How USAID funding helped build political influence networks around the world

By DataRepublican | DataRepublican’s Substack

Everyone is arguing about whether USAID was wasteful. Nobody is explaining what it was actually for.

Yesterday the Daily Caller ran a piece noting that since Trump gutted USAID, right-wing candidates have swept Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, Costa Rica, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. The left hasn’t won a single Latin American presidential election since the funding stopped. Meanwhile, Ro Khanna went on a podcast and said Elon Musk “possibly sentenced to death” 4.5 million children by dismantling USAID. Musk threatened to sue him.

The right points to USAID grants for transgender operas in Colombia and DEI workshops in Serbia and asks why American taxpayers were funding them. The left points to children who depended on foreign aid claims millions of deaths.

But both miss the purpose of true USAID.

USAID was one of Washington’s primary instruments for regime change abroad. Beneath the humanitarian programs, the cultural initiatives, and the development projects sat a much larger objective: managing regime change and color revolutions across the globe.

Which raises an obvious question:

What does a transgender opera in Colombia have to do with regime change?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Read on.

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The Five Capabilities

1. Media. Independent outlets. Journalism training, equipment, institutional funding so a newsroom can survive without depending on the local government or corporations for revenue. The function is to ensure that there is an “independent” outlet ready to broadcast Western narratives. You need a megaphone before you propagate a message.

2. Legal infrastructure. Lawyers, legal aid clinics, rule-of-law programs, judicial reform advocacy. The function is to build a class of professionals who know how to challenge a government through its own legal system — and who have the institutional backing to survive doing it. And, yes, build a judiciary that shares the values of liberal Western democracy.

3. Election monitoring. Observer training, voter roll modernization, parallel vote tabulation (PVT). PVT is the critical technology: an “independent” count run alongside the official one. Without PVT data, people claiming a stolen election are sore losers. With Western-backed election monitoring, they’re defenders of liberal democracy.

4. Activist training. Civic engagement workshops, youth leadership programs, community organizing. The grant descriptions say “civic engagement” and “leadership development.” The skills being transferred:

• How to organize a protest
• How to sustain a protest
• How to train others to do the same
• How to communicate with media
• “Nonviolent” discipline under pressure and training.

The result is a trained cadre of people who know how to convert public anger into sustained political pressure across multiple election cycles.

5. Governance data. Procurement monitoring, FOIA programs, budget transparency initiatives, anti-corruption databases. These organizations generate the raw material that the media reports on, the lawyers cite in court, and the election monitors reference in their findings. Without this layer, the other four operate on anecdote. With it, they operate on evidence.

None of these looks like regime change in isolation. A journalism training program is a journalism training program. The system becomes visible only when you fund all five in the same country for a decade and the people running them all know each other because you trained them at the same conferences, connected them through the same fellowship programs, and funded them through the same grant pipelines.

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What the Completed System Looks Like: Georgia

Georgia is the country where the full pipeline played out in public, so Georgia is where you can trace it.

Starting in the mid-1990s, American and European money built all five capabilities inside Georgian civil society. USAID and the Eurasia Foundation funded Rustavi 2, an independent broadcaster that became the opposition’s primary media outlet by 2003. The Liberty Institute, founded in 1996, drafted Georgia’s freedom of speech legislation and ran anti-corruption campaigns. ISFED, founded in 1995 with USAID and NED money, trained 3,000 election observers and ran parallel vote tabulation across ten Georgian elections. NED spent $3 million on Otpor in Serbia, whose trainers then came to Georgia — funded by Open Society, facilitated by Liberty Institute — and trained a student group called Kmara. Same playbook, same clenched-fist logo, different country. And organizations like IDFI monitored government procurement, generating the data everybody else used.

Open Society’s own Georgia staff described the scale in a video: “We have been out there, helping every startup in Georgia, almost every organization that came to us with new ideas… There were 16,000 projects supported by the foundation.”

Read that again. Sixteen thousand projects in a country of 3.7 million people.

In November 2003, all five fired at once. ISFED’s parallel vote count proved the parliamentary election was fraudulent. Rustavi 2 broadcast the evidence. Kmara filled the streets. Liberty Institute provided the organizational backbone. Three weeks later, President Shevardnadze resigned in the Rose Revolution.

The activation was emergent. Every node in the network activated and performed its designed function simultaneously.

After the revolution, Liberty Institute members entered the Georgian government: Bokeria to the National Security Council, Subari as Public Defender, Targamadze to the Defense and Security Committee, Vardzelashvili as Deputy Justice Minister, Zhvania to Foreign Intelligence, and Minashvili as Foreign Affairs Committee Chair. The organizations didn’t just support a transition. They staffed it.

USASpending.gov shows over a billion in USAID awards to Georgia from 2008 to 2025. The contract descriptions spell it out: CEPPS received $26 million for “Georgia Elections and Political Processes Activity.” East-West Management Institute got $21 million for “build and innovate upon PAST USAID investments in the rule of law.” That one is the pipeline describing itself — build on what we already built.

Twenty years later, the Georgian government proposed a law requiring NGOs to disclose their foreign funding. 

DataRepublican is an investigative researcher known for building public tools that track federal spending, nonprofit networks and grant funding. Her database projects map more than 913,000 nonprofits and 1.3 million federal grants, helping users explore how taxpayer dollars move through government programs and nonprofit organizations. RMV previously profiled her work ahead of her appearance at RMV Freedom Fest in Castle Rock.

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