Revelations that USAID officials are spending hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars overseas for controversial projects such as advancing atheism in Nepal and funding “transgender opera” in Columbia are nothing new.
As Mark Tapscott details below for The Epoch Times, nearly 20 years ago, in October 2005, the refusal of USAID officials to admit they were funding a prostitution ring in India so angered Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) that he vowed to introduce a new law enabling every U.S. citizen with the internet to quickly and easily find out how federal officials are spending his or her tax dollars.
A year later, President George W. Bush’s signing of Coburn’s proposal into law—thus mandating the creation of today’s USASpending.gov—marked a huge step forward in making government spending easily accessible for every citizen with internet access.
Coburn described the USAID coverup in detail in his Senate floor speech in April 2006 as he introduced the promised proposal, which was known as the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act (FFATA).
The FFATA proposal was a bipartisan one from the beginning, with then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Sen. John McCain…
Read the full article here