WASHINGTON, DC- Law Enforcement Today recently reported on the African Development Foundation, where an agency official refused to provide access to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). That story focused on how the agency’s CFO received kickbacks into his personal bank account in exchange for awarding a no-bid contract worth $1 million to a company run by an acquaintance. The story has since gone from bad to worse.
In a follow-up to their original report, The Daily Wire is now reporting that the agency openly discriminated against white employees and at one point refused to hire whites. Those who managed to slip through the cracks were treated “so poorly that one soiled herself because she was afraid to leave her desk to use the bathroom,” the outlet was told.
It got so bad that when the agency’s general counsel tried calling attention to the flagrant rules and laws being violated, agency officials set him up by claiming he issued violent threats and then “removed him from his job with a bizarre manifesto that called him ‘grimy’ and ‘unwholesome,’ general counsel Mateo Dunne told The Daily Wire. Dunne is white.
CEO Travis Adkins, who led the agency from 2021 until last February, joined the ADF after working at the now-defunct US Agency for International Development (USAID) after being appointed by Joe Biden.
Adkins’ former assistant, in a sworn affidavit, said that “on at least three occasions, Mr. Adkins told me that he wanted his entire team (to include the General Counsel) to consist only of Black people. He wanted all of his direct reports to be Black.”
“He was very adamant in only hiring African Americans, mainly female, and he told me many times he would not hire a white person or a veteran,” said the assistant, who is black and who spoke to The Daily Wire on condition of anonymity. “I said that’s discrimination, and he said, ‘I’m the president and CEO, I can do what I want.” It should be noted that Adkins lectures at Georgetown University.
The ADF was created by Congress in 1980. The president of the United States appoints the board members to six-year terms. The board then appoints a CEO to run the organization’s day-to-day operations. The board chair was Jack Leslie, who is white and a former staffer to the late Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA), who was appointed to the board by George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Adkins bragged about concealing the organization’s activities from the board, bragging “them white motherfuc*ers, they don’t need to know…I don’t think I should tell them shit,” the assistant said.
In one case, a junior employee disappeared from her job only months after she brought complaints forward to the board. When the assistant asked what happened to her, Adkins replied, “I just put the white bitch on a contract and then the contract ended.”
Adkins carried on the “legacy” of the former CEO, C.D. Glin, a former Peace Corps DEI officer, later appointed to the Peace Corps and led the ADF from 2016 to 2021. “C.D. [Glin] literally said to me that he needed to hire black people,” another employee, also speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Daily Wire. “Virtually everyone he hired in programs was black.”
The ADF had to pay a settlement in 2021 after laying off a white senior executive without paying her severance or following federal rules, with the executive saying it was because of her race. There was an alleged “reduction in force” that was targeted at her, she claimed, and falsely said she was unqualified to shift into another position, even though many of those positions reported to her.
General counsel working within government agencies ensures that rules and laws are followed. Glin ensured that the general counsel’s office was either empty, or he made sure it had inexperienced junior lawyers unfamiliar with government, despite the agency being engaged in complex international finance.
After Glin departed as CEO in 2021, the agency had no permanent leader for a time. When Mateo Dunne took over after working as a high-level executive at the Defense Department, he was “appalled” by how the ADF refused to follow laws and government rules.
Dunne began interviewing agency employees about conflicts of interest, purchase card abuse, contracting fraud, and a toxic workplace environment. He soon developed evidence of malfeasance within the agency and brought his concerns forward to acting CEO Elisabeth Feleke. He told her that outside lawyers would have to be brought in to document the scope of the lawbreaking.
Those concerns fell on deaf ears, with Feleke ordering him to stop the investigation, telling him to change his preliminary findings, and falsely telling the board the investigation was complete,’ The Daily Wire was told. Dunne halted the investigation, however, he forwarded his preliminary report to the board.
After Glin left, instead of hiring an outsider to run the ADF, his close friend, Travis Adkins, was hired to replace him. Adkins would later testify under oath that he was selected to lead the ADF without applying for the job and couldn’t recall when or how he was selected.
Dunne attempted to show Adkins the illegal activities he had identified so that Adkins could work to reform the agency, however, Adkins was not interested. His immediate priority was to shut the investigation down.
Hours after being sworn in as president and CEO in January 2022, Adkins put Dunne on leave and cut off his access to evidence before he could even speak, according to video.
“You will be on administrative leave the very moment that we hang up this call. You will have a box mailed to your home to allow you to send back to us any USADF-issued equipment,” he told Dunne. “You are not to contact any of the members of the USADF staff. And again, your access to all of our data and systems will be closed down immediately.”
In response, Dunne wrote: “I had prepared this slide deck to introduce myself and what I’ve done at USADF. This conversation obviously went a different way…I guess I have a couple of questions.”
