USAID as Kirk's Prime Example of Wasteful Foreign Spending

Showing 26 USAID videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.

USAID became one of Charlie Kirk's most frequently cited examples of federal spending he argued had drifted entirely away from American interests, built around specific line items he highlighted including twenty million dollars for an Iraqi version of Sesame Street promoting LGBT themes and forty-seven thousand dollars for a transgender opera in Colombia, expenses Kirk used to argue the agency operated as an arm of what he called international wokeism rather than genuine humanitarian relief. Kirk celebrated Secretary of State Marco Rubio's move to place roughly fifteen thousand USAID employees on administrative leave as acting director, describing the restructuring as ending decades of America acting as what he called the world's ATM machine and redirecting resources toward domestic priorities instead of funding gender programs abroad and foreign color revolutions. He extended his USAID critique into direct frustration with a Supreme Court ruling that allowed roughly two billion dollars in paused foreign aid spending to resume over Trump's objection, including funds Kirk specifically flagged for training Sri Lankan journalists in gender-neutral language and rebuilding Cuban state media. Kirk connected the eventual congressional rescission package eliminating 8.3 billion dollars in foreign aid spending, alongside the defunding of NPR and PBS, as proof that Washington could still follow through on cutting programs once sufficient political will existed, treating USAID's restructuring as a template for broader federal spending reform.