Chelsea Clinton has shut down a false viral claim circulating on social media that she siphoned tens of millions of dollars from a federal foreign aid agency through her family’s foundation.
The allegation, which was reshared thousands of times on X, purports that Clinton, the daughter of former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was gifted nearly $84 million in taxpayer money that went to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a government office tasked with providing humanitarian assistance to other countries.
The accusations, which started spreading on Feb. 5, stemmed from a post that included a diagram marking several routes the money was reportedly funneled through until it finally landed in the caches of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
Chelsea Clinton, who serves as the vice chair for the Clinton Foundation, condemned the claim on her X account, asserting that she doesn’t “take a cent from the Foundation.”
“Misinformation isn’t just noise—it’s a weapon,” Clinton continued. “Efforts to undermine good work won’t stop us, and we stand in solidarity with those who are committed to truth, public health, progress, and the endless potential of our future.
Fact-checking outlet Snopes has since debunked the claim, citing tax records and a government spending tracker revealing that Clinton has not personally received any money from USAID since 2008 and that she receives no salary from the only Clinton-related initiative that has received money from the agency.
Snopes also reported that the Clinton Foundation received no money from USAID from the 2008 fiscal year to now, though the data only goes as far back as 2008. The only Clinto-related organization that USAID did award money to was the Clinton Health Access Initiative which once received a grant for $7.49 million and spent a little more than $6 million of those funds from 2019 to 2021.
What lent added weight to the accusation against Clinton was its amplification by tech billionaire and head of the Department of Government Efficiency Elon Musk, who reportedly shared the claim on his X profile but later deleted his posts.
USAID has been at the center of several misleading claims that Musk has recently made, particularly about the agency’s spending, in the wake of a Trump administration campaign to dissolve and overhaul the nation’s federal budget.
While speaking with reporters on Tuesday, Musk said a number of federal workers, including those at USAID, have been fraudulently accruing millions in taxpayer funds, though he offered no evidence to validate the claims, Forbes reported.
He even quote-tweeted a question one X user posed about whether USAID is a “form of money laundering taxpayers money into far-left organizations.”
Musk wrote, “Absolutely,” in response to the post.
No proof was attached to either tweet.
