More than $1.3 billion in taxpayer funds from the Biden administration ended up helping groups that sponsored or committed terrorism.
Federal watchdog reports and other documents show former President Joe Biden’s aid programs funneled the money toward a network of terrorism in the Muslim world — largely by reversing Trump-era policies. National security experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation the new Trump administration must take the trend more seriously.
“We should not be putting money into any country or areas where a terrorist group remains in control,” Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said. Roggio said that “aid, like money, is fungible.”
“It winds up propping up these groups,” the counterterrorism analyst told the DCNF. “It allows them to use … whatever money they have to invest into their terrorist activities.”
The State Department told the DCNF last week that “national security is and will remain a top priority” after President Donald Trump announced he is reevaluating foreign aid programs.
“The review period is a measure put in place for us to align our ongoing work with the America First agenda,” the department said. “The results of the in-depth review will be communicated transparently.”
Trump also placed dozens of senior officials on leave from the United States Agency for International Development, one of the entities responsible for funding to Afghanistan that the Taliban stole on Biden’s watch. The Trump administration closed down USAID’s headquarters Monday and may try to dissolve the agency altogether.
The largest share of Biden-era dollars linked to terrorism went to Palestinian organizations, Congressional Research Service records show.
The Biden administration gave $1,053,400,000 in taxpayer money to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which claims to help war-afflicted Palestinian civilians but is tied to terrorists fighting Israel, according to U.S. and Israeli intelligence. Biden reversed a Trump-era ban on UNRWA funding in 2021 but brought back the ban last year after Israel accused UNWRA workers of participating in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks.
Intelligence officials later revealed that more than 1,000 UNRWA employees, or around 10%, were linked to the groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, according to documents found on the bodies of dead terrorists and other evidence. A dozen took part in the Oct. 7 massacre, including a Hamas commander who was teaching in elementary school for UNRWA and led a siege against an Israeli kibbutz that killed almost 100 people.
UNWRA’s schools have long used curriculum for Palestinian children that glorifies terrorists and martyrdom, a March 2023 report from UN Watch found.
The curriculum comes from the Palestinian Authority (PA), a governing body in the West Bank that the Biden administration considered more friendly to American interests than Hamas. The PA also made a profit from Biden’s presidency despite its program that pays Palestinians and their families as a reward for acts of terror against Jews.
Trump and Congress passed a law in 2018 blocking economic support funds for the PA due to its program. Trump later paused all remaining funding for the PA before Biden took office and resumed it.
The Biden administration in part revived the economic support fund that Trump’s law restricts. The State Department claimed in documents from 2021 that “most” of the money did not “directly benefit the PA” in violation of the law. However, officials sent $265 million straight to the PA for its “security forces and justice sector institutions” throughout Biden’s presidency, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Under Biden, the PA agreed to pay more than $97 million to reward the perpetrators of the Oct. 7 attacks, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
“The Palestinian Authority does not honor its commitments to provide security in the West Bank,” Roggio told the DCNF. “Until it’s willing to do that, I wouldn’t fund them.”
A conservative group sued Biden and former Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2022 on behalf of terror victims, alleging they broke Trump’s 2018 law by funding the PA. The case is ongoing.
The rest of the Biden-era funds that boosted terrorism fell into the hands of the Taliban after it reclaimed Afghanistan in August 2021. The U.S. government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) exposed mounting security issues as Biden continued funding humanitarian efforts for Afghans under the brutal Islamic regime. The government’s programs were designed to help Afghan women’s rights, economic conditions and other causes.
“It’s terrible. We want to help Afghan women,” Roggio said.
“As well-meaning and well-intentioned as providing aid is,” he said, it can end up “extending these problems.”
SIGAR reported in 2022 and again in 2023 that the Taliban “likely gained access to approximately $57.6 million” meant for the former Afghan government when it seized the government’s financial accounts.
Last May, SIGAR found that U.S.-backed humanitarian groups had also paid “at least $10.9 million of U.S. taxpayer money” in taxes and other fees to the Taliban. SIGAR acknowledged that this was “likely only a fraction” of the total amount due to lack of documentation.
In total, the recorded amount that UNRWA, the Palestinian Authority and the Taliban raked in under Biden is an estimated $1,386,900,000.
One legislator on the House Foreign Affairs Committee has tried to stop the U.S. from enriching the Taliban for years.
“They take our money and we give it to them, ’cause we’re gutless,” Republican Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee told the DCNF. He said the U.S. has effectively been “on both sides” of wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East due to the vulnerabilities of aid programs.
For a solution, Burchett pointed to legislation he has repeatedly filed that would require the State Department to form stricter procedures and oversight of its Afghanistan funds. The latest version of the bill now sits in the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“Here is my proposal: Make those disbursing U.S. funds liable for their decisions,” American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Michael Rubin told the DCNF. “If the money goes to terror proxies, then they should face penalties for negligence or even prosecution for terror finance.”
“If they are not responsible enough to tell the difference [between] legitimate recipients and terrorists, then they should pay the price,” said Rubin, a former Pentagon official who has traveled across the Middle East. “If they have skin in the game, these scandals might not be so commonplace.”
The DCNF’s analysis does not account for reported examples of Hamas fighters stealing humanitarian aid shipments that Americans may have paid for. Republican lawmakers have repeatedly said they got no answers on the issue from Biden’s USAID, now under threat of closure.
“They secretly poured literally uncountable hundreds of millions of dollars toward Hamas, including tens of millions of cash they could never account for,” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said about USAID officials. “The American people deserve to know where their hard-earned dollars are going and spending must be aligned with what is best for our country.”
“It’s clear that certain functions of the agency are important and those must continue, but with oversight and accountability,” Cruz told the DCNF.
Rep. Burchett and other Republicans sent a letter to USAID in October 2023, asking for documents and warning of the risks of aiding Hamas. Burchett told the DCNF that the agency has not fulfilled the request.
“I never expected to get anything back on it,” he said.
Adam Pack contributed reporting.
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