DOGE and the Department of State

Editor’s Note: This article is part of the DOGE Files, a series of investigations into federal grants to nonprofits that Capital Research Center is conducting. We are pleased the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and others are exploring the vast forest of nonprofits trying to influence the U.S. government—an area that Capital Research Center has spent years mapping.

This article explores grants made by the Department of State.

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Already the Department of State, now led by Marco Rubio, has felt the wrath of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Just this week it was reported that the State Department’s biggest nonprofit grantee, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), had been cut off and was struggling to make payroll after just one week. NED was initially created to fight communism but more recently became infamous for financing wildly unsuccessful “nation building” endeavors that blew up in the face of the United States.

(The Center for Renewing America published an excellent report covering the numerous reasons the NED deserved to be defunded, which can be found here.)

There is still a great deal left for DOGE to cut, though.

Refugee Resettlement Grants

If an impartial extraterrestrial observer were to descend to Earth and review the State Department’s grants, it would probably conclude that most of the world’s population must be refugees. The amount of cash thrown at foreign and domestic refugee assistance programs is staggering. As of December 2024, when CRC initially exported federal grant data from USASpending.gov, the State Department reported obligating $2.25 billion toward 453 new grants to nonprofits that used “refugee” in the provided grant descriptions.

Church World Service. Of this, $375 million in grants was awarded to Church World Services for various projects focused on refugees, most of it for refugee processing and placement within the United States. The largest grant ($92.3 million) says merely that the grant is for “[providing] regional refugee processing service for all U.S. refugee admissions.”

Church World Services has a clear left-wing political stance that it is working hard to hide. The group recently sued the Trump administration for suspending refugee aid funds, while also apparently deleting its DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) webpages and several press releases criticizing the previous Trump administration. In 2020 the group published a “Platform on Racial Justice” that advocated for ending cash bail and all fines, defunding police departments, rejoining the Paris Climate Accords, entirely banning police use of force, enacting nationwide automatic voter registration, banning police officers from schools, decriminalizing prostitution, decriminalizing all drug possession, and ending all immigration law enforcement. The platform also claims that “White capitalism holds a legacy of unchecked power that dictates how land around the world is used, distributed and dismantled.”

According to its latest Form 990, Church World Services raised $218.5 million from July 2022 to June 2023 and $186.4 million, or 85 percent, of it came from government grants.

International Rescue Committee. Another $386 million was awarded to the International Rescue Committee (IRC). While most of the largest grants are for the resettling of refugees in the United States, many are for refugees outside the United States. IRC was awarded $90 million for assisting refugees from Burma and Myanmar living in Thailand, $14 million for Somali refugees living in Kenya, $12.5 million for Sudanese refugees living in Chad, $10.7 million for refugees in Uganda, $9 million for Rohingya nomads living in Bangladesh, $7.6 million for Syrian refugees living in Jordan, and many others.

IRC has a poor record of using government funds properly. In March 2021, IRC agreed to pay $6.9 million to settle allegations that it allowed procurement fraud in Turkey after the USAID Inspector General’s office found that conduct by IRC staff resulted in the procurement of goods at unreasonably high prices” due to “IRC staff [participating] in a collusion and kickback scheme with a Turkish supply ring.” According to their latest Form 990, IRC receives 61 percent of its revenue from government grants.

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services. Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS), now known as Global Refuge, is another major refugee resettlement organization. After the 2020 election, LIRS published a statement praising Biden’s electoral win while calling the first Trump administration a “dark chapter” in history, castigating its policies as “xenophobic.”

LIRS’s statement on the 2024 election results was not nearly as cheery, but at least it refrains from further name-calling. The LIRS 2022–2024 Strategic Plan LIRS reported receiving $221 million, or 95 percent of its revenue, from government grants in 2023 and has received $215 million in new State Department grants over the last four years. Health and Human Services has also granted LIRS $582 million.

