“Today, it was announced that the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has withheld its 2024 dues payment of $3.6M from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). USADA fully supports this decision by the White House ONDCP as the only right choice to protect athletes’ rights, accountability, and fair competition.
Unfortunately, the current WADA leaders left the U.S. with no other option after failing to deliver on several very reasonable requests, such as an independent audit of WADA’s operations, to achieve the transparency and accountability needed to ensure WADA is fit for purpose to protect athletes.
Since the exposure of WADA’s failed handling of the 23 Chinese swimmers’ positive tests that gave China and its athletes special treatment under the rules, many stakeholders from around the world, including athletes, governments, and National Anti-Doping Agencies, have sought answers, transparency, and accountability from WADA leadership.
Because WADA failed to uniformly enforce the global rules in place to protect the integrity of competition and athletes’ rights to fairness, significant reform at WADA must occur to ensure this never happens again.
The U.S. has been the highest government payor to WADA since WADA’s inception in 2000 and has been a staunch supporter of having an effective global anti-doping system to protect athletes competing at the highest levels. However, the authority to withhold payment to WADA was initially put in place under the first Trump Administration in conjunction with Congress when WADA’s ineffectiveness was exposed in the Russia state-sponsored doping scheme.
As a result of WADA’s failure during this sad saga that ultimately saw Russia rob hundreds of athletes from the U.S. and other countries at the highest levels of competition, Congress passed the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act, which President Trump signed into law in 2020. Also, the Trump Administration and Congress granted ONDCP the authority to withhold payment from WADA in the event that it did not act in a fair, effective, and transparent manner.
USADA thanks ONDCP Director, Dr. Rahul Gupta, the ONDCP team, and Congress for their steadfast efforts to support clean athletes from the U.S. and around the world. We need a strong and independent WADA, and we will continue to work with all stakeholders in the U.S. and internationally to ensure the global system delivers on the promise of clean sport to the world’s athletes. Given the U.S. is hosting many international competitions over the next 10 years, such as the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, now is the time to get WADA right to ensure these competitions on U.S. soil are clean, safe, and a pageantry of fair competition in which we can all have faith and confidence.
The current non-payment of the 2024 dues to WADA will have no impact on U.S. athletes’ right to compete in the United States or around the world. The WADA statutes are crystal clear that the non-payment of voluntary dues does not affect athletes in any way even if the 2024 U.S. payment is never paid. The non-payment will have no impact on the current anti-doping program in the U.S. and USADA will continue to robustly implement its WADA Code program so that all U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athletes’ rights are protected.”
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