$43 Million to Export American DEI to Egypt

Inclusive Workplaces. Equity Frameworks. Solar Panels. All in a Country That Bans Opposition.

Between 2020 and 2025, USAID’s Egypt mission ran a cluster of programs totaling $43.3 million focused on workforce development with DEI components, civil society capacity building, clean energy transition, and public health equity. The programs were funded through USAID’s Country Development Cooperation Strategy for Egypt and administered through local NGO partners and international contractors.

Egypt, under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is an authoritarian state that has jailed journalists, dissolved opposition parties, and prosecuted NGO workers under restrictive civil society laws. The USAID programs were designed and funded under the premise that American diversity, equity, and inclusion frameworks and workforce development models were appropriate exports to this environment.

American Employers Are Required to Implement These Frameworks. Egyptian Ones Were Asked Nicely.

The Workforce Investment for Productive Employment (WIPE) program — the largest in the cluster at $22.4 million — included training Egyptian private-sector employers on inclusive hiring practices, unconscious bias, and workplace equity frameworks. These are the same frameworks that drove billions in corporate DEI spending inside the United States. USAID, using American taxpayer dollars, exported them to a country that does not share the constitutional or cultural context in which they were developed.

The civil society program (SCAP) trained Egyptian NGOs on “equity frameworks for governance” — a phrase that does not translate straightforwardly into a political context where the government regularly prosecutes NGO workers under Law 70 of 2017, which requires government approval for foreign-funded civil society activity. Several USAID partner organizations in Egypt have faced legal pressure from Egyptian authorities. The programs continued.

Egypt Receives $1.3 Billion a Year in U.S. Military Aid. Plus This.

The United States provides Egypt with approximately $1.3 billion annually in military assistance under agreements dating to the Camp David Accords — a strategic relationship that has been maintained across administrations of both parties. On top of the military aid, USAID has run a parallel civilian assistance portfolio focused on economic development, civil society, and governance.

The case for the civilian assistance programs has always been that they build the institutional capacity that makes Egypt a more stable long-term partner. Critics have argued that the DEI-oriented programming in particular reflects domestic American political priorities being exported at taxpayer expense to a country that neither requested nor shares them — and that the results are unverifiable in an environment where the Egyptian government controls what civil society organizations can say and do.

“USAID's Egypt portfolio increasingly reflected domestic DEI priorities rather than host-country development needs, with limited evidence of measurable outcomes.”

House Foreign Affairs Committee — USAID Oversight Review, Middle East and North Africa (2025)