A Perverse Pattern

Dozens if not hundreds of other groups receive massive State Department grants for refugee resettlement, but examining all of them would be tedious and repetitive. Many have recent financial mismanagement scandals and minimal oversight, most of them receive well over 50 percent of their revenue from the government, and almost all of them openly support left-wing policy agendas and are currently supporting some kind of legal action to retain their funding from the State Department and other agencies. There is something perverse about taxpayer funds being used to sue the duly elected representatives of the taxpayers to require them to continue forking over tax dollars, especially when the groups suing are often outspokenly political and plagued by scandal. Pausing further funding for these groups to allow for administration reviews seems more than justified.

Funding and Training Journalists

The Biden State Department initiated $19.1 million worth of new grants to nonprofits using the key words “journalist” or “journalism.” Government funding of media is already controversial, to say the least, but many of these grants went toward obviously wasteful programs at home and opaque training programs for unnamed journalists abroad:

• $1.6 million to InterNews Network, an international journalist-training nonprofit, to “Foster social cohesion and sociocultural inclusion among refugees and host communities through the provision of critical and engaging information in Jamjang and Maban, South Sudan.” The grant was initially awarded in September 2022, and in November 2022 InterNews sub-awarded $477,314 to Community Engagement Network for “Refugee Voices II: two-way humanitarian communications in Jamjang.” Community Engagement Network (CEN) doesn’t have a functioning website, but Facebook posts show that in November 2022, CEN launched “Rooted in Trust 2.0,” which handed out free smartphones and radios to “Combat COVID-19 Romors [sic].”
• $2.3 million to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) for their reporting on organized crime in Malta and Cyprus. Journalism Development Network has received roughly $7 million from the Open Society Network since 2016, making George Soros the group’s largest nongovernment donor. Subawards show that most of the funds were directed to Ciren, OCCRP’s Cyprian publication that trains journalists and has published several articles on Russian oligarchs.
• A total of $6.2 million was awarded to the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) for a wide variety of programs. One $986,500 grant went toward combating “technology-facilitated gender-based violence” against female reporters in India and Nepal. In September 2024, a different $986,500 grant went toward “an investigative hub for transnational collaborative journalism” in Kenya. Other grants awarded to ICFJ went toward investigative journalism training and rewards in Georgia, Ethiopia, Tunisia, Pakistan, Central America, Algeria, and Guinea.
• $2 million to World Learning Inc. for supporting resilience to disinformation in Armenia. Of that funding, $275,219 was then sub-granted to the left-of-center Poynter Institute, which, among other things, runs the controversial fact-checking website PolitiFact.
• A total of $1.2 million to InquireFirst, a California nonprofit that received 80 percent of its revenue ($458,530) from government grants in 2023. Each of the grants describes some kind of training program for investigative journalists in Mexico and South America reporting on migration. According to Facebook posts from InquireFirst Executive Director, Lynne, InquireFirst flew 55 journalists from 11 countries into the United States for one-week training sessions during 2024. What exactly journalists were taught in these sessions is not clear.
• $215,000 to pay for five journalists, three from Armenia and two from Azerbaijan, to come to the United States for a one-week program and cover the 2024 presidential election and produce documentaries and news pieces on it. Azerbaijan, which is not exactly known for its commitment to freedom of the press, recently began arresting journalists on dubious “smuggling” charges.
• $55,750 to a group called Chicas Ponderosas for “Journalistic and collaborative research about the impact of climate change in five regions of Argentina carried out by a team of female and LGBTQ journalists photographers and designers located in five different parts of the country.”

Other groups have also received funding for training law enforcement in other countries. The Asia Foundation received $1.5 million to “increase accountability” for gender-based violence in the Pakistani judicial system. The University of San Diego received $3 million for a “law student litigation and mediation initiative” in Mexico. The Strategic Capacity Group received $2.5 million to support the drug enforcement, immigration, and border patrol agencies of Liberia.

Lax Accounting

The State Department is apparently extremely lax in reporting “outlays” or actual payments, as opposed to “obligations” or promised funds not necessarily disbursed yet. For the vast majority of Department of State grants, $0 in outlays is reported on the USASpending.org database as of the time of this writing, even though outlays have almost certainly been made on many of them.

This is undoubtably one of the many problems with federal spending reports that DOGE would do well to try to fix. Because of this, the discussion above relies on current “obligations” for its numbers and figures, as that is the most consistent form of readily available data.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/doge-and-the-department-of-state/