Trump Slashed USAID and Now America Just Found Out How Much One Alleged Fraudster Hid Under Obama and Biden

Trump greenlit DOGE early in his second term and immediately exposed USAID's budget

The President began to slash but watchdogs are still counting the wreckage inside.

Now, they’ve discovered why one USAID contracting officer kept funnelling taxpayer cash Congress handed him to special contracts and exactly whose hands that cash was landing in.

Roderick Watson Pocketed a Million Dollars While Running USAID Contracts

Roderick Watson held a USAID contracting officer post with the power to steer hundreds of millions of your tax dollars.

In June 2025, the 57-year-old pleaded guilty to running a bribery scheme that started all the way back in 2013.

Watson admitted taking roughly $1 million in bribes.

He claimed it came from contractors Walter Barnes and Darryl Britt, who owned the firms Vistant and Apprio.

The payoffs were not subtle.

Watson pocketed cash, NBA suite tickets, laptops, cell phones, a mortgage down payment, jobs for his relatives, and even a country club wedding.

A subcontractor executive named Paul Young allegedly helped launder the scheme through shell companies and fake invoices so investigators would not connect the dots.

The payoff for all that corruption was an $800 million migration contract Vistant landed in November 2023.

When a legal challenge threatened to unravel it, prosecutors say a fresh $10,000 payment in August 2024 helped keep the deal alive.

Acting Assistant Inspector General Sean Bottary put it bluntly after the guilty pleas: "Corruption in government programs will not be tolerated."

The scheme ran from 2013 until his arrest while USAID leadership looked the other way.

Fox News reported the corruption unfolded at the very agency congressional Democrats spent early 2025 fighting to protect from DOGE auditors.

Watchdogs Found Millions in Food Aid Rotting While Terror Groups Cashed In

The bribery case is not an isolated embarrassment.

Inspector general reports piling up this year show USAID money and supplies ending up in the hands of America's enemies and rotting in warehouses instead of feeding hungry families.

In Yemen, the Houthi terror group Ansar Allah got its hands on $122,000 worth of equipment funded by an American aid grant.

USAID also kept funneling money to the UN Relief and Works Agency even after auditors found 101 of its employees or associates had ties to terror groups including Hamas, some serving as teachers, principals, and military commanders at the same time.

Meanwhile the food meant for starving families – and in all likelihood as cover for covert arms shipments – never even made it out the door.

A USAID inspection found $21 million of emergency food aid sitting in Djibouti warehouses as of June 2025, and more than $17 million of it had never even been assigned to a distributor.

Another $10 million sat at risk of expiring before delivery, while $2.9 million had already spoiled and $1.5 million was infested with pests because nobody enforced basic temperature controls.

In Ethiopia, American food aid meant for the desperate was instead diverted and sold off in online marketplaces.

And when a grantee employee in Zambia embezzled $193,295 in program funds, in a case similar to a separate embezzlement investigation out of Zimbabwe, the Justice Department declined to bring federal charges in the Zambia case.

Every one of those failures happened under the watch of Obama and Biden era USAID management, and every one of them only came to light because auditors finally got the access Rubio's team gave them.

Trump Is Finally Doing What Should Have Happened Years Ago

Marco Rubio announced in March 2025 that 83 percent of USAID's contracts were being canceled outright, with what remained folded directly into the State Department.

USAID headquarters shut its doors that February, and employees who had rubber-stamped this mess for years were barred from even walking back inside.

Democrats howled that gutting USAID would end the world as we know it, and they never once mentioned the bribery, the terror ties, or the rotting warehouses while they said it.

That is the part that fires people up.

From 2013 until his arrest, the same politicians lecturing Americans about accountability let a contracting officer take bribes on an $800 million deal without anyone in Washington asking a single question.

The pattern here is not new, either.

USAID inspectors general have flagged self-dealing and lax contractor oversight going back through prior administrations, but nothing changed until Trump and Rubio actually pulled the plug and let the auditors loose.

Every fresh guilty plea and every new inspector general report is not a random scandal popping up out of nowhere.

It is the wreckage of a foreign aid bureaucracy finally getting dragged into the daylight, one bribe and one rotten shipment at a time.

Sources:

• "Former USAID official, three contractors plead guilty in $550M bribery scheme," Nextgov/FCW, June 2025.
• Fox News Staff, "Federal contracting officer pleads guilty in massive bribery scheme at agency Democrats fought to protect from DOGE," Fox News, June 2025.
• "While Trump sharply cuts foreign aid, past abuses from the Obama-Biden era keep piling up," Just the News, August 2026.
• "Federal Watchdogs Detail Foreign-Aid Fraud, Terror Diversions and Millions in Spoiled Food as Trump Reshapes USAID," Your News, August 2026.
• "Rubio announces that 83% of USAID contracts will be canceled," NPR, March 2025.
• "State Department Must Stop Funding Radical U.N. Humanitarian Agency," The Heritage Foundation.