Adkins snarkily replied: “We’re not going to do questions and answers. We’re not going to have a back and forth about this.”
There was no conversation after that, and Dunne said he was never told why he was put on paid leave, which Adkins admitted was the first step in a disciplinary process.
With that, the agency tried to build a case for firing Dunne, including a 75-page “manifesto” that described Dunne as “Adversarial, Belittling, Calculating, Combative, Condescending, Deceitful, Defensive, Grimy, Sinister, and Unwholesome.” Looks like that pretty much covered the gamut of slanderous speech.
Further, the report referred to Dunne as a “danger to USADF’s mission and staff.” In other words, he was uncovering the grift, and Adkins didn’t like it.
The so-called “insubordination” involved uncovering grift and corruption involving agency top officials’ spending on luxury and personal items. Feleke was uninterested in the apparent fraud, saying, “I have not given Mateo direction or mandate to investigate credit card fraud.”
As an example of Dunne’s alleged defiance of USADF leadership, the dossier said that despite Feleke telling him not to raise the issue, Dunne notified Glin that he had not filed years’ worth of mandatory Office of Government Ethics conflict-of-interest forms. In his capacity as general counsel, Dunne was mandated to do so in his capacity as “designated ethics officer.” Those forms would have confirmed that ADF paid money to a group associated with Glin. Refusal to file the forms carries criminal penalties.
Adkins also implied that Dunne had threatened to kill him, claiming something was “sent to people regarding the death of government officials, as all of us are government officials.” As it turns out, this was a complete and utter distortion of Dunne sharing a sentimental quote from a former New York official while speaking about the passing of a former legislator.
There was also a comment placed on the employer-review site “GlassDoor that said, under “Advice to Management”: die.” While attributed to “General Counsel,” Dunne did not write the post. Despite that, the ADF sent four law enforcement agencies to investigate Dunne for “threatening.”
Conversely, Adkins was honest with ADF Board Chair Jack Leslie about what was happening at the agency. He told Leslie that Dunne was placed on leave for his “efforts to damage USADF’s reputation via the Office of Inspector General…Dunne conducted an unauthorized, backward-focused investigation that unsettled staff…he then began leveling accusations that USADF senior leadership was ‘interfering’ with his investigations and General Counsel functions.”
While Adkins told Leslie what Dunne was being investigated for, he never told Dunne, nor did he attempt to fire him, which would have required proof of wrongdoing. Instead, he was left on paid leave indefinitely, in defiance of a law that limits such leave to 90 days. After six months, Dunne quit to take a different job.
Dunne’s termination would appear to violate federal whistleblower protections, with The Daily Caller calling the situation “as remarkable a case of whistleblower retaliation as the government has seen.” Dunne provided documentation to the Office of Special Counsel, which ostensibly exists to investigate whistleblower retaliation. However, the case was closed when the employee he’d been working with left her position, Dunne said.
Dunne filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging racial discrimination and retaliation. In August 2024, his case was dismissed by an administrative law judge, even though he had a sworn affidavit from a black employee who said Adkins told her repeatedly he didn’t want any white people working for him. That case is currently under appeal.
Adkins, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, was deposed by Dunne as part of his lawsuit. In sworn testimony, Adkins claimed he never said he wouldn’t hire white people, but also suffered a convenient case of amnesia when asked how many people worked for him, claiming he only remembered two. He said he didn’t know what race various employees were.
Adkins apparently perjured himself because numerous documents contradicted him, as well as testimony by nine other employees.
For example, Adkins told the board that a government human resource official had “recommended Mr. Dunne immediately be placed on Administrative Leave for misconduct and performance.” A rep from that office denied that claim.
Adkins also denied plotting to remove Dunne as general counsel before even starting as CEO to protect Glin and other officials, such as Mathieu Zahui, the chief financial officer and subject of our previous article.
Discovery in the lawsuit found that Zahui had written before Adkins took over that “the board and the incoming president would like to explore the possibilities of a do-over” on the general counsel hire.
Dunne told The Daily Wire that it is disappointing to watch some attempt to turn the ADF into a “martyr” to avoid admitting that DOGE’s close scrutiny was warranted, that no one wanted to fix the issues, even though it was obvious it was a broken agency.
Dunne expressed disappointment with his experiences at ADF, saying he left the Defense Department to go to ADF “because I wanted to help people,” however, he found that Africans and low-level staff were being short-changed by widespread fraud.
“I think USADF deserved the fate it received, because if it couldn’t be run correctly, then it shouldn’t be run at all. If the leaders of that agency couldn’t act, and members of the foreign policy establishment wouldn’t act,” Dunne said, “it’s an indictment of the entire system.”
