With revelations emerging about USAID’s spending spree on friends and pet projects, I was reminded of the following April 2023 exchange between Senator Rand Paul and Samantha Power, Administrator of USAID from 2021 to 2025. I vividly remember the vexation I felt as I listened to the recording on my evening jog the next day. Note how she repeatedly looks Senator Paul directly in the eye and insists that USAID has disclosed the grant documents he has repeatedly requested, even though he repeatedly admonishes her that he KNOWS she isn’t telling him the truth because he has never seen them.

Note as well that in October 2019, when USAID officially ceased funding PREDICT, papers like the New York Times lamented that, bereft of such funds, the program would not be able to predict emerging infectious diseases.

A great deal of evidence indicates that this was precisely the time it became apparent that a novel SARS coronavirus was circulating in Wuhan, almost certainly the result of GoF research conducted as part of the PREDICT program.

In other words, PREDICT predicted nothing—it actually created the monster.

Yet another irony was a letter that Elizabeth Warren—the Supreme Self-Righteous Bloviator of the Senate (SSBS)—wrote on January 20, 2020 to the then Administrator Mark Green, demanding to know why PREDICT funding had been cut off.

I would bet a considerable sum that at least someone in USAID knew in October 2019 about the circulating monster that PREDICT had created with the assistance of the $207 million the agency had given the program over a ten year period.

The evidence is clear: USAID has long been a rogue agency that should indeed be brought under direct State Department Control with new, stringent transparency requirements about its activities and long prison times for people like Samantha Power who conceal the agency’s activities and then lie to Senators about them.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.