No, Chelsea Clinton didn't receive $84M from USAID

[Tin tức]

Posts shared online connected the rumor to her work for the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

By Grace Deng


Claim:
Chelsea Clinton received $84 million in taxpayer dollars from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Rating: False

On Feb. 5, 2025, social media users spread a claim that Chelsea Clinton, daughter of Democratic former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton, received $84 million in taxpayer money from the U.S. Agency for International Development, a humanitarian aid agency.

The claim spread primarily on X but it also appeared in posts on Facebook, Threads and Bluesky. Many of these posts included an image purporting to show how money flows to "Bill Hillary & Chelsea Clinton."

Embedded Tweet

WorldNetDaily, a far-right news outlet known for publishing conspiracy theories, posted a story about the rumor, citing what appeared to be a since-deleted X post from tech mogul Elon Musk. Based on the embedded post in the WorldNetDaily story, Musk appears to have quoted a post claiming Chelsea Clinton was "casually taking home $84 million" with "Wow." Snopes could not find a screenshot or archived link verifying that Musk posted this, but we found quote posts and replies to a deleted post from Musk discussing this claim.

In short, Chelsea Clinton has not received $84 million from USAID. The graph shared purporting to show how money flows to "Bill Hillary & Chelsea Clinton" is a reference to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, not Chelsea Clinton specifically. A search of tax records and the U.S. government's spending tracker found that Chelsea Clinton has not personally received any money from USAID since 2008 — the first year records are available online — and that she receives no salary from the only Clinton-related initiative that has received money from USAID. Thus, we rate this claim as false.

Graph references Clinton Foundation, not Chelsea Clinton

The graph appears to be from datarepublican.com's charity graphs (archived). The webpage says it creates its graphs using employer identification numbers — federal tax identification numbers — as well as the USASpending.gov website, the American government's "official open data source of federal spending information." It is unclear how often datarepublican.com's information is updated, although its X account was announcing updates as recently as Feb. 5, as of this writing.

An IRS search for the EIN, listed under "Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton" on the image leads to the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, a philanthropic nonprofit group that carries out various humanitarian efforts. Chelsea Clinton received $0 for her work for this foundation in 2022, according to publicly available tax returns (see Page 7).

ProPublica also offers an easily searchable Nonprofit Explorer tool using these IRS documents, which show Chelsea Clinton had not received any compensation from the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation since at least fiscal year 2013.

It is also worth noting that datarepublican.com's own nongovernmental organization tracker meant to show connections between charities and USAID funding noted as of this writing (screenshot) that Chelsea Clinton receives $0 in compensation from all nonprofit organizations where she is listed as an officer.

Clinton Foundation and USAID funding

The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation also received no money from USAID from fiscal years 2008 to 2024 — which ran from October 2007 to September 2024 — according to a search of USASpending.gov, which goes back to fiscal year 2008. Fiscal year 2025 is not over as of this writing, but the foundation received no money from USAID through Feb. 6, 2025, either.

Another search of USASpending.gov found that the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation has received only one financial award from the U.S. government in total: $49,998 in 2010 for AmeriCorps National, a federal initiative that provides Americans opportunities to do community service.

In 2022, the Clinton Foundation had about $302 million in net assets. ProPublica also has 2023 tax returns available that do not appear to be on the IRS lookup search yet, which show the organization's net assets at $293 million.

From fiscal years 2008 to 2024, USAID has awarded money to only one Clinton organization: the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which was founded by the Clinton Foundation but is its own nonprofit group. The initiative received a grant for $7.49 million and spent $6,049,198.09 of that grant from 2019 to 2021.

From 2019 to 2021, Chelsea Clinton did not receive any compensation for her position as a board member for the health initiative, either, IRS documents say (see Page 18 in the organization's 2019 and 2021 tax returns and Page 17 in the 2020 return).

ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer tool provides information on executive compensation at the Clinton Health Access Initiative from fiscal years 2013 to 2024, and according to the tool Chelsea Clinton received no compensation from the organization during those years.

Thus, there is no evidence Chelsea Clinton has received any money from USAID, nor is there any evidence that she received any compensation from the Clinton organization that has received money from USAID.

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