While most of the fallout from the destruction of USAID will be felt abroad, journalists who were formerly funded by the agency say that the cuts are likely to enable organized crime and corruption abroad, which ultimately impact everyday Americans.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project is among the largest international investigative journalism outfits, and up until a few weeks ago, the project received significant funding from USAID. The group’s reporting has been involved with some of the biggest international corruption stories in recent memory, including the Panama Papers, the Paradise Papers and the Russian Laundromat.
Drew Sullivan, an investigative reporter and one of the founders of OCCRP, told Salon that the organization received about 38% of its operational budget from the United States government, coming through agencies like USAID, the National Endowment of Democracy and the State Department. Since the cuts came down, Sullivan said the organization has had to lay off about 40% of its staff.
This has impacted reporting projects covering topics from Tren de Aragua in El Salvador to ‘Ndrangheta in Italy to money laundering operations buying up real estate in the United States. Sullivan said, from even from strictly an efficiency standpoint, the cuts don’t make sense, because OCCRP’s investigations, and the investigations conducted by its partner organizations, have helped return more money to Americans than it costs to keep these outfits open.
“We’ve had a tremendous return to U.S. taxpayers. Over $3 billion has been returned to U.S. coffers in the United States,” Sullivan said. “Every dollar invested in OCCRP has returned $100 to the U.S. Treasury or other government agencies”
This, Sullivan says, is in addition to the fact that cutting funding for journalists leaves many of them vulnerable to arrest or at risk of being removed from the country they work in, as many require work visas.
Pavla Holcova, a regional editor for OCCRP in Central Europe, worked on investigations into topics like the Pegasus Project and the Russian Asset Tracker.
“It’s kind of short-sighted to think that the U.S. will save money by cutting this budget, because we, as journalists, getting this kind of grants, we are just keeping the environment for business much more transparent and much more accountable than it would be otherwise,” Holcova told Salon.
One OCCRP investigation, for example, exposed how real estate in American cities like New York and Miami have become top destinations for those seeking to invest laundered cash. The demand for such investment properties rose to a level that developers appear to have contributed millions to New York City politicians in what appears to have been a successful effort to secure millions of dollars in tax breaks for developers building luxury properties.
Holcova said, in her view, the cuts by President Donald Trump and Republicans are short-sighted and that these issues of corruption and organized crime are likely to become “much more dangerous” if reporting teams are disassembled.
Attila Biro, another journalist associated with OCCRP, reports on crime and corruption from Romania. His work in Romania led him to cover a credit-card skimming operation in Latin America. In the operation, an international gang operating in Romania and Mexico allegedly stole the credit card information of tourists by tampering with ATMs. The scheme brought in around $1.2 billion, which was funneled into real estate investments in the United States and Brazil.
“If you were a tourist and you were going to Cancun, and you were using your credit card there, there were big, big chances that your data was stolen by this organized crime group that we have investigated. We have exposed them. We have showed the authorities how they are acting, and the FBI and other law enforcement in Mexico, in Romania and other parts shut this group down,” Biro told Salon. “You know, we are going after organized crime figures that affect everyone, no matter what type of political affiliation you have, you know, like monsters who steal from, you know, Democrats and Republicans at the same rate.”
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Biro said funding through OCCRP and the United States government enabled their investigation and the training of reporters to do these sorts of investigations. He said without this funding, his organization is taking things “month by month.”
As it stands, OCCRP is one of the organizations that has sued the federal government in an attempt to restore the funding it was supposed to receive, as allocated by Congress, and it joined with the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition in the suit.
While the federal judge hearing the case agreed and ordered funding restored, the White House responded by claiming that, despite the court order, the administration still maintained the authority to freeze funds and terminate grants.
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