MEF research finds that the Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development have provided hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations involved with designated terrorist organizations.
Executive Summary
• The Middle East Forum’s multi-year study of USAID and State Department spending has uncovered $164 million of approved grants to radical organizations, with at least $122 million going to groups aligned with designated terrorists and their supporters. Billions more of federal monies has been given to leading American aid charities which have consistently failed to vet their terror-tied local partners, and show little interest in improving their practices, to the apparent indifference of the federal government.
• Millions of federal dollars have been handed by USAID to organizations directly in Gaza controlled by Hamas, with government officials even visiting Gaza terror proxies’ offices and launching joint programs.
• USAID beneficiaries have called for their lands to be “cleansed” from the “impurity of the Jews,” among dozens of other chilling examples. USAID staff attend the offices of charities which seemingly operate on behalf of senior Hamas leaders, while staff of multiple multi-million dollar USAID beneficiary charities openly praise and encourage violence against Jews.
• State Department money has been handed to radical domestic groups such as the Tides Foundation, which members of Congress have accused of funding pro-Hamas, anti-Jewish violence in college campuses across America.
• Easily manipulated and complicit fellow travelers, including major aid organizations such as World Vision and Catholic Relief Services, as well as advocacy organizations such as InterAction, serve as important vehicles, sometimes knowingly, for terror-tied Islamists, both in the United States and abroad. These charities are dependent on federal funding, receiving billions of taxpayers’ dollars.
• Federal funding subsidizes efforts by domestic Islamists involved with Hamas, Jamaat-e-Islami and the Turkish regime, to abrogate rules and scrutiny in the United States intended to tackle the threat of terror finance.
• Records of federal funding, particularly through USAID, are obfuscated by deficient disclosure practices, deleted data, and deliberate attempts to evade transparency, with millions of dollars given to anonymous beneficiaries in terrorism-stricken areas of the globe.
• Over the past year, USAID’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) has served as a lone voice of internal concern over USAID’s funding systems, warning about the failure of current procedures to identify awardees’ links to violent extremism, obfuscation by foreign NGOs and UN agencies, and the clear risk of abuse of the vetting and funding systems by “armed groups.” Should USAID be merged into the State Department, as current reports indicate will happen, it is vital that the observations and analysis of the USAID OIG are not lost.
