Last week, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uncovered a government agency called the Inter-American Foundation (IAF) with an annual budget of $61 million that operates in Latin America in a similar way to USAID but separately.
On Tuesday, it was announced that all grants to the agency had been canceled and all but one IAF employee had been laid off (they can’t all be fired because closing the agency entirely would be beyond the executive branch’s authority, since the agency was created by an act of Congress).
Examples of cancelled grants:
$904,811 for raising alpacas in Peru, $364,500 to prevent social discrimination against recyclers in Bolivia, $813,210 for vegetable gardens in El Salvador, $323,633 to encourage cultural understanding of Venezuelan immigrants in Brazil, $731,105 to improve sales of mushrooms and peas in Guatemala, $677,342 to expand fruit and jam sales in Honduras, $483,345 to improve production of fine table salt in Ecuador, and $39,250 to beekeepers in Brazil.
DOGE also claims that they found thousands of cases where more than $300 million in loans were granted to children.
It was revealed today that last year, 45% of IAF spending was on salaries and administrative costs for the agency, with only 55% going to grants. Other examples of canceled grants have been released: $523,000 for avocado marketing in Honduras, $770,550 for cocoa farming in Peru, $1,509,200 for seed banks in Haiti and the Caribbean, and more.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has canceled seven grants for animal sex-change therapy trials, including $532,000 for testosterone injections into female rats and $33,000 for female hormones injections into male mice. President Trump mentioned this finding in his address to Congress last week.
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