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| - The Inter-American Foundation (IAF) gave a $275,510 grant to a Peruvian association supporting alpaca farmers in 2023. In March 2025, following an executive order from U.S. President Donald Trump, DOGE reduced the IAF to one employee and canceled several of its grants.
However, according to usaspending.gov and the IAF's website, the IAF grant to the Peruvian association supporting alpaca farmers did not amount to the $903,811 claimed by DOGE. According to the IAF, it only supported one project for alpaca farmers in Peru — the association that received the $275,510 grant.
It's unclear where DOGE's claimed $903,811 figure came from or exactly which grants it entails. We reached out to the department for clarification and await a reply.
On March 4, 2025, the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, said (archived) on X that it had reduced the Inter-American Foundation (IAF), a U.S. government agency that funded community-led development in Latin America and the Caribbean, to one employee and canceled several of its grants in the process.
The reduction of the agency followed a Feb. 19, 2025, executive order by President Donald Trump that called for the elimination "to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law" of the IAF and other agencies in the name of reducing bureaucracy.
One of the canceled grants consisted of "$903,811 for alpaca farming in Peru," according to DOGE. News of this allegedly canceled grant was shared by users on Facebook (archived) and X (archived). Snopes readers also asked us about the grant.
However, while it was true that the IAF issued a grant to an association supporting alpaca farmers in Peru, according to public government spending records this grant was not worth $903,811, as claimed by DOGE. Instead, according to usaspending.gov, Artesanos Asociados Sumac Pallay Sibayo (AASUPASI) received a $275,510 grant to be paid out from 2023 to 2026. The 2023 grant was the only grant to AASUPASI listed on usaspending.gov. At the time of this writing, the IAF had paid out $161,165 of the grant.
It was unclear where DOGE's $903,811 figure came from. The grant was not listed on DOGE's Wall of Receipts for canceled government grants. We have reached out to AASUPASI, former Peru grant specialists at the IAF and DOGE for clarity on DOGE's grant figure, and await their replies. Meanwhile, we rate this claim a mixture of true, false and undetermined.
According to the IAF, AASUPASI is a "women-led Collagua Indigenous association" that supports "smallholder alpaca farmers" and artisans in the highlands of the mountainous Peruvian province of Arequipa.
The project brief, according to the IAF, was: "Strengthening the resilience of alpaca communities and textile artisans in the district of Sibayo, Arequipa."
In addition to funding from the IAF in the form of a grant, the project also received $518,405 in "counterpart commitment." The IAF site did not explain what this term meant or where the additional funding came from (again, we have reached out to the IAF for more information).
Regardless, factoring in the "counterpart commitment" still did not equal DOGE's claimed $903,811 grant. According to usaspending.gov, the 2023 grant was the only one the IAF gave to AASUPASI. The IAF did not support any other alpaca farming-related projects in Peru, according to its website.
Information about the IAF's work with AASUPASI came from an archived version of its site, which was down for maintenance at the time of this writing.
The IAF was created by Congress in 1969 under Title 22 of the U.S. Code. The agency had a budget of about $60 million in fiscal year 2024, according to usaspending.gov. According to the agency's latest annual report, it supported a total of 426 projects in 2023.
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