Editor's note: On May 13, 2025, this report was corrected to reflect that the grant DOGE canceled was for an organization called COOPECAN, not AASUPASI as we previously reported. Both organizations work with alpaca farmers in Peru.
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.
According to the restored IAF website in May 2025, the organization did disburse a grant worth $903,811 to Cooperativa de Producción y Servicios Especiales de los Productores de Camélidos Andinos (COOPECAN), starting in 2016. The organization supports alpaca farmers in Peru with care and training to maximize the value of their wool.
An IAF spokesperson told Snopes in March 2025 that DOGE canceled the COOPECAN grant but that the IAF had already paid out $825,670 at the time of DOGE's actions — meaning DOGE potentially only canceled the remaining $78,141, rather than the full $903,811 it claimed.
However, it was not possible to independently verify the amount the IAF said it had paid out — nor did DOGE respond to our questions about the potentially much smaller amount of money saved by cutting COOPECAN's grant. Therefore, we rate this claim a mixture of true and undetermined elements.
We reached out to COOPECAN to confirm the size of the grant it received from the IAF and how much it had received, and await a reply.
According to usaspending.gov, a database of spending by the U.S. government, COOPECAN received one grant from the IAF worth $572,900, starting in 2016. According to the database, the IAF had paid out $548,666 of this grant at the time of this writing.
An IAF spokesperson said that usaspending.gov data was "behind" the IAF because "we provide additional funding over the course of grants that have demonstrated early success in their key indicators."
As a result, we were unable to independently verify the IAF's claims about how much of the $903,811 grant COOPECAN had received by March 2025 and thus how much money DOGE had actually saved the U.S. government by ending the grant.
According to its website, COOPECAN runs various programs for its partners, who are alpaca farmers from the Andean regions of Peru. The programs include working with the farmers to ensure sustainable production of alpaca wool and ensuring the survival of businesses through assisting the younger generations.
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.