Did USAID pay Pizza Hut $150 million "to renovate and modernize" in 1997? No, that's not true: The post making the viral claim on social media offered no evidence to support it. Lead Stories found no credible reports proving it, either.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on February 6, 2025. It opened:
USAID paid Pizza Hut $150 million to renovate and modernize in 1997.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed Feb 26 14:48:55 2025 UTC)
The post linked to an obscure message board that did not show credible reports supporting the claim.
A Google search across government websites for the keywords "Pizza Hut" AND USAID AND "150 million" AND 1997 showed 7 results but in reality, none of those pages manually reviewed by Lead Stories actually discussed the supposed payment to Pizza Hut.
A search across the federal government spending database (archived here) showed no results:
(Source: USAspending.gov screenshot taken on Wed Feb 26 14:58:17 2025 UTC)
A similar search for Pizza Hut's parent company Yum! Brands across the same database also generated zero matches:
Lead Stories previously debunked other claims about the USAID (archived here). Those articles can be found here.
