Hours after the African Development Foundation’s chief financial officer admitted to bribery, the Senate voted on whether to abolish the obscure federal aid agency. The vote only required a simple majority, yet it failed 42-58 after 11 Republicans joined all Democrats to “table” the amendment.
“Republicans acting alone could have defunded it — and should have done so after USADF’s acting chairman and CEO called for it to be defunded, based on what he described as a culture of chronic fraud, waste, and abuse within USADF,” the amendment’s sponsor, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), said. “I look forward to hearing my colleagues explain their votes.”
The Daily Wire asked all 11 senators for their rationale over the weekend, and none replied. The Republicans are:
- John Boozman (AR)
- Shelley Capito (WV)
- Susan Collins (Maine)
- Kevin Cramer (ND)
- Lindsey Graham (SC)
- John Hoeven (ND)
- Mitch McConnell (KY)
- Jerry Moran (KS)
- Lisa Murkowski (Alaska)
- Thom Tillis (NC)
- Roger Wicker (MS)
The African Development Foundation staff locked its doors to prevent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffers from auditing it, making the agency a cause célèbre of the Left. But its chief financial officer, Mathieu Zahui, this week agreed to plead guilty to taking bribes and lying to law enforcement. One of the African groups to which the agency steered money was run by Zahui’s friend — a fellow former federal employee — who got contracts for doing no work, and wired some of it to Zahui’s personal bank account.
The Daily Wire broke the story of the African Development Foundation’s corruption, including Zahui’s bribes, in a May expose. The story showed how many of those who have seen the agency operate up-close believe it should be abolished, even though they almost all identify as liberals.
The agency would give money to African groups as “grants,” so it looked like it was complying with its mission, then require the African groups to pay bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. For example, the story said:
In one instance, the African Development Foundation awarded a grant to a Kenyan journalism group called Africa 24 and directed that group to, in turn, pay the salaries of Americans at the federal agency’s D.C. headquarters.
It recounted how the agency allegedly retaliated against its own general counsel after he told officials to stop breaking the law. The general counsel, Mateo Dunne, found that its then-CEO, C.D. Glin, had omitted his affiliation with an outside group, Root Capital, from his legally required ethics disclosures, while ADF directed money to that group.
In another example, agency program manager Kate Ristroph said in a videotaped internal investigative interview that:
The agency gave grants to the Association of Ghana Industries on the condition that it pay Pyxera Global, a D.C. organization where Glin previously worked as director of business development, to “do a study of the artisan sector in Ghana.” … “We’re in that murky territory of like, is this legal?” she said. “The CEO specifically directed it.”
She said the agency trains African grantees to avoid third-world style corruption by only giving out contracts that have been competitively bid at arms length, yet she was forced to tell them that the Americans were ordering them to do the opposite. “It puts me in a compromising position,” she said.
Dunne found that the African Development Foundation appeared to be pushing the for-profit pyramid scheme Herbalife on African peasants because Herbalife’s then-CEO was on the agency’s board.
READ MORE: This Foreign Aid Agency Locked Its Doors To Keep DOGE Out. Now We Know Why.
Glin was so abusive that one white junior employee soiled herself after Glin made her afraid to leave her desk to use the bathroom, Dunne’s investigation found.
When USADF blocked DOGE from accessing their building last year, Democrats applauded.
Now we know it is because USADF was hiding bribes, kickbacks, and fraud.
I have filed the Terminate Unaccountable Spending, Abuse, Deception, and Fraud (USADF) Act to defund these crooks. https://t.co/UoQ0qW1OYc
— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) January 30, 2026
Employees warned the public through the employee review site Glassdoor about how dysfunctional the agency was:
Brandi James, the agency’s chief of staff, said in an internal email that she tried to use government funds to pay GlassDoor to remove negative posts, but the site refused, leaving them available for anyone who cared to look.
Glin was later replaced by Travis Adkins, who arrived in 2021 after a stint at USAID as a political appointee in the Biden administration. Adkins’ assistant, who is black, filed a sworn affidavit saying “Mr. Adkins told me that he wanted his entire team (to include the General Counsel) to consist only of Black people. He wanted all of his direct reports to be Black.” Adkins has denied the allegations.
“The contracts don’t make sense, and they know [DOGE] will find lots of wrongdoing and illegal activity,” the assistant said. “I’m not a fan of DOGE, but some of the things they’re doing need to be done. They have been operating like this for years, and no one did anything about it.”
It is impossible to know why Democrats and 11 Republicans are defending the agency, since they won’t say. But if it is because they believe misconduct was limited to just Zahui, Dunne told The Daily Wire that “this is not the story of one rotten apple. It is the story of an agency that is corrupt, root and branch.”
After Dunne raised issues of misconduct, he has said, a broad spectrum of the agency’s brass began viciously retaliating against him, with Acting CEO Elisabeth Feleke even calling the police on him. Adkins placed Dunne on leave for six months, despite a law limiting “investigative leave.”
The evidence of insubordination was that he had investigated apparent spending on luxuries and personal items by top staff, when Acting CEO Elisabeth Feleke said, “I have not given Mateo direction or mandate to investigate credit card fraud.”
Adkins was forthright with the board’s chair, Jack Leslie, about what was really going on:
He wrote to Leslie that Dunne was placed on leave for his “efforts to damage USADF’s reputation via the Office of Inspector General.”
The Office of Inspector General investigation led to Zahui’s guilty plea.
A left-wing law firm has been suing to prevent President Donald Trump’s appointee as acting chairman, Pete Marocco, from leading the agency.
“The U.S. African Development Foundation provides no value to the American people, and every one of the Senators know it–even the ones who vote in favor of it,” Marocco, who led the abolition of USAID, said.
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