This Foreign Aid Agency Locked Its Doors To Keep DOGE Out. Now We Know Why.
Money intended for Africans was secretly re-routed to D.C. bureaucrats and their friends by racist, abusive bosses, employees say
DAILY WIRE LONGREADS: This piece of long-form investigative journalism is adapted from a recent four-part series.
When the Department of Government Efficiency showed up at a small USAID-linked federal agency called the African Development Foundation in March, its management locked the doors and refused to let auditors in. Its board sued to stop DOGE, and was lauded by the Left for objecting to granting “access to USADF systems including financial records, payment and human resources systems.”
But the objection, several former employees told The Daily Wire, might not have been on principled grounds, but rather because those records amounted to a crime scene.
The African Development Foundation’s employees have been sounding the alarm for years about self-dealing, cruelty, and anti-white discrimination. Money sent to Africa was then wired to the personal bank accounts of bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. An official promoted his for-profit, multi-level marketing scheme to poor Africans. Law enforcement identified possible criminal kickbacks. And those who now lament DOGE’s shuttering of the agency did nothing to fix it when they had a chance.
“It was so hard to see ADF being used as a beacon of hope and resistance against DOGE because I knew they were actually covering up horrible things…the doors were being kept locked for a reason,” one former employee said. “The hero of the story is actually the villain.”
By law, the agency is only allowed to give grants to Africa-based groups. But to keep more of that money for its own employees and officials’ friends, while concealing how much money actually went to overhead, it would require Africans to send money back to the United States at its direction, employees said.
Until shortly before DOGE gained access to the building with the assistance of U.S. Marshals, the agency was led by CEO Travis Adkins, who arrived in 2021 after a stint at USAID as a Joe Biden political appointee. An assistant to Adkins said that after she asked why her paycheck was lower than agreed upon, Adkins informed her that the remainder would be coming from an overseas account.
He “sent me an email connecting me with this guy in Africa who asked for my banking information. Within a few days, this guy wired me $17,000,” she told The Daily Wire on condition of anonymity. The Daily Wire reviewed bank paperwork showing the transfer from an account in Kenya.
Another longtime employee, she said, was eventually “put on the payroll of an African partner and was informed she was being paid through an entity in Mauritania. No payroll, state, or federal taxes were withheld from her paychecks.”
“The contracts don’t make sense, and they know [DOGE] will find lots of wrongdoing and illegal activity,” she 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.”
International money-laundering?
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.
Chief Financial Officer Mathieu Zahui acknowledged and defended the arrangement.
“The grant was provided to an African organization…a grant can pay for people,” he told The Daily Wire in an interview at his home, where he has been spending his days after DOGE put the agency’s staff on leave and gave them notice of layoffs. “Yeah, granted, they were in D.C.”
Its previous CEO from 2016 to 2021, C.D. Glin — a former Peace Corps DEI officer and later an Obama political appointee to the Peace Corps — reverse-engineered African grants to steer money to friends in the United States, employees said.
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,” agency program manager Kate Ristroph said in a videotaped internal investigative interview obtained by The Daily Wire.
“We’re in that murky territory of like, is this legal?” she said. “The CEO specifically directed it.”
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.
Glin attempted to foist grants addressing nonexistent problems on African groups as a way to steer money to an affiliate of the Aspen Institute, the left-wing Colorado nonprofit, Ristroph said. The then-head of that affiliate, called Artisan Alliance, “flat out tells us she’s a close personal friend of C.D. Glin,” she said.
The agency offered a grant to the Heva Fund, an African group, on the condition that it send a portion to Artisan Alliance. The grant was ostensibly to produce personal protective equipment like face masks, even though Heva told the agency there was no demand for such a thing because affordable PPE was readily available in the region.
Heva was so uncomfortable with the proposition that it asked to cancel the grant, Ristroph said. So the agency pushed the plan on a Kenyan group called Ustadi, which also balked, saying “We don’t need to pay Artisan Alliance, an American company, to help Kenyans learn how to sell masks,” she said.
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.
Criminal kickbacks probe.
This February, President Donald Trump fired the African Development Foundation’s board members, and Adkins resigned as CEO. A three-person committee, including chief financial officer Mathieu Zahui, took over executive duties.
On February 21, DOGE “demanded immediate access to USADF systems including financial records and payment and human resources systems,” but Zahui stalled them. On February 28, the White House emailed Zahui that Pete Marocco, the Trump operative tasked with dismantling USAID, had become acting chairman of the African Development Foundation. Zahui told the White House that agency staff would not honor the appointment because Marocco had not been confirmed by the Senate.
