USADF Has Blocked Its Own Inspector General for Over a Year

A management advisory from USAID's Office of Inspector General⧉, dated May 29, 2026, says the U.S. African Development Foundation (USADF) has been unresponsive to its own federal watchdog for more than a year.▸ OIG could not complete either of the two assessments it is legally required to run every year -- an information-security review and a financial-statement audit -- and, as of the advisory, still hadn't regained the access it needs to start USADF's FY2026 reviews, due July 31 and November 16, 2026.

OIG says USADF did not consistently respond⧉ to its requests for the FY2025 financial-statement audit from March 8, 2025 through January 16, 2026 -- a gap the inspector general calls "unprecedented."▸ A separate information-request window, for the FY2025 review required under the Federal Information Security Modernization Act⧉, ran from April 14, 2025 through January 13, 2026. Both gaps trace to the same root cause OIG documents directly: the February 19, 2025 executive order "Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy" directed USADF to cut its statutory functions and staff to the minimum required by law, and in the months that followed, USADF's remaining staff spent much of the year without access to the Agency's own systems.

The financial-statement audit spells out exactly how little access there was: in 2025, USADF staff could reach the Agency's financial systems for only 95 of 261 working days⧉.▸ Staff were on administrative leave from March 8 to June 2 (59 working days lost), then recalled but still locked out through July 22 (36 more days), then cut off again on December 2 and placed back on leave from December 15 through year-end. USADF's Chief Financial Officer never certified the Agency's financial statements for the second, third, or fourth quarters of FY2025 -- meaning, in OIG's words, "no reliable financial statements were produced as of September 30, 2025."

Unable to obtain a signed management representation letter, transaction-level evidence, or consistent staff access, OIG issued a disclaimer of opinion⧉ on USADF's FY2025 financial statements -- it does not express an opinion on them at all, because it could not gather sufficient evidence to form one.▸ The audit also found three material weaknesses in USADF's internal controls and four instances of noncompliance with federal financial-reporting law.

On the information-security side, OIG's FY2025 FISMA evaluation⧉ similarly could not determine whether USADF's security program was effective, but still found 23 critical and 122 high-risk vulnerabilities that remained unpatched past USADF's own 180-day remediation deadline, per scans run December 2, 2024.

The advisory's sharpest line concerns money OIG cannot locate: more than $9 million held in USADF accounts overseas, an amount carried in the Agency's own unaudited financial statements as of September 30, 2025, that OIG has been unable to verify because it can't get the physical and monetary asset checks it needs.▸ Compounding that, USADF has acted on only 1 of 12 open recommendations OIG issued to address fraud risk in grants management, some dating to an August 2024 report on unreported suspected misuse of USADF grant funds and equipment -- USADF missed its own target dates for a risk-management framework (January 2025), staff fraud-awareness briefings (October 2024), and monitoring whether either worked (December 2025).

A separate August 2025 evaluation made nine more recommendations to fix gaps in USADF's strategic-partnership and grants-administration processes; USADF agreed to all nine but made implementation contingent on remaining operational -- even as the Agency continues drawing on a $12 million FY2026 appropriation⧉ to keep making grants.