The U.S. Spent Over $1,000,000,000 to Counter China — and Never Checked Whether Any of It Worked.

Since 2020, Congress has handed the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) at least $1,600,000,000to push back on China’s influence around the world. The two agencies funded roughly 470 projects worth nearly $1,200,000,000 between fiscal years 2020 and 2023.

A new Government Accountability Office report — Countering China: Agencies Provided Over $1 Billion but Have Not Assessed Overall Results of Projects (GAO-26-107822), released in June 2026 — reaches a blunt conclusion. Despite spending more than a billion taxpayer dollars, State and USAID never assessed whether the portfolio of projects actually worked. The watchdog found the agencies do not even have reliable, complete data on what they bought.

This is the accountability gap in its purest form: real money, a serious national-security mission, and no scoreboard. GAO issued five recommendations to fix it. State concurred with all of them — an admission, in effect, that the watchdog is right.

• $1,200,000,000 — spent by State and USAID on roughly 470 counter-China projects across FYs 2020–2023 · Source: GAO-26-107822; Washington Times
• $1,600,000,000 — the minimum Congress has directed toward countering Chinese influence since FY 2020 · Source: GAO-26-107822; Responsible Statecraft
• 0 portfolio assessments — GAO found the interagency working group never assessed overall results across the portfolio of projects · Source: GAO-26-107822
• 129 projects — had no time-frame data for when money was actually spent; 38 'lines of effort' were also missing · Source: GAO-26-107822; Washington Times
• 5 recommendations — GAO's fixes — earlier guidance, documented bureau input, complete project data, and a results-assessment process; State concurred with all five · Source: GAO-26-107822

The GAO’s core finding is in its title. Across the roughly 470 projects State and USAID funded from fiscal years 2020 through 2023 — together worth nearly $1,200,000,000— the interagency working group that oversees the effort has not assessed the results of those efforts across the portfolio. Individual project officers may track their own line items, but no one stepped back to answer the basic question Congress is paying for: did all this spending actually blunt Chinese influence anywhere?

GAO reports that State and USAID began developing a framework to assess results in 2023, but the agencies were still in the early stages when a January 2025 executive order paused obligations of foreign-assistance funds. As of March 2026, GAO writes, State officials were uncertain whether they would even resume building the framework. In other words: a billion dollars out the door, and the tool to measure it remains a half-finished draft.

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“State and USAID have not assessed the overall results of efforts to counter Chinese influence across the portfolio of funded projects.”

U.S. Government Accountability Office — GAO-26-107822, June 2026

The reason no one assessed results is that no one could fully account for the money. Officials told GAO that bureaus and overseas posts managing the projects handed over incomplete data and reports with errors. Among the roughly 470 projects, officials could not provide the time frame for when funds were spent for 129 projects and 38 “lines of effort”. Data was also missing from nearly one-third of the approved proposals about which specific projects the money funded.

GAO put the consequence plainly: working-group officials lacked the information needed to track how funds were used and to determine whether the funding ultimately supported the activities described in the approved proposals. The watchdog had to ask officials to manually compile project lists from scattered sources because there was no reliable central record — for a portfolio worth over a billion dollars.

The Counter Chinese Influence Fund was created in the FY 2020 appropriations bill, then expanded: House lawmakers later passed legislation (HR 1157, the Countering the PRC Malign Influence Fund Authorization Act) on a 351–36 bipartisan vote authorizing more than $1,600,000,000over five years for State and USAID. The stated goal: strengthen partner countries against Beijing’s economic coercion, propaganda, and Belt and Road leverage.

Reporting on the GAO findings describes the kinds of line items the fund covered. The Washington Times notes the State Department’s narcotics-and-law-enforcement bureau spent about $3,000,000 in 2023 on port-security screening technology; roughly $600,000 went to educating European academic institutions about technology-transfer risks; about $475,000 trained Western Hemisphere journalists to detect Chinese propaganda; and around $2,300,000 funded cyberattack-awareness training across East Asia and the Pacific. Individually defensible or not, none of it rolls up into a portfolio-level answer about effectiveness — which is exactly GAO’s point.

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GAO did not just diagnose the problem; it prescribed five fixes, and the State Department concurred with all of them. GAO recommends that State release its annual proposal guidance earlier in the process; require documented input from regional and functional bureaus on every proposal; require Regional China Officers to review and document input on regional proposals; consistently collect and periodically update complete project data; and — the headline fix — develop a process to assess results across the portfolio, spanning lines of effort, accounts, and regions.

That last recommendation is the one that matters for taxpayers. Without a portfolio-level results process, the United States can spend another $1,000,000,000on countering China and still be unable to tell Congress, or the public, what it got for the money. The State Department said it is “committed to decision-making based on the best available information” and is working on a monitoring system — but as of GAO’s report, all five recommendations remained open.

The report lands in the middle of a broader reckoning over foreign-aid spending. In February 2025, the House Oversight Committee’s DOGE subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), held a hearing spotlighting USAID disbursements and weak oversight, and the Trump administration moved to claw back unspent foreign-aid funds. A January 2025 executive order paused new foreign-assistance obligations — the same pause that froze State’s half-built results framework.

There is a real tension here, and the GAO report sits squarely inside it. Some lawmakers argue the counter-China mission is exactly the kind of foreign assistance the United States should be doing more of, not less. Others argue that an effort no one can measure is, by definition, impossible to defend. GAO’s finding cuts through both: whatever one thinks of the mission, you cannot manage what you do not measure — and for over a billion dollars, no one was measuring.

Strip away the geopolitics and this is a clean accountability story. The federal government took at least $1,600,000,000 from Congress, spent nearly $1,200,000,000of it across roughly 470 projects in dozens of countries, and — per its own oversight watchdog — never built the basic machinery to know whether any of it worked. It could not even reliably say when 129 of those projects spent their money. That is not a partisan claim; it is the GAO’s finding, and the State Department concurred with every recommendation to fix it.

The fix GAO wants — complete data and a portfolio-wide results process — is not exotic. It is the kind of thing any organization spending a billion dollars is expected to have. Until it exists, the United States is funding a serious mission on faith. We’ll track whether State actually closes the five recommendations — and whether the next billion comes with a scoreboard attached.

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Last updated June 22, 2026