Taxpayer money is supposed to serve the American people. But two new reports reveal that federal agencies quietly routed roughly $2 billion in government funds to organizations that watchdogs and a Senate committee have flagged for ties to terrorism. The findings raise urgent questions about who is vetting the groups that receive federal contracts and grants, and whether the integrity of American foreign and domestic spending can be trusted.
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The reports implicate both the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, spanning billions in health, humanitarian, and refugee assistance contracts.
From Just the News:
The State Department worked with World Vision to distribute $2 billion in global health foreign assistance even though an Israeli court convicted the nonprofit’s Gaza affiliate operations manager of sending up to $50 million to Hamas in 2022.
Separately, the Middle East Forum recently reported that 14 terror-linked and extremist organizations, led by CAIR, collected nearly $80 million from HHS through refugee resettlement, health, and mosque renovation grants.
“Washington took the most vulnerable people on earth, refugees who fled the Taliban, and delivered them into the hands of the organizations most likely to radicalize them,” said Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum. “That is not compassion. That is a recruitment pipeline built at public expense, and every official who signed these awards owns it.”
On the HHS side, the CAIR California chapter received the largest share at $42.2 million, reportedly to provide legal and social services to Afghan refugees. CAIR has a long and documented history of concern among federal authorities. Federal prosecutors named the organization as an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case involving financial support for Hamas, and the FBI cut off contact with CAIR due to terrorism concerns. At least seven board or staff members have been arrested, indicted, or convicted on terrorism-related charges. CAIR said in a statement that all contributions it receives are fully reported and used strictly for their intended purposes. Other HHS recipients flagged in the report included ICNA Relief, which received $10.6 million, a mosque that helped two Sept. 11 hijackers find housing, and the Sacramento chapter of the Muslim American Society, which a federal appeals court called “an overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.” The Middle East Forum found that 87 percent of the flagged funding was approved under the Biden administration.
On the State Department side, the Senate Finance Committee investigated World Vision in 2019 and found that the organization had transferred a $125,000 USAID-backed sub-grant to the Islamic Relief Agency, a group sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2004 for ties to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Despite this history, the State Department announced earlier this month a new partnership with World Vision to distribute global health and humanitarian assistance, calling it the largest allocation of such funds to faith-based organizations in more than 20 years. A senior Trump administration official told the Jewish News Syndicate that World Vision is “severely compromised by ties to Islamist terrorists,” though the State Department denied that the administration was permitting foreign assistance to reach terrorist-linked groups.
For believers who pray regularly over the stewardship of the nation, this story is a sobering reminder that spiritual discernment and government accountability are not separate concerns. Scripture calls leaders to pursue justice and to govern with wisdom, and the church is called to intercede when those standards fall short. Pray that government officials at every level exercise genuine discernment in how public funds are distributed, that investigations into these grants lead to accountability, and that the American people are protected from those who would use taxpayer dollars to advance ideologies rooted in hatred and violence.
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(Excerpt from Just the News. Photo Credit: SimpleImages / Getty Images).
