When agents from the Department of Government Efficiency arrived at the U.S. African Development Foundation’s Washington headquarters on February 21, 2025, the agency’s Director of Financial Management physically blocked them from entering. That man, Mathieu Zahui, has since pled guilty to corruption and obstruction of justice. The federal government shut the agency down.
What DOGE found when it finally got inside was consistent with what investigators had already documented — and what the Biden administration had declined to act on. A 2024 search warrant executed by the USAID Office of Inspector General showed grant recipients wiring money back to USADF officials’ personal accounts at the same time the grants were disbursed. The warrant was signed October 29, 2024. The Biden DOJ took no further action. Zahui blocked the door four months later.
The USADF case is the most documented criminal instance in a broader pattern of fraud that ran through one of the largest foreign aid agencies in the world. USAID operated in more than 100 countries at its peak, running an annual budget of approximately $30 billion. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, working with DOGE, reviewed all 6,500 USAID programs over six weeks and terminated 83 percent of them, stating the agency had spent tens of billions “in ways that did not serve — and in some cases even harmed — the core national interests of the United States.” Independent audits had previously found that up to 30 percent of USAID’s budget was vulnerable to fraud through a contractor network structured to minimize accountability.
Whistleblowers had been raising alarms for years. In November 2023, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch sent an oversight letter to USADF documenting credible allegations of misuse of official funds, conflicts of interest, inappropriate partnerships, gross mismanagement, and suppression of evidence. In August 2024, the USAID OIG issued a formal management advisory against USADF for failing to report suspected misuse of grant funds and equipment. Two months later came the search warrant. None of it produced a prosecution under the prior administration.
USADF was not the only contractor-level criminal case to emerge from the broader USAID ecosystem. In July 2025, USAID contracting officer Roderick Watson, 57, of Woodstock, Maryland, pled guilty to bribery of a public official. Three corporate executives pled alongside him. Together they had run a decade-long scheme involving at least 14 prime contracts worth more than $550 million in taxpayer dollars. Two companies — Vistant and Apprio, both USAID contractors — admitted criminal liability and entered deferred prosecution agreements with DOJ, requiring ongoing cooperation, compliance programs, and regular reporting to the Justice Department. DOJ’s Criminal Division stated: “The defendants sought to enrich themselves at the expense of American taxpayers through bribery and fraud.”
Separately, at least $9 million in USAID funds was allegedly redirected to Al-Nusrah Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate operating in Syria, through a scheme involving a Syrian national named Mahmoud Al Hafyan, prosecuted by DOJ and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
The transition of USAID’s functions into the State Department has not closed the investigative file. The USAID OIG’s FY2026 oversight plan confirms more than 300 active and ongoing investigative matters remain open, covering fraud, corruption, sexual exploitation, and diversion of funds. The OIG noted that the transition itself has created new vulnerabilities — conflicting instructions to contractors and subawardees about how to report fraud, and a breakdown in oversight structures that existed when USAID operated independently.
The documented record spans years: a Senate oversight letter in 2023, an OIG management advisory in August 2024, a search warrant in October 2024, a federal plea in 2025, and 300 open investigations still running in 2026. The evidence was there long before DOGE arrived.
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