Transparency International accepted $1.3 million from Trump's Pentagon and narc-diplomacy agency, including for 'sponsored research'

Transparency International's UK and Brazil branches initiated $1.3 million in grants in September from the Pentagon and the State Department's narcotics agency, including for "sponsored research."

When Donald Trump and his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, used the opening months of their new administration to detonate the U.S. Government’s long-term soft-power arm, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the secondary impacts was the defunding of a vast international network of U.S.-backed news outlets and social media influencers.

Despite fears of an end to Trump administration funding of international anti-corruption nonprofits, the UK and Brazil branches of the Berlin-based Transparency International landed $1.3 million in previously unreported grants in September. The U.S. State Department’s international narcotics and law enforcement arm, INL, awarded TI Brazil a two-year, $800,000 grant to “combat illegal gold trafficking in the Amazon,” while TI UK was awarded a $580,000 grant from the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) for “sponsored research.”

When TI UK was reached for comment regarding whether its $580,000 grant from the DSCA was its first award from a U.S. military or intelligence agency, the branch stated that “this is the first time we have received a grant from this institution.” After publication, TI UK stated that, “Our records and institutional memory do not indicate TI-UK having received any US federal funding prior to this DSCU research grant,” in reference to the Defense Security Cooperation University.

TI Brazil did not respond to a request for comment regarding its $800,000 grant from INL and has yet to disclose funding from the U.S. Government on its financial transparency page.

(Transparency International was also named as one of three recipients of £3 million in funding from the British foreign office announced on December 4.)

One of the media organizations hit hardest by the Trump administration’s cuts was the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which was founded through a $1.7 million INL grant in 2008, though the funding was publicly routed through USAID. Described by its founder as “the largest investigative reporting organization on Earth,” one $1.8 million grant to OCCRP from the U.S. State Department’s democracy-promotion bureau in mid-2015 was unambiguous in its purpose: “balancing the Russian media sphere.”

One year after landing the counter-Russian grant, the same State Department bureau provided an additional roughly $2.4 million grant for a more aggressive effort — the Global Anti-Corruption Consortium (GACC) — which would combine OCCRP’s investigative journalism with the international lobbying muscle of Transparency International, which was created in 1993 as a de facto spin-out of the World Bank.

With a slogan of “Turning headlines into action,” the GACC’s primary technique has been to press for consequences from unilateral U.S. sanctions. A similar approach has been followed by the GACC’s CIA-connected and Palantir-powered peer, The Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), which received roughly 85% of its 2024 income from the U.S. Government, including through an explicit grant “to counter Russian and Belarussian [sic] maritime and aviation sanctions evasions [sic] activities.” The Latin America-focused news outlet InSight Crime — often cited by the U.S. State Department for its high-quality drug-trafficking analysis — similarly disclosed roughly half of its 2021 income as originating from the U.S. State Department.

As stated in a since-rewritten overview of the GACC collaboration attributed to OCCRP co-founder Paul Radu, “before OCCRP publishes a new investigation, TI sends it to authorities, prepares policy papers and responses to stimulate policymakers' action.”

The U.S. Coast Guard has been attempting to seize a third Venezuelan-linked oil-tanker this month, the Bella 1, as a weaponization of such unilateral sanctions against the socialist government of Nicolás Maduro. In late September, Transparency International’s “exile” Venezuelan arm published a list of 110 target vessels, 12 of which were said to have been subject to unilateral U.S. sanctions.

The State Department’s international narcotics arm — which expanded its mandate into countering narco-terrorism during the reign of Colombia’s Cali Cartel in the mid-90’s — currently hosts a $50 million bounty on Maduro and was the source of an additional $3 million to Transparency International “to host the 2022 International Anti-Corruption Conference” in Washington, D.C. The flagship speakers for the event included U.S. secretary of state Antony J. Blinken, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan, and USAID chief Samantha Power; OCCRP co-founder Paul Radu and editor Caroline Henshaw were also listed, alongside Transparency International founder Peter Eigen and the organization’s former chair, Delia Ferreira Rubio.

Transparency International’s US branch was disaccredited in 2017, partly as a result of the organization providing a leadership award to one of its many U.S. corporate donors, which included the weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, as well as the technology giant Google. The U.S. branch was reformed in 2020 as a project of the D.C.-based Fund for Constitutional Government, which also fiscally sponsors the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, a partner of Transparency International which on December 4 announced a new “Illicit Finance Data Lab” partnership with OCCRP, using funding from the British foreign office.

Transparency International’s New Zealand branch further confirmed to Radio New Zealand in 2023 that it had received funding from the country’s signals intelligence and foreign intelligence agencies. The international nonprofit’s Australia branch was also revealed to have been led from 2006 until 2016 by the commercial lawyer Michael C. Ahrens, who was simultaneously a member of the board of directors of the Australian branch of the American data analytics and intelligence contractor Palantir (beginning circa June 2010) and of the New Zealand branch (beginning October 27, 2015).

TI Brazil’s president circa July 2021 until September 2023 was likewise Marco Gomes, a technology executive who spent more than five years as a deployment strategist at Palantir, including roughly four months as president of TI Brazil, circa July to November 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile. Transparency International’s 2024 International Anti-Corruption Conference further listed Palantir “Global Public Sector Lead” Noam Perski as a speaker, two years after INL paid Transparency International $3 million to host the 2022 conference.

Transparency International’s main secretariat has in the past refused the author’s requests for comment on which military and intelligence agencies its chapters have accepted funding from — beyond those of New Zealand — and TI Brazil did not respond to a request for comment regarding either its new State Department funding or a Palantir executive having simultaneously served as its president.

Updated December 28, 2025 to correct the number of identified vessels in Transparency International Venezuela’s report which were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury and on January 5 to include post-publication comment from TI UK.