USAID has become a significant target for false claims since Trump reentered the White House, and scrutiny of the US’s support of Ukraine has intensified.
A false video is being shared widely on social media alleging that the US paid $4 million (€3.8 million) to Time Magazine to name Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy its “Person of the Year” in 2022.
The video is often posted with captions saying that the previous US government under President Joe Biden used taxpayer money to “brainwash” citizens and “bribe the media.”
Others say that this means you can’t trust Western media because you can supposedly buy Time’s front cover “for the right price.”
The video itself says that since starting its work, President Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, has discovered “huge amounts of money wasted by the government.”
In addition to the claims about Zelenskyy, the video mentions that USAID — the US’ international aid agency — gave more than $8 million to Politico, funded thousands of journalists, and siphoned off money to the Democratic Party.
The video uses the New York Post’s logo to suggest that the claims come from there, but a search of the American news outlet’s website shows that no such news story exists.
EuroVerify reached out to New York Post but hasn’t received a response as of the time of this fact check.
We can also check the handily-named website USAspending.gov, which doesn’t contain any details of payments to Time Magazine or Salesforce — the company founded by Time owner Marc Benioff.
Time named Zelenskyy and the Spirit of Ukraine as its Person of the Year in 2022, the year that Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It wrote at length about its rationale for doing so at the time.
USAID: a breeding ground for misinformation
USAID has become a significant target for false claims since Trump reentered the White House, and scrutiny of the US’s support of Ukraine has intensified.
The claims about $8 million for Politico for example are incorrect, because records show that USAID only paid $44,000 in subscription fees in 2023 and 2024, with additional payments coming from other government entities.
Politico also previously said in a statement to readers from CEO Goli Sheikholeslami and Editor-in-Chief John Harris that it is not getting a government subsidy.
Other media outlets have also been targeted by USAID-based misinformation: the BBC, for example, was said to have received approximately $3.2 million during the 2023-2024 financial year.
But that money didn’t go to its news operation — it went to BBC Media Action, an international charity that is “part of the BBC family”, but editorially and financially separate from BBC News, the charity said in a statement. It accounted for about 8% of BBC Media Action’s budget that year.
“We follow the BBC’s editorial standards and values in our support for public interest media,” reads the statement. “However, all of our funding goes to our own projects. These are completely separate from the journalism of BBC News. We have no influence over the editorial decision-making of BBC News. The BBC in the UK is mostly funded by a TV Licence fee.”
The BBC — not including BBC Media Action, which is a separate entity — also earns income from the organisation’s commercial subsidiaries.
The Associated Press was also among the media outlets said to receive USAID funding. Although the news wire has been paid $37.5 million by other government agencies since 2008, none of that came from USAID, according to federal government statistics.
AP spokeswoman Lauren Easton said that “the US government has long been an AP customer — through both Democratic and Republican administrations. It licenses AP’s nonpartisan journalism, just like thousands of news outlets and customers around the world. It’s quite common for governments to have contracts with news organisations for their content.”
It’s not just the media being targeted: White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said to reporters in February that USAID had spent “$1.5 million to advance DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) in Serbia’s workplaces; $70,000 for the production of a DEI musical in Ireland; $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.”
The claims quickly spread widely on social media throughout the week, but only the grant to a Serbian organisation called Grupa Izadji was awarded by USAID. Its stated aim is to “to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities.”
The rest were awarded by the State Department’s Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.
In 2022, it granted $70,884 to an Irish company for “a live musical event to promote the US and Irish shared values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.”
A grant for $25,000 was awarded in 2021 to a university in Colombia “to raise awareness and increase the transgender representation” through the production of an opera, with an additional $22,020 coming from non-federal funding.
Another $32,000 awarded in 2022 to a Peruvian organisation funded “a tailored-made comic, featuring an LGBTQ+ hero to address social and mental health issues.”
Experts told AP that it made sense that these programmes were funded by the under secretary’s office, because they’re supposed to reflect values of the US, such as diversity and democracy, and the friendship between the countries.
As recent global events force the spotlight on how much money Europe and the US send abroad, it’s crucial that the public is correctly informed.
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