The now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) paid Ukrainian models and designers to go to Paris Fashion Week and other frivolous luxuries, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) said Wednesday.
Ernst revealed that USAID did not report the expenditures in public databases and tried to block her staff from seeing them, claiming they were classified. In reality, she said, they were not classified, merely embarrassing for how wasteful they were.
Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky has demanded billions from American taxpayers, raising the specter of gruesome deaths and suffering. But “staff learned that the aid intended to alleviate economic distress in the war-torn nation was spent on such frivolous activities as sending Ukrainian models and designers on junkets to New York City, London Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week, and South by Southwest in Austin, Texas,” a memo obtained by The Daily Wire said.
Ukrainian recipients of “Competitive Economy Program (CEP)” funds included, the memo said:
• A modern women’s attire company ($150,000)
• A trade mission for a fashion design house ($128,000)
• A photographer for fashion design publications ($126,000)
• A purveyor of contemporary knitwear ($161,000)
• A luxury bridal brand ($84,000)
• Marketplace for designer artisanal pieces inspired by folk crafts ($84,000)
Money going to Ukraine also went to a vineyard ($89,000), an “artisanal fruit tea company” ($104,000), a “custom carpet manufacturer” ($2 million), a confectionary company ($678,000), a dog collar manufacturer, and a designer of upscale furniture.
Ernst said that for years, USIAD had treated her efforts at congressional oversight with open hostility. She wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio this month that the agency “has engaged in a demonstrated pattern of obstructionism” in which they refused to say how they were spending money. When they begrudgingly let congressional overseers see their finances, bureaucrats videotaped the investigators and not only barred them from copying the records, but even restricted their note-taking.
Ernst, the chair of the Senate Small Business Committee, said USAID would only allow her staff to review documents “in a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) at USAID headquarters. These requirements were all presented to my staff under the false pretense that this data was classified.”
“From my staff’s review of the data on USAID assistance to businesses in Ukraine thus far, it seems clear why USAID is trying to withhold information from Congress. Based on the in-camera review, it appears that over 5,000 Ukrainian businesses received U.S. taxpayer funded assistance through the Competitive Economy Program (CEP), Investment for Business Resilience (IBR), Credit for Agricultural Producers (CAP), and Agriculture Growing Rural Opportunities (AGRO) programs with awards of up to $2 million each.”
She found that USAID was also allowing NGOs to keep more than 25% of grants for themselves, to pay for “indirect costs” such as office rent, and that it claimed it would be against the law for it to provide her information necessary to evaluate whether that was appropriate.
Zelensky is set to visit the White House Friday to sign a new mineral deal with the United States.