Terror Finance at the State Department and USAID

• 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.

The Trump administration’s order to freeze foreign aid programs has delivered a hearty shock to the bloated humanitarian aid industry.

The Wall Street Journal quoted one leading figure, Jeremy Konyndyk, president of advocacy organization Refugees International, confessing: “Everyone in my world is walking around today with our hair on fire and our jaws on the floor.”

Konyndyk, whose public charity pays him over $314,000 a year, has been repeatedly quoted and interviewed in newspaper columns and cable news to voice his despair over the prospective paucity of funds, stating the abrupt halt of American charity makes the United States look “cruel,” “callous” and “unreliable.”

Konyndyk’s name may be familiar to those who have tracked the federal government’s funding and subsidy of violent extremism over the past decade. A former official in both the Biden and Obama administrations, Konyndyk served at a high level in the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which operates under the Department of State. Konyndyk, the Middle East Forum found in 2017, was involved in USAID’s transfer of $125,000 to the Islamic Relief Agency, a terrorist organization in Sudan linked to Bin Laden.

In that instance, the Middle East Forum found, officials expressed fears of repercussions to the American aid industry if the payments were not provided.

Konyndyk and other humanitarian aid industry fatcats are offering similar panicked sounds now. But, notwithstanding the Trump administration’s broader agenda with respect to foreign aid spending, the circumstances remain rather similar: the problem of public monies subsidizing terror remains as big a problem now as ever before.

As the Middle East Forum has documented extensively, over the past decade, the amount of federal funding that ends up in the pockets of Islamist organizations, both domestic and foreign, makes the U.S. government one of the leading financiers of global Islamism. Violent extremists in particular have prospered under the federal government’s international aid programs. The State Department and USAID have knowingly funded terrorists and their proxies with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

Paid altruists, terror-tied Islamists, and indolent civil servants have all contributed to this state of affairs.

Over the past few years, the Middle East Forum has uncovered a significant amount of money that illustrates the depth of this problem. This dossier serves to showcase both our data and our findings. In total, we are concerned about $164 million of funding to organizations with radical links, of which some many millions went to organizations with links to violent extremists.

There are problems with the reliability of government spending data, as reported below. It should also be noted that these are the approved grant sums; while the actual amounts outlaid are unknown.

Since 2016, USAID has given over $900,000 to the Bayader Association for Environment and Development, a Gaza-based terror charity.

The most recent USAID grant to Bayader was issued on October 1, 2023, just six days before the Hamas’s October 7 attacks, in which almost 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered.

Just a few months earlier, in February 2023, Bayader organized an event with senior Hamas officials in the Gazan city of Khan Yunis, in collaboration with Western Islamist charity Islamic Relief, another former USAID grantee.

At the ceremony, Bayader staff embraced senior Hamas officials, including Abdul Salam Haniyeh, the son of the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, one of the men responsible for the October 7 pogrom.

Founded in 2007, shortly after Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip, Bayader operates in close cooperation with the Hamas regime. Its 2021 annual report notes “coordination” and “meetings” with Hamas’s Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Works, Ministry of Social Affairs and Ministry of Agriculture.

Bayader officials are also regularly seen in the company of other Hamas terror politicians. In March 2023, Hamas’s Ministry of Public Works broadcast its support for Bayader’s efforts to build public infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

Bayader also advertises in Hamas media, where it boasts of its USAID funding.

Bayader’s officials, meanwhile, are overtly supportive of terror. The charity’s financial director, Abd Rabbo Saeed Abu Haddaf, has publicly mourned the death of Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Ahmed Abu Deka, whom he referred to as a “brother and friend.” Abu Deka served as deputy commander of the Al-Quds Brigades’ rocket forces.

Similarly, Ahlam Jama, a Bayader “project coordinator” who previously worked for U.S. charities such as the Catholic Relief Services and Mercy Corps, has shared material mourning the death of Baha Abu al-Ata, another Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader.

Bayader is listed in federal spending data as a sub-grantee for USAID, with the government monies first routed through a sponsoring U.S. nonprofit, which are ostensibly required to vet their sub-grantees.

The U.S. nonprofits that secured USAID monies for Bayader include major American charities such as the Catholic Relief Services, Global Communities, and the International Medical Corps.

