Max Primorac: Former USAID Official Speaks Out Against Decades-Long Agency Corruption

The United States Agency of International Development (USAID) has become President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) poster child for waste, fraud, and abuse of American taxpayer dollars.

And there is arguably no one in Washington, D.C. who knows more about how USAID works—or doesn’t—than Max Primorac, who formerly served as USAID’s Chief Operating Officer and chief assistant to the Acting Deputy Administrator during the first Trump administration. Primorac, now a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, joined me this week on The Signal Sitdown to discuss what we now know about USAID’s corruption, how it was corrupted in the first place, and what other revelations could be coming down the pike.

One of Primorac’s early interactions with USAID was as a member of a non-governmental organization (NGO) while working in eastern Europe after the breakup of former Yugoslavia. Primorace said he “came to know USAID operating in the area and already had identified some problematic things,” 1990s precursors to “a lot of the woke stuff that we see today.”

Though USAID was founded in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy to counter the Soviet Union’s exportation of communism, it appears the fox is now in the hen house. Just one month into the Trump administration, DOGE, led by Elon Musk, has exposed millions of dollars worth of USAID contracts devoted to exporting western progressivism, such as $45 million to DEI in Burma, $520 million to ESG in Africa, $20 million on creating an Iraqi Sesame Street, and $1.2 billion for “undisclosed” purposes.

USAID became “something that the left saw as an opportunity to wage their culture war, not only on America, but on the entire world,” Primorac said.