Your tax millions sent to AMERICA
IT IS one of the richest countries on Earth, yet millions of pounds of British taxpayers’ money is being sent to fund aid organisations in the US, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
One Washington think-tank, the Center for Global Development (CGD), received £5.9 million – yet was so cash-rich that it moved into new £12 million offices complete with a 60-seat ‘ideas lab’.
British money was also inexplicably used to fund a global warming summit in Texas at which local businessmen were encouraged to jump on the ‘green energy’ bandwagon. And an American charity that received UK aid has made television shows about how rival jail gangs made peace over a shared loved of football.
According to the Department for International Development (DFID) website, Washington-based CGD has received nearly £6 million since November 2011 for ‘global development, researchbased aid, food security, global health, technology and anticorruption cases’.
While CGD is an internationally recognised and respected thinktank that focuses on ‘rigorous independent research’ into how to make aid more effective and reducing global poverty, it appears to have few qualms about spending money on its own highly paid bosses and moved into new offices at the end of 2013.
The most recent publicly available tax records show that the organisation’s president, Nancy Birdsall, received a £300,000 salary in 2014 while chief operating officer Todd Moss (who writes thrillers in his spare time) was paid £200,000.
Birdsall lives in a £1.1million home in the Washington suburbs with her lawyer husband David. She recently announced she was stepping down as president and has hired a firm of top Californian headhunters to find her replacement.
Moss is a former US State Department official who served under President George W. Bush. Moss balances his work with CGD with writing airport thrillers involving a character called Judd Ryker, who works in the State Department’s ‘Crisis Reaction Unit’ and becomes embroiled in adventures in Africa and Latin America.
One critic praised Moss for ‘making US policy in Africa a page-turner.’
The CGD’s new headquarters occupies the 33,000sq ft fifth floor of a modern office in one of Washington’s most prestigious areas.
The offices cost £9million to buy, with a further £3million spent on fixtures and fittings, including a ‘multi-media lab’ and 170-seat con- ference hall. Lawrence MacDonald, CGD’s then vice-president of communications, sought to head off criticism of the office purchase in a blog post that said: ‘Sometimes the thriftiest thing to do is buy your own place.’
He said the millions ploughed into the building were available because the charity, which has around 50 US-based staff, had accumulated ‘a modest reserve fund’.
Staff at CGD – which also has offices in London’s exclusive Pimlico area – are encouraged to have fun. During President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address in January, they had a ‘bingo’ night complete with drinks and pizza. The winner was the first to cross off a card filled with words commonly used by the President, such as ‘terrorism’, ‘immigrations’ and ‘poverty’.
In an email, a CGD spokesman said: ‘The funding we receive from DFID supports our independent academic research. None of the funding we received from them was used to buy our offices.
‘The support from DFID funds specific programmes of work including research into how wealthy countries can make aid money more effective, strengthening education systems and strengthening global health, food security, anti-corruption and technology policies.’