(Zero Hedge)—There are those that say all government aid is a scam in one way or another, and so far the revelations surrounding USAID are proving those people right daily. Democrats and the establishment media, in a bid to muddy the waters and save face, continue to claim that there was never any fraud at USAID and that the Trump Administration is simply labeling projects they “disagree with” as suspect.
Of course, spending American tax dollars on projects the public never asked for and were never told about is the epitome of fraud, and waste is never a good thing. Beyond that, the question of billions in missing funds certainly falls into the category of criminality.
Trump has taken a lot of heat from the media with the shut down of USAID and much of the criticism suggests that without US funds people in third world countries will fall back into desperation. The Washington Post recently claimed that Trump’s cuts to USAID are a “gift to Haitian gangs” terrorizing the locals; a typical leftist appeal to emotion that assumes most of the funds were getting to the Haitians in the first place.
Yet another example of this problem has been revealed in a New York Post expose on the audit of USAID which shows a disturbing shortfall in funds surrounding ongoing relief projects in Haiti. The Post notes:
“Since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti killed as many as 300,000 people, the US government has disbursed around $4.4 billion in foreign assistance to the small island nation.
At least $1.5 billion was disbursed for immediate humanitarian aid, while another $3 billion went to recovery, reconstruction and development.
Of the at least $2.13 billion in contracts and grants for Haiti-related work, less than $50 million, or 2% went to Haitian organizations or firms. By comparison, $1.3 billion, or 56%, has gone to firms located in or near the US capitol. Little wonder USAID is so threatened by the sudden scrutiny.
It remains unclear how exactly the billions have been spent and whether US tax dollars have had a sustainable impact. USAID and its vendors have generally failed to make such data public…”
The exposure of USAID by DOGE actually confirms long running suspicions of mishandled aid. Some Haitian reporters warned about this disappearing money years ago under the Obama Administration. USAID funds to Haiti were dispersed in part through the Clinton Foundation.
Elon Musk just shared details on the USAID Haiti Scam exposing “$4.4B SPENT, SIX HOMES BUILT”
Of all the contracts, “Haitian companies got just 2%”
2016 Haitian Reporter, “The whole world has given billions.” They say Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton stole it
“Where is the… pic.twitter.com/q6v6vKIgb1
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) February 22, 2025
The lack of funding transparency was also noted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2023. Though, not surprisingly, the impotent agency did nothing about it. The GOA stated in their analysis of USAID activities in Haiti:
“The USAID mission in Haiti does not fully track data on its local partnerships, or its activities to strengthen local organizational capacity, which limits institutional knowledge about these efforts and understanding of results and lessons learned to inform future activities.”
“The Administrator of USAID should ensure that USAID/Haiti develops a process to track and assess consistent and complete results information for infrastructure activities, such as the final outputs, outcomes, costs, time frames, and lessons learned.”
“The Administrator of USAID should ensure that USAID/Haiti establishes a process to completely and consistently track and analyze data on awards made to local organizations, such as the amount and percent of total funding awarded and the percent of total awards provided to these organizations.”
Of the five “recommendations for executive action” put forward by the GAO for USAID, two are marked as “completed”. Transparency was never achieved and no one was held accountable. The question is, if only 2% of the $4.4 billion allotted for Haitian relief was actually used in Haiti, where did the rest of the money go?
As the New York Post points out, 56% went to firms located in or near the US capitol, and apparently the money stayed there. A comprehensive forensic accounting of these funds (along with all other missing funds) needs to be undertaken and tracked to the recipients. Not just because it is is politically advantageous for the Trump Administration, but because justice needs to be served for once in the case of government fraud. Americans are tired of seeing bureaucratic conmen get away with it.
The public is welcome to debate whether or not any American taxes should be spent in Haiti (proximity to the US does not mean they are entitled), but if the money was already sent and it never arrived, then whoever took it stole from both sides of the equation – Americans and Haitians.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.