Auckland University’s USAID Billions!

Is Aotearoa’s largest university, the University of Auckland, the recipient of hundreds of millions of US dollars from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)?

The answer is: no.

If you want more, read on…

Alright, before I start on what’s about to follow, I need to take a deep breath, because this is a lot…

There’s a reasonable amount of backstory for this, and it’s so stupid and very disheartening, but let me touch on it briefly.

Donald Trump won the 2024 US Presidential election thanks, in part, to hundreds of millions of dollars from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. And to thank Elon for this, or perhaps just because he likes being near a genuine billionaire, Trump pulled Elon into his inner circle and charged him with eliminating government waste.

Every sentence I write here makes me feel stupider and is worthy of thousands of words on its own, but we struggle on anyway.

Elon declared his efficiency effort to be called the Department Of Government Efficiency, or DOGE for short — it’s a stupid meme in-joke that refers to a joke crypto currency that Elon took an interest in some years back, which then accidentally became a real thing. The crypto currency itself was an in-joke reference to a meme about a Japanese dog. Argh! WHY AM I WRITING THIS?!

Anyway, in the weeks after Trump’s inauguration Elon and his DOGE henchmen (who are seemingly made up of internet edgelords barely out of their teens) set their sights on USAID. The decades-old institution is the agency by which the United States delivers almost all its international aid — if you’ve heard about US-backed efforts to eradicate disease, or to promote democracy anywhere in the world, it's being managed by USAID.

Their attacks on the agency were swift and, according to most non-Trumpian lawyers, illegal. But they were effective. In under a week the DOGE kids were able to effectively freeze all USAID spending, and disestablish the agency’s global operations, placing thousands of agency staff worldwide on immediate administrative leave and implementing plans to bring them all back to the US.

It is a legitimate global catastrophe that will directly result in the deaths of thousands of people in the developing world and is doing incalculable harm to the global reputation of the US. But that’s beyond the scope of this.

Those actions led to this:

This is an accusation from an online conspiracy theorist that Auckland University received over a billion NZ dollars from the US government, via USAID.

The university’s social media team had a go at setting the record straight, but it was futile.

And Mr. TheShadow isn’t the only person pointing the finger at the university.

These names (and many of the others sharing the same information as if they were their own unique discovery) will be familiar to anyone who’s followed NZ’s conspiracy theory scene, or some of the very ugly politics that became prevalent on social media during the height of NZ anti-Covid efforts.

But what might not be immediately clear is why there would be an immediate leap to connect these numbers (whatever they might mean) to USAID, and why that would necessarily be a bad thing.

To understand that you need to look at some of the claims of America’s conspiracy theorist in chief — the world’s richest man, and the head of DOGE — Elon Musk.

These are just a few of the dozens of baseless attacks that Elon has posted and retweeted on the social media platform he owns.

USAID has become, for the US right and conspiracy theorists (who are in many ways one in the same these days), a shorthand for “deep state” power. In their minds any and all groups associated with USAID were part of the deep state mechanism for global power.

On the day that Elon’s unelected techno hit-squad effectively froze USAID’s bank accounts, the US political news website Politico happened to have a coincidental payroll issue that saw pay delayed for their staff.

By putting two and two together, brave social media commentators were immediately able to tell their audience it was seven!!

And now the conspiracy crowd is frantically Googling for financial connections between USAID and any organisation they suspect to be some arm of the deep state.

However, as is basically universally true in these situations, the “do your own research” crew are very bad at doing their own research.

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So, back to that first tweet — what was the “forensic audit of the USAID database” that was being referenced for this billion dollar number?

It’s from a website called “Data Republican” that aggregates public information of various sorts. In this case the data is drawn from the public taxation records of US “501(c)(3)” non-profit organizations. As a recipient of some US funding (as any large university with research programmes might be) they university is registered as a non-profit for tax purposes in the US, and has to file regular returns as part of that process.

In their IRS 990 form for the 2023 tax year, they report “government grants” of just under $300m.

The number is in US dollars and, in the context of a New Zealand-based organisation, it refers to the New Zealand government.

The same number is reported in the university’s 2023 financial statements, although in NZ dollars. The conversion is based on an early 2024 exchange rate that saw NZ$1 buy about US$0.61.

But what about the “OVER $1BILLION NZD” in the original tweet? Well that’s for what’s reported on Data Republican as the university’s total grant revenue – lines e and f from the 990 form added together. And then, presumably an outdated back-of-the-envelope conversion to NZD where the US dollar is about twice the NZ dollar — even with our poor performance against the US dollar, that amount is only about $910 million today, and would have been closer to $830 million in early 2024.

So, not more than a billion dollars, not government revenue and even the government revenue isn’t the US government… and even if it was the US government it wasn’t USAID.

But hang on a second, what about sites that show actual US government spending with the University of Auckland?

Well the screenshot that Cam Slater shows is from USASpending.gov — an actual US government website that does show government expenditures via grants and other awards. And indeed, it shows US$2.7million going to the university. But that’s over 17 years, and none of it is from USAID.

But, let’s be as transparent as we can be, there is evidence of USAID money going to the University of Auckland. In this case it’s through “subawards” where one organisation that is the recipient of a “prime award” then contracts some of that out to another provider.

Between 2021 and 2023 the University of Auckland received five subawards worth a total of about US$350k from a USAID grant to the Education Development Center Inc to improve global educational outcomes.

The total value of that USAID grant, over five years, is US$36.8 million.

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USAID is the current boogey-man for conspiracy theorists and ideologically stunted commentators who are using their claims about the agency and its funding to both reinforce their bureaucratic coup in destroying it, and to make confusing disinformation about entities against which they have existing negative biases.

The nature of USAID is not what’s claimed, and association with it, no matter how provable, isn’t evidence of corruption.

There are absolutely criticisms to be made about the way the US has historically used their foreign aid to influence geopolitics, but the wholesale accusations being made by Musk and his acolytes are not based in reality or reasoned policy positions.