by Ashe Short
The State Department and USAID funded nearly $1.2 billion across 470 projects to counter Chinese influence worldwide, but there is no readily available or reliable data to track the projects or their effectiveness.
The inter-agency body managing the U.S. government’s only fund dedicated to countering Chinese influence does not keep records of what it funds, has never measured whether any of it worked, and has frozen the one effort that would have tracked it, a report has found.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently published a report finding that between fiscal year 2020 and 2023, the State Department and USAID funded nearly $1.2 billion across 470 projects to counter Chinese influence worldwide. But there is no readily available or reliable data to track the projects.
Incomplete data and errors
“In response to GAO’s request, officials stated they had to ask the bureaus and overseas posts managing the projects to compile data from various sources, resulting in incomplete data and errors,” the GAO report found. “For example, of the estimated 470 projects, officials did not provide data on time frames for 129 and lines of effort for 38. Officials also lacked data on the specific projects funded from nearly a third of the approved proposals. As a result, working group officials lack critical information to track how funds were used and determine whether the funding ultimately supports the activities described in approved proposals.”
The working group tasked with evaluating the spending didn’t even have a framework to do so, and began developing one in 2023. Two years later, in January 2025, an executive order paused foreign assistance funds. GAO found that State Department officials won’t commit to restarting the development of the framework.
In addition to not having the data, the inter-agency working group officials did not review information about the results from prior projects when deciding whether to fund new proposals. In other words, the working group officials do not know what worked and what hasn’t when determining whether to fund new or existing projects.
No measurement of effectiveness
Effectiveness has also never been measured across the portfolio. Proposal guidance asks applicants to describe project-level monitoring, but it has never required common indicators or planned evaluations that could measure results across all projects against the goal of countering Chinese influence. After five years and more than a billion dollars, no one in the government has determined whether any of the money has effectively countered Chinese influence.
Part of the problem comes from annual guidance that does not require State Department foreign service officers with China expertise stations in the region to review proposals for effectiveness or possible success. This was done, according to the GAO, “to avoid the perception that RCOs have a role in approving or rejecting proposals, which could ultimately impede [the expert’s] working relationships with posts.”
This represents a striking choice by the institution: The people most qualified to assess counter-China projects were left out of required review to protect office relationships and avoid the appearance of gatekeeping.
It took 58 teams from the State Department and 55 from USAID nearly five months to provide the data requested by the GAO, meaning it took more than 100 government teams nearly half a year to answer GAO’s basic question about how taxpayer money was spent. Even after those teams managed to find the information, what they provided was insufficient. Of the 470 estimated projects funded since fiscal year 2020, the government officials “could not provide data on award numbers for about one-fifth, start and end dates for about one-quarter, and obligations data for about one-third of projects.”
Further, the officials did not receive data on the specific projects funded from nearly one-third of the approved proposals, meaning that officials could not provide GAO with the names, award numbers, or implementing teams of the projects.
The discovery is not all GAO has found. The GAO stated that it is a pattern at the State Department. “We have previously reported that State has not tracked key program data, leading to challenges in providing readily available and accurate data on the status of programming.”
Ashe Short
Source: https://justthenews.com/government/us-spent-12-billion-countering-china-without-knowing-if-it-made-difference
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