Written By: Justin K.P.
Recently , there was a major wave of criticism levied at Elon Musk for his cuts to USAID when he was part of the Department of Government Efficiency in the Trump administration.
The criticism paints the U.S. government’s USAID as a purely humanitarian organization, when in reality, the majority of the time, it was used as a cutout to fuel CIA coups against mostly elected governments that refused to bow down to Washington’s demands.
Leaked documents show that in 2002, the U.S. gave $15 million to USAID and tasked it with undermining Venezuela’s then-elected and popular president, Hugo Chávez.
USAID was tasked with implementing a “strategy for undermining Chavez’s government by ‘penetrating Chavez’s political base,’ ‘dividing Chavismo,’ and ‘isolating Chavez internationally.’”
Similarly, as Foreign Policy magazine reported , “the United States covertly launched a social media platform in Cuba in 2010, hoping to create a Twitter-like service that would spark a ‘Cuban Spring’ and potentially help bring about the collapse of the island’s Communist government … It was a digital Bay of Pigs, but it was funded by USAID”.
Foreign Policy magazine similarly reported that “USAID’s previous efforts to potentially weaken Cuban President Raúl Castro’s hold on power came to light in 2009, when Cuban authorities arrested USAID contractor Alan Gross and later convicted him for ‘acts against the independence or the territorial integrity of the state.’ Gross had been secretly outfitting the island’s small Jewish community with communications and satellite equipment as part of a program funded by USAID.”
USAID similarly funded groups behind the 2014 Maidan coup that saw Ukraine’s democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych overthrown and replaced by a U.S. puppet government, after U.S. backed far-right militants carried out a false-flagsniper massacre on protestors in the Maidan square.
USAID also played a role in preventing the end of the civil war in Eastern Ukraine that happened as a result of the coup.
As journalist Aaron Mate reported :
One illustrative case came in March 2020, when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky took a major step towards implementing the Minsk accords, the February 2015 pact that sought to end Ukraine’s post-2014 civil war. In a landmark move, Zelensky agreed to hold direct talks with representatives of the breakaway Donbas republics – a critical requirement for Minsk’s implementation.
In a statement, dozens of Ukrainian NGOs, political figures, and media outlets denounced Zelensky’s decision on the grounds that it would recognize the breakaway republics as equal partners, and play into the Russian narrative that Ukraine was facing an “internal conflict,” rather than “armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.” According to Ukrainian scholar Ivan Katchanovski, the vast majority of Ukrainian groups that signed the list were funded by Western governments and foundations. These include the media outlets and organizations Detector Media, the Institute of Mass Information, and Internews-Ukraine, all of which are supported by USAID.
USAID similarly played a role in a failed U.S. backed coup attempt on Nicaragua’s Sandinista government in 2018.
Journalist Max Blumenthal noted :
When the socialist-oriented Sandinista Front returned to power in Nicaragua through democratic elections in 2006, Washington began pouring tens of millions of dollars into the creation, training, and funding of right-wing opposition groups in the Central American nation.
Millions of dollars have flowed from the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, into the bank accounts of anti-Sandinista groups.
These US-funded organizations were at the heart of a failed coup d’etat that ravaged Nicaragua in 2018, leading to hundreds of deaths and destabilizing the country.
As Blumenthal added:
USAID placed a special emphasis on cultivating media outlets to bombard the country’s citizens with disinformation and deception that served the right-wing opposition’s agenda.
To support the media ecosystem it sought to establish in Nicaragua, USAID channeled money through an entity run by Nicaragua’s most powerful oligarchic family, the Chamorro Foundation.
Among the most prominent recipients of the millions USAID plowed through the Chamorro Foundation was the opposition media outlet 100% Noticias.
In July 2018, The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal visited the offices of 100% Noticias in Managua. There, he met with Miguel Mora, the station’s director, who declared openly that he wished for a US invasion of his country to remove its elected president, Daniel Ortega.
The USAID-funded “100% Noticias”, Max Blumenthal noted, pushed messaging explicitly designed to foment an overthrow of the government.
As he wrote:
During the 2018 US-backed coup in Nicaragua, 100% Noticias was the main propaganda channel of the violent elements that attempted to overthrow the country’s elected Sandinista government by force.
Early on in the coup attempt, Mora went on air to spread fake news, claiming President Ortega had already given up and was fleeing the country, and that leftist Sandinista supporters were also going to be forced into exile or face legal persecution.
Mora’s call for a US military invasion was echoed on air by Oscar Renee Vargas, a popular opposition pundit who clamored for the US Southern Command to orchestrate a coup against President Ortega or invade to overthrow him through a Panama-style operation.
On 100% Noticias, Vargas even urged anti-Sandinista forces to storm the presidential residence, kill the president, die by the hundreds doing so, and hang his body in public.
USAID similarly funded Maria Corina Machado, the U.S. puppet in Venezuela who played a large role in manufacturing consent for Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro late last year.
Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange documented the many times the USAID-funded Maria Corina Machado cheered on a military invasion of her own country in the lead-up to the kidnapping, including:
-5 December 2025, Machado on CBS Face the Nation: “I say this from Oslo right now, I have dedicated this award to [President Trump] because I think that he finally has put Venezuela in where it should be, in terms of a priority for the United States national security.”
- 30 October 2025, Bloomberg interview: “Military escalation may be the only way... the United States may need to intervene directly”
-17 October 2025, call to Benjamin Netanyahu on Israel’s conduct in Gaza: “The Nobel Peace Prize laureate told the Prime Minister that she greatly appreciates his decisions and resolute actions in the course of the war.”
-October 2025, Fox News interview on U.S. military strikes on civilian vessels: “justified.”
-5 October 2025, interview in The Sunday Times on the U.S. military buildup and extra-judicial assassination strikes against civilian boats: Trump’s strikes are “visionary”. “I totally support his strategy.”
-February 2025, interview with Donald Trump Jr.: “We’re going to kick the government out of the oil sector ... American companies are going to make a lot of money ... forget Saudi Arabia, we have more oil.”
-9 February 2019, interview with EL PAÍS: Maduro will only leave “in the face of a real threat from a more powerful state.”
- February 2014, testimony before U.S. Congress: “The only path left is the use of force.”
In 2019, USAID similarly funnelled 52 million dollars to Juan Guaido, the U.S. puppet in Venezuela who repeatedly made coup attempts against the actual government.
USAID also heavily funded the Syrian White Helmets, the search and rescue group closely associated with CIA-backed Al-Qaeda-linked rebels in Syria, and which openly clamoured for U.S. military intervention and sanctions in support of said CIA rebels. USAID-funded White Helmets were also seen on video aiding in crimes committed by the CIA rebels, including a public execution.
Journalist Lee Fang also revealed that USAID-funded think tanks in Romania pushed for a judicial coup against the presidential candidate Calin Georgescu because he was opposed to the proxy war in Ukraine.
The portrayal of USAID as purely humanitarian erases the reality that it more often than not was used as a tool of U.S. regime change operations around the world.
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Going back to the Peace Corps and any other American Aid NGO it has always been known that intelligence operatives were always on staff anyone who believes otherwise is a fool.
USAID did provide humanitarian support, which makes many mourn its demise (it just moved). In my view, however, this genuine aid was nothing more than "the camel's nose under the tent". It gave the organization legitimacy and access to the target nation.