But USAID coordinates directly with Bayader as well. USAID officials have praised Bayader’s work on social media, and even visited Bayader’s offices, where one senior USAID official, Jonathan Kamin, received an award from the terror-linked charity.

Founded in 1968, just after the Six-Day War, ANERA is one of largest American charities operating in the Palestinian territories, also offering programs in Lebanon and Jordan. In its 2022 tax returns, ANERA reported revenue of over $170 million.

USAID is one of ANERA’s biggest contributors, approving transfers to the organization of tens of millions of dollars over the past few decades, including a $12.5 million grant in 2024.

Despite serving as a major partner of government and various international agencies, multiple media reports and investigative works have, for decades, accused the charity of supporting extremists tied to the designated terrorist organization Hamas.

Today, ANERA is a long-standing partner of Hamas terror charity, the Bayader Association for Environment and Development (profiled above).

ANERA has also used USAID monies to fund projects of the Unlimited Friends Association, which a previous study by the Middle East Forum determined to be a Hamas proxy organization, which works to reward the “families of martyrs” in Gaza with cash handouts, and promotes deeply anti-Semitic rhetoric across its social media pages.

ANERA has an apparent history of such partnerships. In 2000, an ANERA report appears to disclose a partnership with the Ihsan Society, which the U.S. government later designated as a Hamas front in 2005.

In 2007, the Washington Times reported that “USAID continues to fund multimillion-dollar programs through American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA), which is building a high-tech facility” for the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG).

In fact, the IUG was founded by Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin and remains a key Hamas outpost today. ANERA reported in 2005 that it was working to raise $900,000 for just a single project at IUG.

An audit from the Inspector General’s office at USAID concluded that the government agency had seriously failed in its vetting duties upon funding ANERA’s activities with IUG and other institutions.

In 2017, a report from the Israel Law Center alleged that money sent through ANERA to the Palestinian territories was “used to support Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) kindergartens that actively indoctrinate children in hatred and killing of Israeli civilians, as well as other PIJ and Hamas organizations, thus enabling them to finance terrorist activity, which is forbidden by U.S. law.”

ANERA staff openly express violent ideas, without apparent censure from top charity officials. In 2014, Mousa Shawwa, ANERA’s “logistics coordinator,” endorsed a call on social media for God to “erase the Jews.”

ANERA staff member Esma Marwa has expressed delight upon hearing of an injury to the “head of a rotten Jew,” and warns Palestinians that publishing pictures of their “martyrs” only serves to help the “Jews.”

Ibrahim Zanoun, meanwhile, serves as ANERA’s photographer in Gaza. His own social media posts include praise for the Hamas “resistance” and warnings that Hamas will “soon broadcast a video threatening the Jews.”

Other ANERA staff include Ibrahim Najjar, who expressed support for the “brave prisoners” in Israeli jails and venerates the Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin, posting pictures of the terrorist leader.

ANERA’s Palestine Director, meanwhile, is Sandra Rasheed. Despite ANERA’s claim to be a “non-partisan organization,” Rasheed is an overt advocate for radical action, encouraging direct action efforts by extremist far-Left organizations, supporting student campus protestors, and posting inane social media agitprop that promise resistance by “land, by air and by sea – by any means and in any conditions.”

Naser Qadous, ANERA’s agricultural programs manager, posted cryptic messages of support for Hamas’s October 7 attacks, which were ‘liked’ by other ANERA staff. Qadous later shared Hamas-produced propaganda about its treatment of Israeli hostages, with the ANERA official declaring that one hostage, pictured surrounded by armed terrorists, had merely been a “guest.”

ANERA’s former “national coordinator” in Lebanon, Mohamed Alsayed (who now claims to serve as the charity’s “youth sports coordinator”) also welcomed the October 7^th attacks, referring to the day of the mass killings as a “beautiful morning.”

A USAID August 2022 “news update” celebrates the construction of a “USAID-funded Unlimited Friends Association [UFA] educational and community center in Gaza.” As noted by USAID, the American Near East Refugee Aid (Anera), a prominent Washington D.C. charity with offices across the Middle East, “built” the center.

UFA is involved with senior Hamas leaders and promotes violently anti-Semitic rhetoric across its social media pages. The charity hosts events to provide financial support to the “the families of martyrs and prisoners.”

