The Biden administration's State Department and USAID spent $1.2 billion over four years trying to counter Chinese influence around the globe. Nobody checked if any of it worked.
That's not an editorial opinion. That's the finding of a Government Accountability Office report published this month. The conclusion was blunt: officials overseeing the program "do not have readily available and reliable data on the types and status of these projects." Of the estimated 470 projects funded between fiscal years 2020 and 2023, officials couldn't provide spending timeframes for 129 of them. Another 38 were missing data on what the projects were even supposed to accomplish.
Meanwhile, China wasn't waiting around. Admiral Sam Paparo, commander of Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April 2026 that Chinese AI companies — Alibaba, Baidu, DeepSeek, MiniMax, Moonshot, Tencent, Zhipu — are fielding AI agents reportedly twelve times more likely to follow malicious instructions than their American counterparts. China's Belt and Road Initiative continues expanding its economic footprint across the developing world. The competition is happening in real time, on every continent. And our counter-strategy was sitting in a filing cabinet with a third of the paperwork missing.
The money trail is staggering in its specificity and its randomness. A $3 million port security project managed by the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. A $600,000 program funneling cash to European academic institutions. A $475,000 journalist training initiative located — and this is the actual level of geographic specificity in the official records — "somewhere in the Western Hemisphere." A $2.3 million cyberattack awareness program spanning East Asia, South Asia, and the Pacific. Another $3 million for intelligence training in foreign nations. All of it funded through the "Countering Chinese Influence Fund," a program Congress created in late 2019 with a $1.6 billion allocation.
Notice what's not on that list: any measurement of whether a single dollar of it moved the needle against Beijing.
The GAO spelled out the oversight failure in detail. "The working group has not assessed the results of efforts to counter Chinese influence across the portfolio," the report stated. "As a result, working group officials lack critical information to track how funds were used." Roughly one-third of approved project proposals were missing basic data. Not classified data. Not complex performance metrics. Basic data — like when the money was spent and what it was spent on.
The State Department's official response to the GAO reads like a press release drafted by committee: "The Department is committed to decision-making based on the best available information." Which sounds reassuring until you remember the GAO just told them the "best available information" doesn't exist. Their proposed solution: stand up a new Office of China Coordination to improve tracking going forward. A new office to monitor the old office that was supposed to monitor the projects that nobody was monitoring.
The Trump administration cut all program funding in February 2025. Critics called it reckless. The GAO report makes it look like a reasonable response to lighting money on fire. When you've spent $1.2 billion with no way to measure results, no complete project records, and no assessment of impact — defunding isn't abandonment. It's triage.
Congress appropriated $1.6 billion. The agencies spent $1.2 billion across 470 projects. They lost track of 129. They couldn't categorize 38. They never assessed whether any of it worked. And their proposed fix is another office.
That's not a plan to counter China. That's a plan to counter accountability.
