Democrats championed government bureaucrats resisting Trump.
The media painted DOGE as the villain.
But a USAID official was caught in one crime that proved Elon Musk was right.
The bureaucrat who locked out auditors was hiding exactly what you suspected
The African Development Foundation was nobody's idea of a household name until its chief financial officer physically locked the doors on Elon Musk's auditors.
Mathieu Zahui refused to let DOGE examine the agency's books and Democrats couldn't praise him fast enough.
Left-wing politicians framed Zahui as a hero while sympathetic media outlets called the tiny agency "the little agency that could."
Zahui was protecting the exact corruption Americans suspected all along.
The Department of Justice dropped the hammer.
Zahui confessed to laundering taxpayer dollars through poor African nations and funneling kickbacks straight back to Washington, D.C. insiders.
The African Development Foundation sent $800,000 to a Kenya-based company run by Zahui's buddy Maina Gakure.
Gakure paid Zahui a $12,000 kickback while pocketing $134,886 for doing zero work.
The rest functioned as a "pass-through" where the Kenyan company paid bills the agency owed to other vendors.
Federal prosecutors caught Zahui approving invoices with markups ranging from 17% to 66% even though the company did nothing justifying those fees.
Taxpayer dollars paid for a middleman who existed solely to obscure the money trail and kick cash back to Zahui.
The VA contracts officer who built a minority contracting scam
Zahui and Gakure worked together at the Department of Veterans Affairs in California where Gakure ran the contracts office.
Gakure created his own company to game the government's "8(a)" law that hands no-bid contracts to minority-owned businesses.
He established an Africa-based version so Zahui could steer federal grants there.
One contract was supposedly for "travel" services in March 2020 when COVID had shut down travel completely.
When investigators asked about it, Zahui claimed it was actually for IT services.
Ganiam had zero IT expertise so they subcontracted to another company in violation of federal rules.
Zahui kept awarding contracts without competition, claiming he was "lazy."
The kickback arrangement was too profitable to mess with.
Gakure wired payments straight to Zahui's personal Bank of America account.
Investigators found at least eight wire transfers totaling over $10,000 that matched contract awards perfectly.
Between 2019 and 2022, the scheme funneled over $617,000 through Ganiam.
When DOGE showed up in February demanding financial records, Zahui told the White House the agency wouldn't recognize Trump's appointee Pete Marocco as acting chairman.
Staff physically locked the doors when DOGE returned.
The Trump administration sent in U.S. Marshals to take control of the building.
Zahui later bragged to reporters that DOGE forgot about a back door and he'd been sneaking in anyway.
Bureaucrats who think they're untouchable act exactly like this.
Left-wing lawyers fought to protect the crook after the criminal probe went public
Senator James Risch had been documenting serious irregularities at the African Development Foundation for years and begging officials to clean house.
They ignored every warning and his prediction came true when Trump abolished USAID entirely.
Zahui agreed to plead guilty to accepting gratuities and lying to federal investigators.
He faces up to seven years in prison.
Even after The Daily Wire exposed the criminal investigation in May, left-wing lawyers from Democracy Forward used D.C. courts to keep Zahui in charge.
When one lawsuit got tossed, they found a for-profit company in Zambia whose entire business model depends on American taxpayer money.
The Zambian company sued to keep the gravy train flowing.
Democracy Forward lawyers argued that shutting down the agency would be "unfair" to this foreign company.
A D.C. judge bought it and slapped an injunction on Marocco.
The ruling brought Zahui back to work even with federal prosecutors building a criminal case against him.
This month those lawyers begged the judge to restore all 353 grants and 43 contracts that Marocco cancelled plus force the rehiring of all 16 employees Marocco fired.
They're fighting to resurrect an agency where the CFO just admitted to stealing from taxpayers.
Pete Marocco didn't mince words: "The African Development Foundation is a scam that delivers no value to the American taxpayer, and its budget should be zero."
Former general counsel Mateo Dunne led an internal investigation that uncovered substantial fraud, waste, and abuse.
When he reported his findings, the agency placed him on leave and tried to destroy his career.
A federal official familiar with ongoing investigations said "this case is the tip of the iceberg" and pointed to "corruption at the highest level in an agency entrusted to support impoverished communities in Africa."
The 8(a) minority contracting program is riddled with fraud
The Small Business Administration just banned more than 1,000 firms from the minority contracting program after they refused to hand over anti-fraud documents.
Those companies received over $5 billion in federal money during the past four years and make up a quarter of all contractors gaming the 8(a) system.
In June 2025, the DOJ uncovered an 8(a) joint venture awarded an $800 million USAID contract the same day one of the principals was formally barred from government contracting for bribery.
USAID had already determined this person lacked "honesty or integrity" but gave him the contract anyway.
Trump abolished USAID but its inspector general is sitting on 350 open fraud investigations.
Senator Mike Lee filed the "Terminate Unaccountable Spending, Abuse, Deception, and Fraud Act" to defund the African Development Foundation permanently.
Congressman Brian Mast said it plainly: "For years Democrats labeled programs as aid and development, but it was really just fraud, grift, and pure waste of American tax dollars."
The media and Democrats who championed Zahui as a hero just got caught defending the exact corruption they claimed didn't exist.
They cared about resisting Trump even if it meant defending criminals who stole from the American people.
Elon Musk was right to send auditors through those doors.
How many more Zahuis are out there still cashing their kickback checks?
Sources:
- Luke Rosiak, "Top Official Of USAID-Linked Foreign Aid Agency To Plead Guilty To Taking Bribes," Daily Wire, January 30, 2026.
- "A Quarter Of 'Minority Contracting' Firms Banned After Refusing Anti-fraud Check," Daily Wire, January 28, 2026.
- "SBA Announces Full-Scale Audit of 8(a) Program to Uncover Fraud and Bribery," Holland & Knight, July 2025.
