USAID had a budget of $20something billion under Trump 1.0, and that doubled under Biden. USAID has programs in like 130 countries. The news organization Politico was receiving like $1.3m a year but under Biden they started receiving $8m, people have noted. Apparently BBC got a few million a year. NYT received like $300k a year ($100k a year before Biden). However, I think that without the doubling of the amount under Biden, if this had been uncovered in 2019, the amounts paid then would have been a scandal under Trump. I don't, however, see any reason to think Trump would have been in favor of USAID even then, as he seems pretty steady in wanting to ‘clean the swamp.’
'NYT. Getting paid. Politico. Getting paid. Bill Kristol, perrenial war monger. Getting paid. Ukraine, like 11 out of 12 publications in Ukraine, getting paid. Victor Orban, the PM of Hungary, his political opposition, funded by USAID. In Poland, the leftwing political opposition funded by USAID.' Sacks. ‘Every leftwing organization in the world seems to be getting paid by this slush fund USAID, which disperses $50b a year.’ Sacks noted that he wondered how much support there really was for any of these leftwing goals in any of these countries. Chamath noted that a lot of the issues which are undertaken by charity and aid organizations, they might actually be inflated and perhaps not as serious a problem as Americans and others believe.
How USDAID got to the top of DOGE's list, was on January 21, Trump signed executive orders including pausing foreign aid for 90 days, part of his mandate for Trump 2.0. ... A few days later the White House noted that this agency (which isn't even really well known in America among citizens) called USAID was going to circumvent this order and try to just continue their payments. That alerted the DOGE team (Musk tweeted that ‘all DOGE did was check to see which federal organizationwere violating the POTUS executive orders the most.’ USAID tried to prevent DOGE employeees from accessing secure USAID systems, or even getting into their building. DOGE got access though and that's when we got the funny stories about things USAID was spending on.