When DOGE returned, staff locked the doors and refused to let them in. DOGE eventually gained access to the building using U.S. Marshals, and put the staff on leave. That’s according to a lawsuit filed against DOGE by a fired board member, with the assistance of left-wing groups, objecting to “swooping in with DOGE staff, demanding access to sensitive information systems.”
But the efforts to stop the Trump administration from viewing that information look different in light of a long-running criminal probe.
Zahui directed more than a million dollars in grants and contracts to a company in Kenya called Ganiam Ltd., without competition. A one-year, $350,000 contract for “transport, travel, relocation” services was executed in March 2020, when few people were traveling or holding conferences because of coronavirus.
According to a search warrant application uncovered by The Daily Wire, USAID’s inspector general established by August 2024 that the company’s owner had secretly wired money to Zahui’s personal bank account at times that matched up with the company obtaining federal contracts. To date, the Department of Justice has not charged either man with a crime.
Ganiam Ltd. is owned by Maina Gakure, whom Zahui has known for decades. Both worked at the Department of Veterans Affairs in San Diego and later moved to Fairfax, Virginia. Gakure had been in charge of awarding contracts at the VA, then created his own company designed to get government construction contracts by taking advantage of a minority preference program. It was called Ganiam LLC and was based out of a house in Virginia.
The African Development Foundation is permitted by law to give grants only to African entities. Gakure similarly created a company based in Kenya called Gakure Ltd.
In January 2024, inspector general agents interviewed Zahui, and he acknowledged having known Gakure personally since 1999. Zahui “could not explain why the contract with Ganiam was sole-sourced instead of being competitively bid,” the agents wrote.
Zahui, who was named chief financial officer of the federal agency after he declared bankruptcy and had his house foreclosed on, acknowledged to investigators that the travel contract was executed after COVID had already shut down travel. He said the money was actually used for IT services, but since Ganiam had no expertise in IT, it subcontracted it to a different company. A Department of Treasury contracting official told the agents that was not allowed.
Zahui continued to give more contracts to Ganiam without competition, which he justified by saying he was “lazy” and didn’t want to find a new vendor. “Zahui stated that he did not receive any direct or indirect benefits from Gakure,” agents wrote.
But in February 2024, the agents seized Zahui’s work phone and examined a subset of the data. “Agents found text messages showing at least eight instances of wire transfers or electronic payments from Gakure to Zahui’s Bank of America account, totaling over $10,000. These payments coincide with USADF’s awarding of sole-source contracts to Ganiam,” they wrote.
“After identifying these payments, the agents stopped their review. Based on the aforementioned evidence, there is probable cause to believe that there are additional relevant communications and instances of payments on the TARGET DEVICE,” they told a judge on October 29, 2024. They asked for a warrant to examine the rest. On November 4, 2024, they executed the search warrant.
Zahui acknowledged to The Daily Wire that he selected Gakure’s firm because of their personal relationship, and said Gakure moved to Kenya before COVID.
During the same time period that Ganiam Ltd. was paid as an African company, Ganiam LLC received $90,000 in U.S. coronavirus assistance designed to prevent the loss of American jobs. Gakure did not return a request for comment.
Zahui told The Daily Wire that Ganiam performed IT services during COVID instead of travel services. Contracting records show that the agency, with only 30 employees, was separately paying astronomical sums for IT, including $865,000 to another minority-owned contractor called Etranservices Corp. between 2020 and 2022, with the option to bill up to $4 million.
Zahui initially denied to The Daily Wire that on top of $800,000 in contracts, the agency also gave grant funding to Ganiam, but he later conceded it was true. He said it gave grants to Ganiam which it was required to use to buy airline tickets for the agency’s African partners to attend events on the continent and to take a trip to the United States, where they visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Zahui also told The Daily Wire that when DOGE changed the office’s locks, they forgot about a back door, and that he has gained access since the takeover.
Offshore bank accounts.
In November 2023, Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho), then the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations committee, asked the USAID inspector general to open an “immediate investigation” into what he said was a slew of whistleblower complaints about financial irregularities at the African Development Foundation. Those included “misuse of official funds; fraudulent and corrupt spending practices; conflicts of interest [and] gross mismanagement.”
Among them was “an alleged $2 million deposit by [Zahui] into a bank account in Ghana in February 2023 – that typically would require signature by at least two presently responsible fiduciary agents of the agency,” Risch wrote. “This may also explain why a senior USADF official was unable to account for major financial discrepancies included in the agency’s FY2024 budget request.”
