2 Decades Ago, a Senator’s Probe of USAID Funding Led to Government Transparency Reform

Public disclosure of federal spending today is thanks largely to a Republican senator from Oklahoma.

U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on March 9, 2011. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

News Analysis

Revelations that USAID officials are spending hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars overseas for controversial projects such as advancing atheism in Nepal and funding “transgender opera” in Columbia are nothing new.

Nearly 20 years ago, in October 2005, the refusal of USAID officials to admit they were funding a prostitution ring in India so angered Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) that he vowed to introduce a new law enabling every U.S. citizen with the internet to quickly and easily find out how federal officials are spending his or her tax dollars.

A year later, President George W. Bush’s signing of Coburn’s proposal into law—thus mandating the creation of today’s USASpending.gov—marked a huge step forward in making government spending easily accessible for every citizen with internet access.

Coburn described the USAID coverup in detail in his Senate floor speech in April 2006 as he introduced the promised proposal, which was known as the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA).

The FFATA proposal was a bipartisan one from the beginning, with then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Sen. John McCain (R-Az.), and Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) as co-sponsors.

Coburn, who was already well-known among his Senate colleagues as “Dr. No” for his opposition to wasteful federal spending and his annual compilation of examples, called the “Wastebook,” assembled a crack staff of congressional investigators and communicators who constantly exposed outrages such as the $329 million earmark better known as Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere.”

In his FFATA floor speech, Coburn described how USAID officials fought his staff investigators every step of the way in their probe of the agency’s funding of a nongovernmental organization (NGO) called “Sampada Grameen Mahila Sanstha (SANGRAM).

Coburn quoted an unclassified State Department memorandum concerning how SANGRAM opposed a U.N. agency’s effort to free 17 young Indian girls from a prostitution ring.

“The girls are now back in the brothels, being subjected to rape for profit,'' the memorandum said.

“On November 16, 2005, a USAID briefer asserted to subcommittee staff that USAID had ‘nothing to do with’ the grant to the pro-prostitution SANGRAM and that the subcommittee’s inquiries were ‘destructive,’” the Oklahoma lawmaker told his Senate colleagues.

“Nonetheless, congressional investigators continued to pursue this matter and eventually proved that USAID money financed the pro-prostitution SANGRAM through a second organization named Avert, which was established with the assistance of four USAID employees as a pass-through entity.”

Not only did USAID officials help start Avert and fund it, but one of them also served on the group’s board of directors.

Twenty years later, USASpending.gov has been used for billions of searches by journalists, congressional staffers, academic researchers, and nonprofit advocacy groups seeking information about how the federal government spends trillions of tax dollars every year.

Many of those searches produce widely read and discussed news stories about waste and fraud in government.

Roland Foster, who was one of Coburn’s staff investigators as his legislative director, is now a special adviser to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa).

Ernst makes public a monthly “Squeal Award” that highlights the latest examples of tax dollars being wasted.

She has also introduced legislation to strengthen USASpending.gov, including the Stop Secret Spending Act that penalizes agencies that hide spending from disclosure and “TRACKS,” to require prompt and accurate reporting of funds going to China.

U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) questions former Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought during a U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on his second nomination to be OMB director, on Capitol Hill in Washington on Jan. 15, 2025. Jemal Countess/ AFP

When asked about the current USAID revelations, Foster told The Epoch Times that “between USAspending and Wastebook, Senator Coburn created the blueprint empowering every taxpayer to continue carrying on his mission today as a DOGE deputy.”

John Hart, the recently appointed chief executive officer of Open the Books, the website that captures virtually all spending by every level of government in America, was Coburn’s long-time communications director, including during the years when FFATA was conceived, written, proposed, and adopted by Congress.

Hart told The Epoch Times that the latest USAID revelations were no surprise for him.

“It’s been an open secret for years that USAID was not spending effectively on vital humanitarian assistance,” Hart said.

“Decades ago, Senator Coburn was pointing out that agency’s funding of radical organizations that use the money for far-left, dangerous or even criminal activities. It’s a relief that a reckoning has come.”