It appears that leftist billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations was outright lying when it claimed it received no funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
OSF gaslighted the world over controversies surrounding USAID funding a number of leftist pet projects it was simultaneously financing. “The claims that the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, receive funding from USAID or direct the funding of a multibillion-dollar U.S. government agency are manifestly false,” OSF exclaimed February 12.
However, an investigation by MRC Business found that not only did an OSF node get a sizable committed grant from USAID, but other government funding was apparently earmarked for the Soros empire to administer a foreign policy program on behalf of the U.S. State Department.
MRC discovered that the State Department and USAID committed $11,091,856 collectively in grant money split from 2007-2014 between the Open Society Institute and the Alliance for Open Society International (AOSI), the “legal operating name” for Open Society Institute-Baltimore, which was later announced to be shuttering in 2023. Over $8 million of that figure was from the State Department to OSI for the purpose of administering the Edmund S. Muskie/FREEDOM Support Act Graduate Fellowship Program on behalf of the agency. “MUSKIE GRADUATE FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM GRANT TO THE OPEN SOCIETY INST,” the grant’s description stated.
It's unclear exactly how much of the funding was physically outlayed to date, but OSF's deception is palpable.
An archived version of the State Department website, noted the specifics of the relationship between Soros and the State Department’s Muskie program:
The Muskie/FSA Program, administered on behalf of ECA by the American Councils for International Education and the Open Society Institute, is part of the Department of State's public diplomacy effort to foster mutual understanding between the United States and other countries through educational and training programs.
American "public diplomacy" clearly included collaboration with radical-left foundations.
The rest of the funding was allocated towards AOSI, which is notable given that the group caused a national stir in 2013 when it sued USAID for attempting to place a stipulation that “requires that all federally funded NGOs implement a policy explicitly opposing prostitution” under the United States Leadership Against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Act, according to Oyez. In other words, putting stipulations on a specific government program to combat HIV/AIDs that required an explicit anti-prostitution stance ran so afoul of AOSI’s twisted ideology that it launched a lawsuit over it. USAID specifically obligated at least $1,959,606 to AOSI for the period 2007-2008, while the State Department allocated at least $641,050.
AOSI claimed First Amendment protections in its suit, and the U.S. Supreme Court dubiously sided with the Soros group. Then-Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas both dissented from the majority opinion.
In his dissent, Scalia rebuffed the majority’s claims that the Act’s requirements somehow subjugated free speech. “If the government cannot demand a relevant ideological commitment as a condition of application, neither can it distinguish between applicants on a relevant ideological ground. And that is the real evil of today’s opinion. One can expect, in the future, frequent challenges to the denial of government funding for relevant ideological reasons.” To exemplify the implications of the majority’s half-cocked opinion, Scalia wrote:
One of the purposes of America’s foreign-aid programs is the fostering of good will towards this country. If the organization Hamas—reputed to have an efficient system for delivering welfare—were excluded from a program for the distribution of U. S. food assistance, no one could reasonably object. And that would remain true if Hamas were an organization of United States citizens entitled to the protection of the Constitution.
The group apparently wasn’t content with the Court’s decision, as it would later go on to sue USAID again some years later for still enforcing the Act’s anti-prostitution provisions on its foreign affiliates.
This time, in 2020, the Supreme Court sided with the government against the Soros machine’s push for “permanent injunctive relief.” “Because the foreign affiliates of American nongovernmental organizations possess no First Amendment rights, the federal law restricting funding to organizations with ‘a policy explicitly opposing prostitution and sex trafficking,’ 22 U.S.C. §7631(f), is not unconstitutional as applied to them,” Oyez summarized.
MRC’s new findings follow on the heels of its February 28 exclusive which found that USAID separately doled out $1 million in 2021 under the Biden administration to the radical, anti-American Central European University. The elder Soros himself founded CEU and heavily financed it with $948,570,000 between 2016 and 2023 alone.
MRC Business reached out to Open Society Foundations for comment but received no response as of the publication of this report.