In an internal videotaped interview obtained by The Daily Wire, regional portfolio manager Jeff Gileo, who was tasked with deciding which grantees should receive money, said numerous shadow grants were run out of Zahui’s office, and “we never actually saw them.” He said he asked for information about a grant in the country of Mauritius and was “told no, because there might be some other information in there that people don’t need to know about, being run by finance.”
Zahui strongly denied to The Daily Wire that there was any $2 million deposit. He said it was true that there are accounts throughout Africa with money sitting in them, some in countries where the agency hadn’t been active in years. He also said that he had traveled to open and close such bank accounts, but that the money was all accounted for.
“I went to Botswana, I close it, I take the money out. I went to Swaziland…I close it, and the funds are accounted for today. I couldn’t bring it here because I couldn’t cross the — so we put it where we transfer them in an account, what we call ADF — I forget the name, but we have an account in Kenya,” he said.
Mathieu Zahui, chief financial officer of the African Development Foundation / ADF
Conflicts of interest.
Critics of closing foreign aid agencies say doing so amounts to depriving poor people of essential support. But top officials used the African Development Foundation to advance their own interests, including helping Herbalife — a multi-level marketing scheme run by an agency board member — make inroads on the continent. John Agwunobi, who served as CEO of Herbalife, was an African Development Foundation board member.
In 2020, the African agency partnered with Herbalife at Agwunobi’s behest. That was two months after Herbalife paid a $122 million settlement to the Department of Justice to settle charges that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It also paid $200 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it was a pyramid scheme that exploited people.
The African Development Foundation made it seem like the partnership was with a nonprofit affiliated with Herbalife, but it was actually with the company itself, which was seeking to expand its reach in Africa, the agency’s former general counsel, Mateo Dunne, found. The partnership involved paying five Africans $5,000 and providing them “product donations, and Herbalife Nutrition staff as global volunteers in their businesses,” marketing materials said.
“Materials prepared by USADF and Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. reflect that the partnership was being used to drive corporate sales and marketing, not charitable objectives,” Dunne concluded. “USADF personnel described the partnership with Herbalife Nutrition Ltd. as designed to leverage USADF’s network and reputation to promote the Herbalife brand in Africa.”
That sort of violation of conflict of interest rules was common, Dunne said.
Glin — the Obama appointee who served as the African Development Foundation’s chief executive from 2016 to 2021 — had the agency pay $5,000 a year to an organization, Root Capital, of which he was a board member, employees said. Glin did not file conflict-of-interest reports and ethics pledges, which are required by law and designed to prevent such situations, for most of the years he worked there. He filed one in 2019, but omitted Root Capital from it.
Using poverty funds for luxury.
In January 2022, Travis Adkins took over as CEO. Adkins had a lien against him for unpaid federal taxes from 2015 until he went to work for the federal government, according to public records.
Both Glin and Adkins used agency spending to build their personal brands and glad-hand with celebrities and billionaires, while treating workers with the callous cruelty of which liberals accuse DOGE, employees said.
Glin had the agency pay for him to “travel to countries and network at things that had nothing to do with grassroots African economic development. He went to a Scandinavian country, a European country, African countries where there was no ADF program being considered. He was spending ADF money to get his next job,” an employee said.
Another employee said he’d have the agency pay to sponsor conferences in order to buy prominent speaking slots: “He’d pay $30,000 to speak at events.”
Glin had the agency pay $1,000 to theboardlist.com, which helps executives get prestigious board seats based on DEI hiring, and $7,500 for a Harvard executive class just before leaving the agency, workers said.
All of that seems to have paid off. Glin is now president of the PepsiCo Foundation, overseeing $70 million.
Adkins, for his part, brushed off government rules about travel costs and demanded $1,000-a-night hotels, summarily firing an assistant who raised concerns about his travel arrangements, the former assistant told The Daily Wire, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The executives seemed more concerned about making the agency look good so congressional funding would continue than they were in actually doing good, employees said.
One grantee, called Vava Coffee, violated rules about how it spent grant money, but threatened to publicly disparage the agency as “colonizers” if the checks didn’t keep coming; Glin ordered disbursements to continue, employee Kate Ristroph said in an internal interview obtained by The Daily Wire. She said she eventually succeeded in terminating the grant.
The agency entered into a partnership with the National Basketball Players Association, where NBA players could choose how to spend money in Africa, and American taxpayers would match it. Some of the money was used to build a basketball court.
Toxic workplace.
Glin and Adkins frequently hired workers as contractors instead of government employees, which allowed them to pay them using creative mechanisms such as African pass-throughs.