UFA’s cash handouts are part of the group’s “Orphan Sponsorship Program.” In since-deleted videos published by the group, the charity’s officials defined orphans to include the children of those killed while resisting “the ongoing slaughter against the Palestinian people.”

Such work is carried out in open collaboration with Hamas. UFA has organized events and invited to its offices prominent Hamas figures such as Mustafa Sawwaf, who calls “Israel’s disappearance ... a necessity [according to] the Koran"; as well as Mohamed Abu-Shkian, a senior Hamas leader who praises the “strikes of the mujahideen” and leads events in Gaza lionizing slain terrorist operatives.

In addition, UFA openly advertises projects funded by U.S. charities in prominent Hamas literature and boasts a certificate of support from Ummah University, an institution in Gaza directly controlled by Hamas’s “Interior Ministry.”

In 2022, multiple Hamas-aligned media outlets, including the terrorist group’s own daily newspaper, Felesteen News, published details of job vacancies at UFA; not as advertisements, but as news stories.

Meanwhile, hatred for Jews permeates UFA’s activities. In 2013, the charity published a social media post stating: “We ask God to drive away the anguish of the heroic prisoners in the Nazi Zionist jails and to free Al-Aqsa Al-Sharif from the filth of the most dirty Jews.”

UFA officials express similar rhetoric. In April 2021, UFA director Jomaa Khadoura called on his own Facebook page for God to “cleanse Al-Aqsa from the impurity of the Jews.”

The “USAID-funded Unlimited Friends Association educational and community center in Gaza” was, according to USAID, “built by Anera,” a major American charity founded in 1968, also known as American Near East Refugee Aid. ANERA claims to provide humanitarian aid in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon.

On its website, Anera states that it ensures donations do not reach “parties like Hamas” because its “local staff evaluates our partners.” But as profiled above, these same staff express violently anti-Semitic rhetoric.

On top of the direct USAID funding for UFA’s activities, other USAID-funded American charities also support the terror charity, including Islamic Relief and Helping Hand for Relief and Development.

Islamic Relief is the leading charitable institution of the Ikhwan Al-Muslimeen, better known as the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in the United Kingdom, Islamic Relief is one of the leading Islamist financial institutions across the globe, with branches, offices and affiliates in over 40 countries. Prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood established the charity, and leading Islamist activists continue to run the franchise today, leading to bans and blacklisting in multiple Arab and European countries. The U.S. branch is among the franchise’s richest, raising over $100 million in annual revenue.

USAID has approved $2 million of funding for two branches of Islamic Relief, despite its overt connections to terror.

In 2022, Islamic Relief repeatedly partnered with senior terrorist officials in Gaza, including Hamas politburo member Ghazi Hamad. Weeks after the October 7 attacks, Hamad promised that Hamas would repeat the attacks “time and again until Israel is annihilated.”

In February 2023, Islamic Relief launched a project in the Gazan city of Khan Yunis. The initiative was carried out by Islamic Relief Palestine and another terror-tied organization, the Bayader Association for Environment & Development, and funded with $200,000 from Islamic Relief’s branch in the Netherlands.

The project was organized in close cooperation with the Hamas government and the Hamas-controlled municipality of Khan Yunis. As mentioned in the profile of Bayader above, at the ceremony to open the project, Islamic Relief official Muneeb Abu Ghazaleh was joined by senior Hamas members, including Abdul Salam Haniyeh, a senior Hamas government official and son of Hamas’s late political leader Ismail Haniyeh.

Such close cooperation with Hamas officials belies Islamic Relief’s frequent denials of cooperation with designated terror organizations.

Writing in the Guardian in 2020, Islamic Relief official Naser Haghamed stated: “In the past decade more than 500 audits of our programmes have been conducted, in many cases mandated by governments and other institutional donors. Not one has found a shred of evidence of links to extremism or terrorism, and that includes more than 20 audits in the West Bank and Gaza.”

Critics now wonder exactly what these audits actually entail. Evidence of the charity’s longstanding support of extremism and terror is overwhelming.

In 2016, Islamic Relief founder Hany El-Banna gave an interview (still freely available on El-Banna’s personal YouTube channel) to Hamas’s official radio station in Gaza, urging close cooperation between charities and the Hamas “government.”

