media space.

I mention all this as the Internews/USAID story has been doing the X/Twitter rounds and I know Matt Taibbi is about to come out with a story that I am very keen to see.

I’m not defending Internews or USAID, scrutiny is overdue, but in the feeding frenzy, important nuances seemed to be passed over, sunk by the information war.

You could easily have gotten the impression the past week that USAID was the censorship high command, where it is just one important funder in a host of government departments and private philanthropies funding censorship activities.

My non-profit liber-net has produced a detailed white paper on what we think are the most important censorship nodes in the US federal government. It's no demolition derby but holds a few insights nonetheless. The liber-net team has also been building a database of hundreds of dubious USG “anti-misinformation” grants, all built from public sources. We’ll be writing about what we’ve discovered over the next few weeks and beyond.

These are grants like the 9.3m USAID grant to the Pentagon-funded Zinc Networks to build societal resilience in the face of disinformation and propaganda campaigns in Georgia, which in the last few months has been facing down a Western-driven color revolution. Or 4.5m to Internews to do fact-checking and counter disinformation in Central Asia, or the $650,000 to FundaMedios in Ecuador who, among other things, run cover for Pfizer through dubious "fact-checks".

USAID is better in the waste bin and demolition derbies are exciting, but nuance can get lost in the frenzy and targets missed as a result.