The State Department and USAID spent nearly $1.2 billion across 470 projects meant to counter Chinese influence worldwide between fiscal year 2020 and 2023, and couldn't tell auditors whether any of it worked. A Government Accountability Office report found the agencies had no reliable data to track the projects, no framework to measure effectiveness, and in many cases couldn't even identify what they had funded.
The GAO findings, reported by Just the News, paint a picture of an inter-agency spending machine that distributed more than a billion taxpayer dollars over five years without basic bookkeeping, let alone strategic results.
The numbers are not rounding errors. They describe a systemic failure of oversight at the agencies responsible for America's most important geopolitical competition.
When the GAO requested information on the 470 counter-China projects, officials at the State Department and USAID couldn't hand it over. They didn't have it. Instead, 58 teams from State and 55 from USAID had to scramble across bureaus and overseas posts to compile data from scattered sources, a process that took nearly five months and still came back riddled with holes.
The GAO report, designated GAO-26-107822, laid out the damage in plain language:
"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."
Of the estimated 470 projects, officials couldn't provide time frame data for 129. They couldn't provide "lines of effort" data for 38. They couldn't furnish award numbers for about one-fifth of the portfolio. Start and end dates were missing for roughly one-quarter. Obligations data, meaning how much money was actually committed, was absent for about one-third.
And for nearly one-third of all approved proposals, officials didn't even receive data on which specific projects got funded. That means the people running America's only dedicated counter-China fund couldn't tell the GAO the names, award numbers, or implementing teams for a large share of the projects they were supposedly overseeing.
The spending wasn't just poorly tracked. It was never evaluated. The inter-agency working group that managed the fund never measured effectiveness across the counter-China portfolio, not once in the five-year period the GAO examined.
The working group didn't review results from prior projects when deciding whether to approve new proposals. In other words, past performance was irrelevant. Whether a project succeeded, failed, or simply vanished into the bureaucratic ether had no bearing on future funding decisions.
The pattern mirrors other federal accountability failures. Lawmakers have confronted similar breakdowns in Medicare hospice fraud, where hundreds of millions drained from the system before anyone noticed.
The GAO noted this wasn't even a new problem at State. The watchdog flagged it as a recurring institutional deficiency:
"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."
So the State Department has been warned before. And it kept doing the same thing, spending freely, tracking poorly, and learning nothing.
Perhaps the most revealing detail in the GAO report involves the State Department's own China-expert foreign service officers, described as "RCOs", stationed in the regions where these projects operated. Annual proposal guidance did not require these officers to review proposals for effectiveness or likelihood of success.
Why not? The GAO report offered the State Department's reasoning:
"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."
Read that again. The State Department sidelined its own China specialists from reviewing counter-China proposals because letting them weigh in might create awkward office dynamics. The agency prioritized bureaucratic comfort over strategic competence.
This is the kind of institutional logic that ensures money flows out the door but never produces results. The people best positioned to evaluate whether a counter-China project would actually counter China were kept away from the decision-making table, by design.
The concern takes on sharper edges when you consider how aggressively China has worked to expand its influence inside American institutions. One public university trained over 1,500 Chinese state managers in MBA programs the CCP helped design, a program that ran for a quarter-century before drawing scrutiny.
The inter-agency working group didn't begin developing a framework to evaluate effectiveness until 2023, three years and hundreds of millions of dollars into the spending. That belated effort then stalled when an executive order in January 2025 paused foreign assistance funds.
State Department officials have not committed to restarting the framework's development.
So the trajectory is clear: spend first, promise accountability later, then abandon the accountability effort when it becomes inconvenient. The taxpayer is left holding a billion-dollar receipt with no way to know what it bought.
The GAO report is available in full through its product page, and the findings deserve sustained congressional attention.
The counter-China debacle doesn't exist in isolation. Federal agencies have repeatedly demonstrated an inability, or unwillingness, to track massive expenditures and hold programs accountable for results.
The Pentagon's F-35 fighter jet program offers a parallel case. A separate GAO report found the military is set to spend at least $1.7 trillion on nearly 2,500 F-35s that can only complete missions 55 percent of the time. More than 10,000 aircraft have been grounded for repairs. The GAO warned that "difficult decisions regarding sustainment continue to be delayed," as the New York Post reported.
Whether it's fighter jets or foreign influence programs, the pattern holds: enormous sums committed, minimal oversight applied, and taxpayers left wondering where the money went.
The China competition makes this especially dangerous. Beijing is not standing still. A leaked Pentagon intelligence report revealed China has been arming U.S. allies, a strategic challenge that demands a serious, measurable American response, not a billion-dollar wish list with no follow-through.
Several questions remain unanswered. Which countries received the counter-China funding? What types of programs were funded? Did any of the 470 projects produce measurable results, even absent a formal evaluation? Has the State Department or USAID issued a formal response to the GAO's findings? And what specific recommendations did the GAO make?
These are not academic questions. They go to the heart of whether the federal government can be trusted to spend money on its stated priorities, or whether entire programs exist mainly to justify budget lines and staff positions.
The government's track record on financial accountability already gives taxpayers reason for skepticism. A billion dollars spent with no tracking, no evaluation, and no commitment to do better is not a program. It's a blank check.
After five years and $1.2 billion, the only thing Washington proved it can counter is accountability itself.
