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They have also sent an email that explains that the affected programs are the Responsable Computing Challenge and Mozilla Common Voice, the latter of which is the largest open, crowd-sourced speech recognition dataset.
Now that I've been given the hat of the official "Mozilla Shill", I thought I might just as well dig a bit into how much this money exactly is and what it has been used.
Let's start with the narrative that's been built up by an infamous tech journalist who I shall not name here, and then I will clarify what's correct and what's wrong.
Firstly, he claims that the Responsible Computing Challenge is specifically funded by the USAID, which should account for $2.5M of the above-mentioned number.
He claims that the page that shares that USAID supports Mozilla is not findable through search engines, as a sign that Mozilla is probably trying to hide this through robot texts and such.
He then starts reading all the grants, focusing on the ones that sounds more "political", i.e., that focus most on social justice, inclusiveness, and marginalized groups – all in the context of computing and the internet, mind you.
He claims the money is also going towards in-person kick-off meetings with keynotes on critical race and gender studies, which are - of course - also presented as the evil in this world.
But why is Mozilla doing all of this now? Well - he claims - since the deal with Google that's giving them 80% of their revenue might be soon disappearing, they "need every couple millions they can get, which includes that of USAID".
He also wonders, at this point, if these taxpayer dollars are going to be funding the "most extreme ideological" Mozilla projects, such as a "feminist AI Alliance for Climate Justice"?
He also complains that all of this USAID income from the US government was not declared on their public finance documents, and thus, these shady ways of them receiving money were kept a secret until now.
I decided to bring up all of these points because I thought it would be useful to address them and show you how people try to intentionally mislead you into thinking that a nothingburger actually has any meat in it.
Let's start with what we know happened, to the best of our knowledge.
Firstly, the Common Voice project. This is a free and open source platform to collect scripted speech, spontaneous speech and language text, with the goal of developing technologies such as voice recognition or voice synth that are open source and based on a dataset of people who willingly gave their voices for the project.
This is a very worthy project, with parters that go from Germany, to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to even NVIDIA - who is probably interested to such a public dataset.
Now, the Common Voice project has received $1M from the National Science Foundation in 2024.
The goal was to collect various kinds of languages and dialects within the US so that voice recognition software would be able to, well, recognize any of them instead of just a handful.
This would be done through open-source platforms and infrastructure to ensure public accessibility, and the program should ensure a good diversity of voices to allow voice recognition software to work on any dialect.
However, this grant has already been paid off by the NSF; thus, I'm not sure why it's being brought up at all by Mozilla. Maybe there could've been more grants in the future about this that won't materialize? It's hard to know. That said, this isn't USAID money, so let's move on.
The real deal is the Responsible Computing Challenge. This started in 2018 under the name of "Responsible Computer Science Challenge", and the goal was to "support the conceptualization, development, and piloting of curricula that integrates ethics with undergraduate computer science training".
The first round of funding indeed happened in 2018, and it was only privately funded. I quote:
With funding from Mozilla, Schmidt Futures, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies, awardees from the first round of RCS across the U.S. have created 100 distinct classes with more than 15,000 students.
This makes sense since the 2018 grantees were all U.S. based, and thus outside the scope of a program like USAID. Thus, we can safely assume that these programs did not use "taxpayer money" as claimed, and we can cross them off.
USAID came into play in 2022, and in the same year, the program changed its name to the "Responsible Computing Challenge" that we all know and love today. Between 2022 and 2023, they have announced the following:
- A grand total of $250K in grants towards institutions in India;
- A grand total of $1.2M in grants towards India and Kenya.
- A grand total of $2.2M in grants towards the U.S., though these have nothing to do with USAID so we can also cross them off.
In 2024, they also announced a total of $192K in grants towards South Africa, and awardees are supposed (or were supposed) to be nominated this year.
Not counting this latest fund, which has not been granted yet, we are left with just two cohorts funded by USAID: the 2023 India and Kenyan ones, for a total of $1.4M. Again, these have already been paid out (to the best of my knowledge), but let's roll with it.
To be clear, this $1.4M has never been even touched by Mozilla. Instead, the non-profit only acted as the organization that helped to raise proposals and find the judges to select them, and the money has been granted from USAID directly to the awardees – Mozilla got none of it.
Now, my thinking is that the funding at risk of being canceled by the new administration is the South African one. However, it might also be the case that even Indian and Kenyan funding was somehow not paid off yet; we can't know for sure unless Mozilla decides to share more info about these $3.5M that the government might not grant them.
Finally, if you were wondering why is the Mozilla Foundation doing all of this instead of developing Firefox, it means you haven't watched my - very helpful! - video about how Mozilla works.
The Mozilla Foundation does not develop Firefox. They are a non-profit organization that wants to "shape a healthier digital world", and they do so in various ways, such as by working towards grants to developing world countries regarding a healthier and more fair internet. The Mozilla Foundation does not receive money from Google, and they do not have a CEO.
What you're thinking about is the Mozilla Corporation, which is a different company entirely. They are a for-profit, they develop Firefox, they receive money from Google, and so on; they're also a subsidiary of the Foundation, but they are nonetheless a different entity that works on different things.
To recap: Mozilla Corporation, works on Firefox, has nothing to do with grants or USAID. Mozilla Foundation, is a non-profit that does not work on Firefox and instead works on grants, even USAID ones.
Now that I've hopefully cleared up what's happening between Mozilla and USAID exactly, let me go back and focus on the narrative that's been built by the above not-mentioned tech journalist.
Firstly, let's address the idea that Mozilla is somehow trying to hide its involvement with USAID. This is blatantly false. Firstly, the blogpost that I've shown you appears immediately when doing a Google search:
On top of that, this partnership with USAID has been very public since 2022; I've found countless articles promoting it publicly and even LinkedIn posts highlighting it. Nothing was ever hidden away, and a simple "USAID" search on the Mozilla blog gave me all the information I was looking for.
But why, then, is no USAID money declared on the Mozilla financial documents? Well, I can't know for sure, but maybe it's because - as I mentioned - Mozilla did not receive any money from USAID – they "merely" selected the organizations that would receive those grants. But, again, Mozilla didn't really touch that money.
But why was USAID used for such evidently left-wing programs in the first place? Well, it sort-of wasn't. What the journalist showed you were all U.S. based grants, which were not funded by USAID.
Again, only the Indian and Kenyan grants were funded by USAID, and those are much less "politicized". You can go to the Responsible Computing Challenge page and see for yourself: there's no scary words like social justice or diverse perspectives.
Finally, he claimed that the point of these programs was to gain as much money as possible in the event of Google stopping their funding. Now, even setting aside that these programs are about the non-profit Mozilla Foundation - whereas the Google money flows to the for-profit Mozilla Corporation - again we're missing the fact that Mozilla is not receiving anything (as far as we know) out of these grants. Why would you try to turn a profit from something you don't get any money from?
Of course, the idea that this money is then used for entirely unrelated political events like the AI feminist meetup is completely made up. Not only does Mozilla not touch the money, but the awardees of these grants are clearly outlined in the webpage. If you take something completely unrelated and say, "ooh, maybe this is also funded by USAID, for all we know!" then you're just lying.
Now, to be clear, if you're a right-wing conservative person, you're still probably going to be angry about the fact that USAID was sponsoring Kenyan and Indian programs about ethical computing; I disagree, but you do you. The point here is that the very shallow investigation from this journalist, on top of his intentionally misleading framing of the facts, leads you to hold factually incorrect information, like the idea that Mozilla receives USAID money.
But it doesn't.
