GAO Found 161 Unexplained Ukraine Payments USAID Never Checked
Summary
The United States sent Ukraine $45.2 billion to keep its government running during the war. GAO's own analysis found 161 unusual payment changes in a sample of the underlying transaction data -- including a $1.07 million unexplained spike in Ukraine Supreme Court salaries -- that USAID's oversight process never reviewed. USAID also skipped a required report to Congress and never ranked which of 56 contractor-recommended fixes mattered most. State inherited the job in July 2025 with a narrower toolkit, not a bigger one.
The bulk of the funding moved through the World Bank's Public Expenditures for Administrative Capacity Endurance in Ukraine (PEACE) project, which reimburses Ukraine's government category-by-category for eligible salaries and social assistance payments. By November 2024, Deloitte -- 's monitoring contractor -- had tracked $25.4 billion of that funding to a specific expenditure category⧉: $10.1 billion in salaries across five worker categories, and $15.3 billion in pensions and other social assistance benefits. Pensions alone accounted for roughly $10 billion of the total.
USAID checked the totals. It never checked the transactions.
's process for catching problems relied on aggregated numbers -- World Bank summary reports and total amounts by category and month. When a total looked off, like school salaries suddenly doubling one June, asked the World Bank for an explanation. But USAID never reviewed the far more granular, report-to-report expenditure data⧉ broken out by region and institution that it also received. That's exactly where anomalies tend to hide: a spike in one region can cancel out a drop in another once everything is rolled up into a single national total.
View data as table
| Salaries | 10.1 | government, school, higher-education, healthcare and first-responder salaries, combined across five categories |
|---|---|---|
| Social assistance benefits | 15.3 | pensions ($10.0B alone), disability, housing, IDP stipends and other benefits combined |
To show what that gap was costing, ran the analysis itself. Investigators pulled the disaggregated expenditure data behind 78 verification reports covering March 2022 through August 2023 -- 5,121 report-to-report changes in all⧉ -- and found 161 of them were anomalies, outliers, or otherwise unexplained by the normal pattern of bonus cycles and seasonal payments. The most striking: a 2,474 percent jump -- $1,067,542 -- in salaries paid to non-security government employees at the Ukraine Supreme Court between April and June 2023. Non-security employees do get June bonuses, noted, but this increase was an outlier even accounting for that, and it has never been explained.
View data as table
| Total report-to-report changes in GAO's sample | 5,121 | the detailed, disaggregated data GAO found USAID never analyzed |
|---|---|---|
| Flagged as anomalies needing further examination | 161 | includes a $1,067,542 unexplained spike in Ukraine Supreme Court staff salaries |
also compared what reported to Congress against Deloitte's own internal tracker and found the two didn't match: 27 instances where the records showed different dollar amounts for the same category and month, totaling about $212 million in unreconciled differences⧉ across the 13 expenditure categories examined. also skipped a required report outright: the law requires State or to tell Congress how DBS money from each of the five Ukraine supplemental appropriations acts was used, and never submitted the report covering the fifth one.
Fifty-six fixes, and no sense of which ones mattered
Beyond the money itself, 's own monitoring contractor spent two years documenting weaknesses in how Ukraine manages the funds -- manual processes, decentralized recordkeeping, missing signatures on payment ledgers -- and packaged them into 56 recommendations⧉ by August 2024. A separate World Bank contractor, PwC, tested 120 of Ukraine's internal controls directly and found weaknesses in 44 of them, more than a third. never sorted either list by risk. " did not prioritize its contractor's recommendations using a risk-based approach," wrote, even though more than $10 billion⧉ of the U.S. loan funding still had to flow through the same project.
