\n<\/p>\n
If the U.S. Agency for International Development <\/span>is a front for the CIA, we\u2019re about to find out all about it. A new official inside the agency is prepared to blow the lid off the whole conspiracy.<\/p>\n That official is Mike Benz, a right-wing influencer who popularized the notion that Taylor Swift is a secret NATO asset and once wrote, under a pseudonym, \u201cI want white identity politics to grow like wildfire.\u201d Benz rose to prominence last year by spreading fantastical claims about USAID, portraying the agency as a terrorist organization or a spy operation\u2014or both. His comments caught the attention of Elon Musk, setting into motion the dramatic dismantling of the agency. USAID, Benz argued earlier this year, \u201cis notorious for funding the darkest, most controversial, most horrifying projects known to all of mankind.\u201d<\/p>\n So it was somewhat surprising for staff remaining at the decimated agency when Benz strode into their office last week. U.S. officials who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to describe Benz\u2019s position said he\u2019s a special government employee, a type of executive-branch appointee brought in to perform important services for a limited period of time. Musk had the same status when his DOGE initiative took a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy.<\/p>\n Benz\u2019s mission, officials told me, is to use the agency\u2019s archives to substantiate his own allegations about USAID\u2019s pernicious influence in the world\u2014its role in foreign regime change, its promotion of \u201cstate-sponsored hit pieces,\u201d and its suppression of free speech. He\u2019s fixated, for example, on communications among USAID staff following the 2024 election, which he has told associates holds the key to the agency\u2019s wrongdoing. But his ambitions are ultimately broader, officials said. He wants to prove that USAID has secretly incited so-called color revolutions, a pejorative used often by Russian President Vladimir Putin to blame Western powers for popular uprisings in post-Soviet countries.<\/p>\n Benz did not respond to a request for comment. Current and former USAID employees predicted that Benz\u2019s research is going to come up short.<\/p>\n Until this year,<\/span> USAID provided food, medicine, shelter, and access to clean water in some of the bleakest parts of the world. Its programs treated acute malnutrition in Ethiopia, brought hygiene and sanitation projects to displaced Gazans, and offered security and shelter to Haitians fleeing gang violence. Its roughly 10,000 employees worked in more than 100 countries; in the most recent fiscal year, it spent $21.7 billion, accounting for a mere 0.3 percent of federal spending.<\/p>\n The agency was created by Congress in 1961, an outgrowth of Cold War competition. Humanitarian assistance, the thinking went, was vital to the kind of soft power necessary to counter Soviet influence. In its early years, USAID sometimes advanced CIA operations, perhaps most notoriously through a blandly titled Office of Public Safety that trained police and paramilitary forces in allied countries. A series of reforms sought to divorce development initiatives from intelligence work. Some clandestine work continued. In 2010, USAID created a social-networking service in Cuba designed to kindle opposition to the government.<\/p>\n Predictably, USAID is deeply unpopular with autocratic regimes, which accuse the agency of meddling in their internal affairs. In addition to food and clean water, USAID grants have supported election monitors, anti-corruption watchdogs, and independent media outlets. In 2012, Putin\u2019s government blocked the agency\u2019s grants and expelled its workers. Human-rights activists lamented USAID\u2019s departure, but Russian authorities argued that its true aim was improper political influence. The same argument\u2014that humanitarian assistance was a smoke screen for regime change\u2014eventually found support among Trump acolytes.<\/p>\n Enter Mike Benz, a brash 41-year-old who worked mid-level jobs in Trump\u2019s first administration, including a short stint at the State Department. Afterwards, he founded the Foundation for Freedom Online, presenting himself as a \u201cnational expert on how the government, agencies, non-profits, and large internet platforms work together to censor the speech of Americans.\u201d This year, the Trump administration has illegally targeted noncitizens for pro-Palestinian speech, according to a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan; threatened broadcast networks over unfavorable coverage; and encouraged campaigns of intimidation against people who criticize the slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. But in Benz\u2019s telling, the foremost threat to free expression is USAID and associated U.S. humanitarian missions cloaking plots against global right-wing movements. \u201cUSAID declared censorship holy war against every single populist group,\u201d Benz has said. If USAID didn\u2019t exist, he argued, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro would still be in power \u201cand Brazil would still have a free and open internet.\u201d<\/p>\n In the weeks before Trump returned to the White House and put Musk in charge of downsizing the federal government, Benz\u2019s outlandish claims appeared to ignite Musk\u2019s animus toward USAID. On Joe Rogan\u2019s podcast, Benz argued that the agency\u2019s very name was some kind of psychological operation. \u201cYour brain is being tricked when you see the phrase USAID<\/em>,\u201d he said during the December 3, 2024, broadcast. \u201cIt\u2019s not an aid organization.\u201d USAID, Benz said, \u201cis effectively a switch player to assist the Pentagon on the national-security front, to assist the State Department on the national-interest front, or to assist the intelligence community on a sort of clandestine-operations front.