A coordinated bombardment of half-truths - led by billionaire Elon Musk, WikiLeaks, and a loose network of self-styled free-speech advocates - turned the US Agency for International Development’s (Usaid) own transparency against itself to engineer its eventual collapse in early 2025, a cross-border investigation by Asian journalists has found.

The campaign, which peaked between February and March 2025 during the onset of US President Donald Trump’s second term, did not rely on wholesale fabrications about Usaid.

Instead, it rode a perfect storm of transparency by using real contract figures and publicly available audit reports and disclosures to frame Usaid’s work in Asia and beyond as a deliberate waste of funds and a covert bankrolling of foreign interference.

Since 1961, Usaid has served as the US government's primary foreign aid agency, funding programmes in global health, democratic governance, education, and media development in more than 100 countries.

It has supported publicly documented projects of the...