Two federal agencies directed tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to organizations that watchdogs and a Senate committee have linked to terrorism, and the bulk of the money flowed during the Biden administration.
The State Department announced earlier this month that it would partner with the Christian humanitarian group World Vision and other faith-based organizations to distribute $2 billion in global health foreign assistance, calling it the largest such allocation in more than two decades. Separately, a report from the Middle East Forum, a national-security-focused think tank, found that the Department of Health and Human Services provided nearly $80 million to 14 organizations the group identified as linked to terrorism or extremism. The MEF report found that 87 percent of those HHS dollars were approved under the Biden administration.
Together, the two developments raise a blunt question: how did organizations with documented records of terror connections clear the federal government's grant-making process, and why did it keep happening?
The largest single recipient among the 14 groups was the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR-CA received $42.2 million from HHS to provide legal and social services to Afghan refugees, Just the News reported. That figure dwarfed the amounts collected by the other organizations on the list.
CAIR's institutional history makes the award hard to explain on the merits. Federal prosecutors named CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal conspiracy to provide financial support to Hamas. The FBI ended contacts with the organization over concerns about its terror ties. At least seven CAIR board or staff members have been arrested, indicted, have pleaded guilty, or were convicted of terrorism charges, or were denied entry to the United States because of them.
In 2004, CAIR settled a lawsuit it had initiated against an anti-CAIR group. In the settlement, CAIR acknowledged that the group's statements were accurate, including the claims that CAIR is "a terrorist supporting front organization that receives some money from terrorists" and that "the organization has links to and was founded by Islamic terrorists."
CAIR has maintained a statement on its website since 2009 condemning "all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa'ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the U.S. Department of State as a 'Foreign Terrorist Organization.'" In a statement to Just the News, CAIR-CA defended its stewardship of public funds:
"All contributions and grants that CAIR-CA receives are fully reported, accounted for, and used strictly for their intended purposes, subject to rigorous internal and external auditing and reporting. This transparency is why both private and public funders have worked with us and continue to do so."
The national CAIR organization did not respond to Just the News's inquiry before press time.
CAIR-CA was not alone. The Islamic Circle of North America Relief, described as the humanitarian wing of an Islamist group that has caused violence in South Asia, collected $10.6 million from HHS. The Muslim American Society's Sacramento chapter received $90,000 to promote women's health literacy. A federal appeals court has called MAS the "overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America", a movement known, among other things, for supporting female genital mutilation.
Dar Al-Hirjah, a mosque in Northern Virginia, received $340,000 in HHS sub-grants to promote coronavirus vaccines. That mosque helped two of the September 11 hijackers find housing. Five overseas organizations split an additional $14 million. Among them, one unnamed overseas pollster had links to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and an unnamed West African college that received funds to study homosexual Muslim men with HIV had a history of homophobic mobs attacking suspected gay students on campus.
Gregg Roman, the Middle East Forum's executive director, framed the pattern in stark terms. He told Just the News:
"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. That is not compassion. That is a recruitment pipeline built at public expense, and every official who signed these awards owns it."
The State Department side of the story centers on World Vision. The agency announced a partnership with World Vision and other faith-based groups to channel $2 billion in global health and humanitarian assistance, an arrangement the department described as historic.
"This historic announcement is the largest allocation of global health foreign assistance to faith-based organizations in over 20 years. It underscores the Trump Administration's commitment to partnering with organizations that demonstrate faith in action and have proven their ability to deliver health and humanitarian assistance in the world's most difficult environments."
But World Vision's record complicates that framing. In 2014, the organization transferred a $125,000 sub-grant backed by USAID to the Islamic Relief Agency. That agency, also known as the Islamic Africa Relief Agency or Islamic American Relief Agency, had been sanctioned by the Treasury Department a full decade earlier, in 2004, for ties to terrorism. Treasury blocked the U.S. accounts and assets of IARA and five of its senior officials.
At the time of those sanctions, the Treasury Department reported that IARA's international offices had provided direct financial support for Osama bin Laden and cooperated with him to raise and spend additional funds. IARA also purportedly worked with an institute controlled by bin Laden that provided assistance to Taliban fighters.
In 2016, IARA shut down for good. A representative pleaded guilty in federal court in Jefferson City, Missouri, to conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the federal law governing economic sanctions. IARA also pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and one count of obstructing the administration of internal revenue laws. The organization admitted it had illegally provided $1.4 million to Iraq in violation of U.S. sanctions.
World Vision's own troubles did not end there. The Senate Finance Committee investigated the organization in 2019 over the IARA sub-grant transfer. And in 2022, an Israeli court convicted the operations manager of World Vision's Gaza affiliate of sending up to $50 million to Hamas.
The State Department's decision to partner with World Vision drew internal pushback. A senior Trump administration official told the Jewish News Syndicate that "World Vision is severely compromised by ties to Islamist terrorists and a radical left-wing climate change agenda."
A State Department spokesman pushed back on the criticism, telling JNS that "[a]ny implication that the Trump administration is permitting the diversion of U.S. foreign assistance to organizations with ties to terrorism is baseless." The spokesman added: "No administration has held Hamas and other radical Islamist terrorist organizations more accountable than the Trump administration."
That defense addresses intent. It does not address the paper trail, a trail that runs through Treasury sanctions, a Senate investigation, a federal guilty plea, and an Israeli court conviction. The question is not whether the current administration supports terrorism. No serious person suggests that. The question is whether the vetting process that allowed these organizations to collect federal money has been fixed, or whether bureaucratic inertia simply carried forward grant relationships that should have been severed years ago.
The Middle East Forum's report places the heaviest responsibility on the prior administration. According to the MEF findings, 87 percent of the nearly $80 million in HHS funding to the 14 flagged organizations was approved during the Biden administration. The grants flowed through Refugee Resettlement, Health, and Mosque Renovation programs, categories that sound benign on paper but that, in practice, routed taxpayer money to groups with documented ties to designated terrorist organizations and extremist movements.
Several basic questions remain unanswered. What vetting process, if any, did HHS and the State Department use before awarding these grants and contracts? Were the awards made with knowledge of the Israeli court conviction, the Senate Finance Committee findings, and the Treasury sanctions that preceded them? Which officials signed off, and on what basis did they determine these organizations were fit recipients of public funds?
The MEF report names 14 organizations. Only four domestic recipients, CAIR-CA, ICNA Relief, MAS Sacramento, and Dar Al-Hirjah, are identified by name in the available reporting. The identities of the remaining groups, and the full scope of their activities, remain unclear.
Taxpayers funded Afghan refugee resettlement services through an organization whose national body was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas financing case. They funded coronavirus vaccine outreach through a mosque that helped September 11 hijackers find apartments. They funded a $2 billion global health partnership through a charity whose Gaza manager was convicted of funneling $50 million to Hamas. Every one of those facts was available in the public record before the grants were signed.
When the government cannot, or will not, read its own files before writing checks, the people who pay for it deserve to know why.