\u201d<\/p>\n Musk reposted highlights from the podcast with the caption, \u201cMike Benz just revealed everything.\u201d Weeks later, Musk\u2019s DOGE initiative began freezing grants and putting agency staff on leave. Benz\u2019s assertions\u2014including his reference to USAID as the \u201cTerror Titanic\u201d\u2014offered justification for \u201cfeeding USAID into the wood chipper,\u201d as Musk boasted of doing in February. He called USAID a \u201ccriminal organization.\u201d A Washington Post<\/em> analysis at the time found that the billionaire had reposted, replied to, or otherwise mentioned Benz more than 160 times in the previous year, and that he had never posted about USAID before interacting with Benz\u2019s content.<\/p>\n Benz\u2019s influence quickly grew. He landed an interview on Tucker Carlson\u2019s podcast and appeared with Secretary of State Marco Rubio in April to celebrate a move by the State Department to shut down an office aimed at countering foreign disinformation. \u201cThis is amazing news,\u201d Benz said.<\/p>\n It was a remarkable star turn for a right-wing activist who once worked in the shadows. Benz used to blog under the pseudonym \u201cFrame Game,\u201d as NBC News reported in 2023, exposing comments he had made about \u201cwhite genocide\u201d and \u201cJewish influence.\u201d In a lengthy post on social media responding to the revelations, Benz said he was Jewish and that his intent was actually to \u201cget people who hated Jews to stop hating Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n In one post, from 2018, he elaborated on his aims: \u201cI want two things for the world my grandkids grow up in: (1) A nuclear proliferation treaty on ethnic identity politics in America, and (2) a reversal of white demographic suicide.\u201d There were white nationalists who wanted to go further than that, he acknowledged. \u201cI\u2019m not a White Nationalist,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI don\u2019t have any problem with White Nationalists; it\u2019s just not me.\u201d<\/p>\n Musk may have fed USAID<\/span> into the wood chipper, but the agency is not fully dead. The Office of Management and Budget, led by the powerful Trump ally Russell Vought, gained responsibility for its oversight at the end of August. A U.S. official estimated that about 75 people still work at USAID, managing remaining contracts and helping transfer other functions to the State Department.<\/p>\n The majority of the agency\u2019s employees used to be distributed around the world; they were laid off or put on leave. Those who remain occupy the ninth floor of an office building in downtown Washington, about three blocks from the White House. That\u2019s where Benz showed up last week, telling his new colleagues that Vought had hired him as a special government employee and given him a mandate to investigate USAID from the inside. A spokesperson for Vought did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n Benz has already chafed at aspects of his role, officials told me. He complained to multiple colleagues about the orientation session on ethics, arguing that his status as a special government employee should allow him to operate outside of traditional protocols, as Musk did. In these conversations, he expressed concern, one of the officials told me, that he could be accused of improperly benefiting from his government role by using nonpublic information on his social media. His online commentary continues unabated. In recent days, he wrote on social media that he holds USAID responsible for politically motivated arrests in foreign countries, including in Moldova, the former Soviet republic neighboring Ukraine.<\/p>\n Current and former USAID staff I spoke with predicted that Benz\u2019s research project will end up being consistent with a pattern in Trump\u2019s second term: acolytes of the president who whipped up supporters with grotesque tales of government wrongdoing suddenly gaining government power and struggling to find facts to support their mudslinging. This has played out most notably in the case of government files about Jeffrey Epstein, which Trump and his associates once dangled before their base as evidence of Democratic malfeasance but then resisted releasing once they took office.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also consistent with the Trump administration\u2019s willingness to devote government resources to the investigation of far-fetched claims that seem cribbed from extremist online forums. In June, I reported that the Department of Transportation had agreed to spend as much as $2.1 million to investigate assertions made by the president that diversity, equity, and inclusion programs were to blame for the deadly January crash at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Epstein\u2019s victims say they still lack answers. The Federal Aviation Administration is still short on air-traffic controllers who are needed to prevent deadly plane crashes. And, according to a study in the medical journal The Lancet<\/em>, 14 million people could die over the next five years because of USAID cuts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If the U.S. Agency for International Development is a front for the CIA, we\u2019re about to find out all about it. A new official inside the agency is prepared to blow the lid off the whole conspiracy. That official is Mike Benz, a right-wing influencer who popularized the notion that Taylor Swift is a secret<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36595,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[20397,774,2337,6668,6951],"class_list":{"0":"post-36594","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-decimation","9":"tag-hired","10":"tag-person","11":"tag-responsible","12":"tag-usaid"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36594\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}