The handoff came with less oversight, not more
The oversight that did exist mostly stopped in early 2025. A January 2025 executive order paused 's foreign-aid contracts; issued a stop-work order on January 25, terminated Deloitte's DBS contract in February, and let KPMG's audit work lapse in March. The U.S. government did not conduct any independent monitoring of PEACE project funding from late January 2025 through early June 2025⧉, found. When State took over on July 1, it inherited a narrower toolkit: officials said the agency plans to rely on the World Bank and a KPMG contract that only covers 2022-2023 spending, with no plan to resume the kind of ongoing tracking Deloitte had done -- and no Treasury plan to independently monitor how $10.36 billion in undisbursed loan funding⧉ gets used beyond trusting the World Bank.
made five recommendations to State⧉: investigate the 161 flagged changes, correct the inaccurate reports already sent to Congress, file the missing fifth-supplemental report, risk-rank Deloitte's 56 recommendations, and start tracking Ukraine's progress on PwC's findings. In its written response, State neither agreed nor disagreed⧉ with any of them -- arguing in one case that it lacked access to 's own records, a position rejected in the same report, noting State does not need 's underlying data to examine the expenditure changes had already published in its own appendix.
- The U.S. has disbursed $45.2 billion in direct budget support to Ukraine since February 2022 -- $30.2 billion in -managed appropriated funds, fully disbursed by December 2024, and $15 billion from a loan repaid with revenue from immobilized Russian assets -- per 's September 2025 report.
- reviewed only aggregated spending totals, never the detailed transaction-level data underneath. When analyzed a sample of that data itself -- 5,121 report-to-report expenditure changes from March 2022 through August 2023 -- it flagged 161 as unexplained anomalies, including a $1,067,542, 2,474% spike in Ukraine Supreme Court staff salaries that has never been accounted for.
- 's own reporting to Congress didn't match its contractor's tracking of the same money -- $212 million in unreconciled differences across 27 instances -- and never submitted the legally required report on how the fifth Ukraine supplemental's DBS funds were used at all.
- 's contractor documented 56 recommendations to fix weaknesses in how Ukraine manages the funds, and a separate World Bank contractor found weaknesses in 44 of 120 internal controls it tested. never risk-ranked either list, even with more than $10 billion in loan funding still to be disbursed.
- Independent oversight lapsed entirely from late January through early June 2025 during a foreign-aid contract freeze. State took over on July 1, 2025 with a narrower toolkit than had, and neither agreed nor disagreed with any of 's five recommendations to close the gap.
is explicit that the 161 flagged expenditure changes are not confirmed instances of fraud, waste, or error -- they are report-to-report anomalies in a non-generalizable sample (78 of 160 total verification reports) that says "merit further examination," a review neither nor its contractors had performed as of the report's publication. The $45.2 billion total in U.S. direct budget support combines $30.2 billion in -managed appropriated funds (fully disbursed) with $15 billion from a loan funded by revenue on immobilized Russian sovereign assets, of which the World Bank had disbursed $4.64 billion through the PEACE project as of July 2025. All figures and quotations in this piece come from -25-107057, published September 24, 2025 and accessed directly from gao.gov.
Sources(1) ▾
- U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-25-107057 — Ukraine: State Should Build on USAID's Oversight of Direct Budget Support (2025-09-24) — 's own performance audit (September 2023-September 2025) of U.S. oversight of direct budget support (DBS) to Ukraine, including 's independent analysis of 5,121 report-to-report expenditure changes in a sample of Ukrainian expenditure-verification reports, the funding breakdown by category, the 56 unprioritized contractor recommendations, the internal-control weakness testing, the five recommendations to State, and State's response. Also cites the same report's one-page Highlights summary, hosted at the same gao.gov path. gao.gov · original document
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Since Russia's invasion in February 2022, the United States has sent Ukraine $45.2 billion⧉ in direct budget support -- money that pays Ukrainian teachers, pensioners, and first responders so the government can keep functioning through the war. USAID managed $30.2 billion of it⧉, all disbursed by December 2024, before handing oversight to the State Department on July 1, 2025. A September 2025 Government Accountability Office review⧉ found that for most of that time, nobody -- not , not its contractors -- had actually examined the transaction-level data that would show whether the money went where it was supposed to.