It broke up the salaries of some workers into small payments from different pass-throughs, seemingly structuring payments to evade contracting rules and oversight by staying under what amounts to a petty cash threshold. One contractor described having to restart her employment every five weeks. Her paychecks came not from the government agency, but from a rotating collection of LLCs, such as Dobbs, the BKW Transformation Group, and Lalaith. When Zahui couldn’t arrange one of these mystery payment sources on time, she was expected to keep working without pay, she said.
Hiring workers as contractors also meant they didn’t have to follow merit-based hiring practices, prove wrongdoing when firing people, or grant them union protections. Glin and Adkins viciously mistreated staff, according to Daily Wire interviews and videos of an internal investigation.
Brandi James, the chief of staff, said in a videotaped internal interview: “Toxic would be people crying or things like that. Yeah, we had that, we had [Glin] yelling.”
Jeff Gilleo, a senior program manager, called Glin a “narcissistic bully” who “said mean things to almost everybody.”
Associate General Counsel Nina-Bella Mbayu said she sought therapy after having “physical reactions” anytime she thought of Glin. “People were just treated, in my opinion, as disposable,” she said.
Yael Nagar, a senior program analyst, said one employee “went on extended sick leave for a mental health program because they were so stressed at work,” and Glin’s takeaway was “we need to make sure no one… finds out about this.”
Employees said they tried to warn PepsiCo against hiring Glin, sending it a letter “about the horrific culture and use of money” under Glin, but that he was hired anyway. PepsiCo and Glin did not return a request for comment.
Employees posted public cries for help on the employer-review website Glassdoor. “USADF is a scary place to work…Maybe one day it will be a workplace that has admirable values and care for its staff. Presently though, it is rotten to the core,” one wrote in 2023.
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.
Though DOGE critics now claim that the African Development Foundation was essential and mourn for the jobs lost, when it was operational, no one showed an interest.
‘Them white motherf–ckers.’
The abuse was particularly brutal for white employees, who said the government agency was flagrantly racist. One white junior employee said she soiled herself after Glin made her afraid to leave her desk to use the bathroom.
Adkins’ former assistant, who is black, said in a sworn affidavit that “On at least three occasions, 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.”
“He told me many times he would not hire a white person or a veteran. I said that’s discrimination, and he said ‘I’m the president and CEO, I can do what I want,’” the assistant told The Daily Wire on condition of anonymity. Adkins is also a lecturer at Georgetown University.
The African Development Foundation was created by Congress in 1980 as a board whose members are appointed by the president of the United States to six-year terms, who in turn appoint a CEO to run day-to-day operations. The board chair was Jack Leslie, a white former staffer to former Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) who was appointed to the board by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Adkins bragged about concealing operations from the board, saying “them white motherf—ers, they don’t need to know…I don’t think I should tell them sh–,” according to the assistant.
A junior employee disappeared a few months after she took complaints to the board, and the assistant asked what happened to her; Adkins replied, “I just put the white b—h on a [short-term] contract and then the contract ended,” the assistant said.
The situation was the same under Glin.
“C.D. [Glin] literally said to me that he needed to hire black people,” an employee told The Daily Wire on condition of anonymity. “Virtually everyone he hired in programs was black.”
In 2021, the agency paid to settle an anti-white discrimination claim after it laid off a white senior executive without paying her severance or following federal rules, and falsely claimed she didn’t have the qualifications to shift into another job, even though many of those jobs had actually reported to her.
Retaliation.
In a government agency, the job of the general counsel is to ensure that rules and laws are followed. Glin ensured that the role was either empty or filled with junior lawyers with no experience in government.
After he departed as CEO in May 2021, there was a brief period in which the agency had no permanent leader, and a traditional general counsel managed to be hired. When Mateo Dunne, a white former high-level Defense Department executive, took the job, he was appalled by how little the African Development Foundation seemed to care about laws and rules.
The lawyer set out to interview employees about conflicts of interest, purchase card abuse, contracting fraud, and a toxic workplace environment. In a matter of days, the evidence started stacking up. He told the acting CEO, Elisabeth Feleke, that outside lawyers would have to be brought in to document the full scope of the lawbreaking.
Instead, Feleke ordered him to stop the investigation, told him to change the preliminary findings, and falsely told the board the probe was complete, he told The Daily Wire. Dunne stopped investigating, but sent his preliminary report to the board.
He soon learned that despite agreement that Glin had been abusive, the organization wasn’t getting a fresh start: the board hired Adkins, a decades-long friend of Glin’s, to replace him. When Adkins entered the office for the first time, Glin enveloped him in a bear hug.
