State, USAID Spent $1.2B Countering China. A Third Untracked.

Since fiscal year 2020, Congress has directed at least $1.625 billion into a fund built for one purpose: countering Chinese influence around the world, from PRC-financed ports to disinformation campaigns to nuclear-energy deals in third countries.▸ GAO -- Congress's own investigative auditor, whose findings the agencies it reviews are expected to answer -- spent 21 months examining how the State Department and USAID actually spent it, and found that State and USAID reported funding about 470 projects worth roughly $1.2 billion from 2020 through 2023. But the two agencies' own interagency working group, the body that decides which proposals get funded, could not produce reliable award numbers for a fifth of them, start and end dates for more than a quarter, and obligation records -- confirmation that money committed to a project was actually paid out, as opposed to merely authorized -- for a third, the largest of the gaps. And in the six years the fund has existed, the working group has never assessed whether its spending, taken as a whole, actually countered Chinese influence.

The fund began as the Countering Chinese Influence Fund (CCIF) in fiscal year 2020 and was rebuilt as the Countering PRC Influence Fund (CPRCIF) in 2022 with a similar mandate: counter "the negative influence of the Government of the PRC, the Chinese Communist Party, and PRC-affiliated entities acting on their behalf globally."▸ Each year, Congress set a rising minimum spending floor across five appropriations accounts -- Economic Support Fund, Development Assistance, Foreign Military Financing, International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement, and Nonproliferation/Anti-terrorism -- climbing from $300 million in fiscal 2020 and 2021 to $325 million in 2023 and $400 million in 2024, for a five-year floor of $1.625 billion. It is, according to State officials, the only U.S. government funding stream dedicated specifically to this purpose.

An interagency working group -- representatives from State's Office of China Coordination ("China House"), its Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and USAID's planning bureau -- runs a competitive annual process where embassies, regional bureaus, and USAID missions submit proposals tied to specific "lines of effort": countering PRC economic coercion, military sales, cyberspace dominance, and 16 similar categories.▸ State and USAID told GAO the working group approved about 430 proposals into roughly 470 funded projects worth $1.2 billion between 2020 and 2023. When GAO asked for the underlying project data in November 2024, at least 58 State units and 55 USAID units had to be individually chased down to report and validate it -- and it still took the working group more than five months to hand it over, with USAID's data arriving in April 2025 and State's in May 2025.

What came back was incomplete.▸ Of GAO's own tally of 466 estimated projects, 94 have no award number on record, 97 have no implementing-partner name, 129 have no start or end date, and 155 -- exactly a third -- have no obligation data at all, meaning the working group cannot say how much of the committed money was actually paid out against them. For nearly a third of the roughly 430 approved proposals, officials could not identify any of the specific projects those proposals produced -- no names, no award numbers, no implementing units, nothing linking an approved plan to money that moved.

The government's own internal-control standards require management to obtain reliable data in a timely manner and to communicate it to the people who need it to do their jobs -- the baseline GAO measured the working group against, and the one it failed.▸ Separately, a 2018 law known as the Evidence Act requires agencies to publish an annual plan naming the evaluations they intend to run each year; State's evaluation plans have not named a single review of countering-Chinese-influence programming since fiscal year 2022, the earliest year GAO could check.

State and USAID did start building a framework in 2023 to measure results across the whole portfolio of projects, rather than project by project -- indicators tied to each line of effort, standardized across regions and accounts.▸ USAID obligated a contract for it in September 2023 and held workshops with bureau officials through August 2024. Then, in February 2025, the contract was put on hold in response to a presidential executive order pausing foreign-assistance obligations. As of March 2026 -- a year later -- State officials told GAO they were still assessing whether and how to resume it. Since the fund's creation in 2020, the working group has never assessed the results of its spending across the portfolio, and it currently has no plan to.

The paperwork gaps are not abstract.▸ A post in the Western Hemisphere submitted a $500,000 proposal in November 2023 to upgrade optical telescopes and prevent PRC space-related espionage; the working group did not approve it until May 2024, too late for the post to notify Congress and obligate the funds before the deadline. State ultimately redirected the money to a different, already-running cybersecurity project in another country -- a proposal the working group had specifically selected for its counter-China rationale, abandoned for a scheduling failure, not a merits decision. GAO found the pattern was structural: for most fiscal year 2024 funding, posts and bureaus had less than a month to draft their proposals, and officials at 15 of the 21 regional and functional bureaus GAO interviewed said the compressed timeline had limited their ability to line up implementing partners or obligate funds on time at all.

GAO's own prior work on China's Belt and Road Initiative⧉ puts CPRCIF's size in perspective: from 2013 to 2021, China provided $679 billion for infrastructure projects abroad in five key sectors, compared with $76 billion from the United States in the same sectors -- roughly nine dollars of Chinese state financing for every one of American.▸ CPRCIF's $1.625 billion floor since 2020 is not directly comparable to that infrastructure-specific figure -- CPRCIF also funds non-infrastructure lines of effort like disinformation and nuclear-technology security -- but it establishes the order of magnitude: a fund built to counter Chinese influence operates several orders of magnitude below the scale of the influence campaign it is meant to counter, at a moment when its own managers cannot say what happened to a third of what it already spent.

State agreed with all five of GAO's recommendations: release annual guidance earlier, require documented bureau and regional expert input on proposals, require the State officers who specialize in PRC-related issues to review and document input on regional proposals, consistently collect complete project data, and finally build a process for assessing results portfolio-wide.▸ All five were still open when GAO published its report on June 17, 2026 -- concurrence recorded, no dates attached to when any of it happens.