The U.S. Agency for International Development falsely claimed that documents detailing foreign aid to Ukrainian businesses were classified when Senator Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) tried obtaining access to them last year.
USAID has come under scrutiny from Republican lawmakers and the White House in recent days as Elon Musk, who leads the Department of Government Efficiency, works to cut back on the federal government’s wasteful spending and potentially shut down the aid agency. Ernst, the Senate chair of the DOGE Caucus, is on board with that mission given her past interactions with USAID.
In September 2024, Ernst’s office requested access to data on foreign aid to Ukraine. USAID stipulated that the review be conducted in a sensitive compartmented information facility at its headquarters, suggesting to the senator’s staffers that the aid documents were classified when, in reality, they were not.
“The documents my staff reviewed, on their face, failed to comply with standard classifications protocols. Only after demanding to speak to your USAID Office of Security, my staff uncovered that this data was, in fact, unclassified,” Ernst wrote in a Tuesday letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The correspondence was first reported by Fox News.
“In a desperate attempt to limit congressional oversight of public information, USAID demonstrated intentional abuse of a system designed to keep our nation’s secret information secure.”
Upon her staff’s review of the requested data, the...
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