USAID Funneled $122 Million to Charities Tied to Designated Terrorists, Congressional Testimony Reveals

By Geoffrey Clarfield, From National Review

The now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development has funneled at least $122 million in approved grants to terror-tied aid charities, including an evangelical Christian group that in 2014 facilitated a $125,000 sub-grant to a Sudanese terrorist organization linked to al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden.

USAID has long been complicit in funding humanitarian aid groups associated with designated terrorists, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. This is just one egregious example of the waste, fraud, and abuse within USAID that the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency are working to uncover.

“There’s a fox loose in the henhouse of our foreign aid system—a system intended to uplift lives abroad that instead has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to radical and terrorist-linked organizations,” Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum, said in his testimony before House Oversight’s DOGE Subcommittee on Wednesday.

The Middle East Forum published these findings in a years-long study earlier this month, as DOGE head Elon Musk started targeting USAID and its wasteful, often ideologically-driven spending. One organization, World Vision, was given $200,000 in taxpayer funding to direct toward the Islamic Relief Agency a decade ago.

Roman noted how his organization has been repeatedly “stonewalled” by the entrenched bureaucracy at USAID. In 2023, the Middle East Forum requested information from USAID on a grant benefiting the Hamas-aligned Unlimited Friends Association in Gaza. Two years later, the conservative think tank still hasn’t received an adequate response to its Freedom of Information Act request.

Reports indicate USAID will fold into the State Department if the Trump administration gets its way. The possible merger is likely after Secretary of State Marco Rubio was named the agency’s acting administrator.

While shutting down USAID provides complications, the Middle East Forum believes it is necessary to stop funding terrorists.

“Within our limited scope focused on the defunding of international Islamism and its enablers,” Roman told NR, “the collapse of USAID funding will come as a major blow to multiple Islamist ideological movements across the globe.”

Read it all here.