Adkins later testified under oath that he was selected to lead the African Development Foundation without even applying for the job, and that he couldn’t recall when or how he managed to be selected.
The report called Dunne a “danger to USADF’s mission and staff.” But the details made clear that the risk was not to anyone’s life, but rather the livelihoods of law-breaking bureaucrats.
As Adkins’ start date neared, Dunne prepared to show him the violations he had found so that Adkins could reform the agency. But it seemed that Adkins already knew, and his first priority was shutting Dunne’s investigation down. Within hours of Adkins being sworn in as president and CEO in January 2022, he put Dunne on leave and cut off his access to evidence before he could even speak, video shows.
“You will be on administrative leave the very moment that we hang up this call. You will have a box mailed to your home to allow you to send back to us any USADF issued equipment,” he told Dunne. “You are not to contact any of the members of the USADF staff. And again, your access to all of our data and systems will be closed down immediately.”
The agency sought to build a justification for firing the white lawyer, with chief of staff Brandi James compiling a 75-page manifesto that called Dunne “Adversarial, Belittling, Calculating, Combative, Condescending, Deceitful, Defensive, Grimy, Sinister, and Unwholesome.”
The report called Dunne a “danger to USADF’s mission and staff.” But the details made clear that the risk was not to anyone’s life, but rather the livelihoods of law-breaking bureaucrats. The dossier faulted him for his “insistence on tying up staff time on investigatory digs.”
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.”
As evidence of Dunne “circumventing and breaching USADF protocols,” the dossier complained that Dunne notified Glin that he had not filed years worth of mandatory Office of Government Ethics conflict-of-interest forms, carrying a $600 penalty, even though Feleke told him not to raise the issue.
Adkins went as far as implying that Dunne had threatened to kill him, alluding to something “being sent to people regarding the death of government officials, as all of us are government officials.” This, it turned out, was a fantastical distortion of Dunne sharing a sentimental quote from a New York governor acknowledging the passing of a former legislator.
Then a new comment appeared on the agency’s profile on GlassDoor that said, under “Advice to Management”: “die.” The post was attributed to “General Counsel.” The African Development Foundation sicced four different law enforcement agencies on Dunne for making death threats.
The former Sunday School-teaching lawyer said he was framed.
“If I was going to do an anonymous post I would obviously not put my job title in there.”
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…Dunne conducted an unauthorized, backward-focused investigation.”
Lies.
The African Development Foundation never told Dunne what he was being investigated for, or formally moved to fire him, which would require proving that he did something wrong. It simply left him on paid leave indefinitely, despite a law that limits investigative leave to 90 days. After six months, in July 2022, he quit to take another job.
Dunne provided documentation to the Office of Special Counsel, which exists to investigate whistleblower retaliation, but it closed his file when the employee he’d been working with left her job, he said.
He filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging anti-white discrimination and retaliation. In August 2024, an administrative law judge dismissed his case, even though he had an affidavit from a black employee saying that Adkins had told her repeatedly that he did not want any white people working for him.
Dunne is appealing in court, and deposed African Development Foundation staff in the course of that lawsuit. In his sworn testimony, Adkins denied saying he wouldn’t hire white people — but also claimed he didn’t know how many people worked for him, that he could only remember the names of two, and that he didn’t know what race various employees were.
Adkins did not return a request for comment for this article.
Adkins’ sworn testimony was repeatedly contradicted by documents and the testimony of other employees.
In Sen. Risch’s 2023 letter, he warned that a failure to reform the African Development Foundation might risk destroying public trust in foreign aid as a whole.
“Turning a blind eye to alleged fraud, corruption, and mismanagement in any single development agency or program would undermine the credibility of U.S. development assistance across the board,” he wrote.
Dunne said it has been painful to watch some turn the African Development Foundation into a “martyr,” seemingly to avoid acknowledging that DOGE was right and that established, more cautious methods of accountability had yielded nothing.
“I think USADF deserved the fate that it received, because if it couldn’t be run correctly, then it shouldn’t be run at all. If the leaders of that agency couldn’t act, and members of the foreign policy establishment wouldn’t act,” he said. “It’s an indictment of the entire system.”
, he describes himself as an agnostic.
Of course we’re drowning in debt: We’ve got elected representatives who spend like drunken sailors — enabled by a Treasury Department intent on shoveling money out the door willy-nilly. Thank God President Trump and DOGE and grown-ups like Sec. Bessent are at least attempting to bring some order and accountability to bear.
