You really have to admire the sheer audacity it takes to be a federal employee, working at a U.S. aid agency no less, while simultaneously creating a fake company to rip off pandemic relief funds.
That’s not just double-dipping—that’s a government-sponsored grift with a side of gall. Yusuf Akoll, Senior Procurement Contract Specialist at USAID, decided that while he was overseeing taxpayer money earmarked for international development, he might as well snag a little stimulus for himself. Nothing like a little personal “foreign aid,” right?
According to federal prosecutors, Akoll cooked up Naagode Consulting LLC in November 2020—months after the deadline for businesses to qualify for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds. But no problem. He just told Uncle Sam that the company had been up and running in January 2020, and had pulled in a comfy $40,000 the year before. Never mind that it didn’t exist until late 2020. That kind of creative accounting would make Enron blush.
Yusuf Akoll, a senior USAID officer, has been charged with fraud for exploiting COVID-19 relief funds. Akoll, who worked as a Senior Procurement Contract Specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), allegedly created a fake company called Naagode…
— Jason (@jason1Patterson) May 11, 2025
The government, in its infinite wisdom and efficiency, didn’t bother cross-checking with Virginia’s corporate registry or, say, tax filings that might have confirmed Akoll was lying through his teeth. No red flags, no alarms, just a nice fat direct deposit of $16,666 for a company with as much real-world presence as Bigfoot. And this guy wasn’t a random Joe off the street—he was a contract specialist at an agency already under scrutiny for sloppy financial oversight. You can’t make this stuff up.
1/3: Federal prosecutors charged Yusuf Akoll, a former Senior Procurement Contract Specialist at USAID, with fraudulently obtaining Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans totaling approximately $16,666. https://t.co/cRjLHzkWLa
— 🇺🇸 ✝️ Thomas Baer (@ThomasB47402901) May 11, 2025
This, of course, is just a microcosm of the absolute clown show that was the federal government’s COVID spending spree. The feds blew out the doors on the Treasury vault and adopted a “pay now, panic later” model. It’s almost like they actively avoided the most basic vetting protocols. Why check tax returns when you can just click “approve”? Why verify a business existed when you can just assume everyone’s telling the truth? Because nothing says “effective governance” like handing out billions with less scrutiny than your average high school bake sale.
Then came the cherry on top: the Biden administration, in its never-ending quest to turn “equity” into an excuse for fiscal negligence, decided in 2023 it would just not bother collecting loans under $100,000. Forget whether the recipients lied or failed to meet forgiveness criteria. It’s fine, because feelings. We’re just going to let it all slide because accountability is so last season. Never mind that the Small Business Administration’s own inspector general said this move violates the rules and encourages more fraud. Nothing to see here, folks.
Congress almost let the Special Inspector General for Pandemic Recovery vanish quietly in March 2025—because why bother chasing down fraud when you can bury the evidence? According to CourtWatch, that watchdog agency was sitting on $577 million in suspected fraud cases. But it only had a skeleton crew of investigators, because apparently staffing a fraud unit during the largest federal cash giveaway in history isn’t a priority. Meanwhile, Senator Ed Markey complained the office only recovered $3 for every dollar spent. Maybe if they had been given more than a handful of people and a stack of paperclips, we’d be getting somewhere.
Thankfully, Sen. Joni Ernst stepped in with a spine and a calculator, fighting to keep the office alive. She pointed out the obvious: fraudsters shouldn’t be allowed to ride off into the sunset with sacks of taxpayer cash. And speaking of sacks, Lexis Nexis Risk Solutions told Congress that criminals likely stole $1 trillion in COVID relief money. That’s trillion, with a “T”—most of it vanishing overseas faster than Joe Biden can forget what state he’s in.
Akoll is just a symptom of a much bigger sickness: a federal government that treats your hard-earned dollars like Monopoly money and only remembers to care about fraud when it becomes a political inconvenience. But hey, as long as we’re throwing around words like “equity” and “emergency,” accountability can wait.