El-Banna revealed that Islamic Relief has worked closely with the Gaza Zakat Committee (IZS) for decades. IZS is a leading charitable institution of Hamas whose own website describes its officials as “soldiers for Jerusalem,” and frequently runs events with senior Hamas officials.

Islamic Relief branches have also long supported the Al-Falah Benevolent Society in Gaza, which is labeled by intelligence analysts as one of “Hamas’s charitable societies” and described by journalists a “complementary arm of the [Hamas] government.”

Staff of Islamic Relief’s branch in Gaza, meanwhile, openly express support for Hamas leaders and have declared: “I ask god to paralyze the pillars of the Jews and cut their legs and paralyze their hands,” as well as: “O Muslim, O servant of Allah, behind me a Jew. Come and Kill him.”

At its U.S. branch, Islamic Relief staff have included Khaled Lamada, whom, in 2017 the Middle East Forum found, had circulated text on social media praising the “jihad” of the “Mujahidin” for “causing the Jews many defeats,” and republished claims on Facebook that praised Hamas for inflicting a “huge defeat” against the “Zionist entity.” Another staff member, Yousef Abdullah, has praised the killing of Jews, among other anti-Semitic remarks.

Islamic Relief branches have also served as conduits for other radical organizations. The accounts of Islamic Relief’s British headquarters, for instance, have disclosed millions of dollars of income from dozens of terror-tied groups, including branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Gulf, and terror-linked groups such as the Charitable Society for Social Welfare, which was founded by the Al-Qaeda terrorist and Bin Laden loyalist Abdul Majeed Al-Zindani.

In 2019, responding to parliamentarians from Germany’s centrist Free Democratic Party, the Berlin federal government expressed concerns about Islamic Relief Deutschland and the franchise’s U.K. parent organization, Islamic Relief Worldwide, declaring that both had “significant ties” to the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 2020, the U.S. State Department warned about the “blatant and horrifying anti-Semitism and glorification of violence exhibited at the most senior levels of Islamic Relief Worldwide.”

In 2021, after a media outcry that Islamic Relief Netherlands was to be among the recipients of an 825 million euro government grant program, the Dutch Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation declared that, after consultations with security services and the German government, Islamic Relief was recognized to be part of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, and would be barred from receiving the funding.

On top of the federal funding to Islamic Relief branches, under both the Obama and the first Trump administrations, USAID and Islamic Relief organized joint events, including an iftar at USAID for Islamic Relief staff.

More promisingly, under the first Trump administration in 2020, the U.S. State Department blacklisted at least one branch of Islamic Relief, warning about the “blatant and horrifying anti-Semitism and glorification of violence exhibited at the most senior levels of Islamic Relief Worldwide.” However, USAID and U.S. embassies continue to promote the work of other Islamic Relief branches.

Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD) is the overseas aid arm of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), the U.S. branch of the violent South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami.

In 2017, the Middle East Forum revealed that HHRD had organized a conference at a government-run college in Pakistan in collaboration with the charitable and political wings of the Pakistani terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba. These findings led to multiple congressional inquiries, and an investigation by USAID’s Inspector General.

In Pakistan, HHRD’s chief partner is the Al-Khidmat Foundation, with which it has partnered at least 214 times. In 2006, Al-Khidmat announced it had “presented a cheque of six-million rupees from the people of Pakistan to Khaled Meshaal, head of politburo Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas)” to finance their “just Jihad.”

The Investigative Project on Terrorism has found that previously, HHRD’s parent organization, ICNA, has, on its websites “linked to the websites of Hamas, Hizballah, and terrorist organizations fighting in Chechnya, Afghanistan, and the Pakistani-Indian disputed region of Kashmir. Among its short list of recommended Islamic charities was the Islamic Society in Gaza, which openly touted its connections to Hamas.”

Speakers at ICNA conferences have openly encouraged violence against Jews. Such speakers have even included senior Hamas member Muhammad Siyam, who addressed the organization’s conference in 1990, together with the deputy head of Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan, Khurshid Ahmed.

In Gaza, HHRD is a partner of the Unlimited Friends Association, a Hamas-aligned terror charity (profiled above).

In 2014, USAID awarded $723,405 to World Vision Inc., an enormous international evangelical charity, to “improve water, sanitation and hygiene and to increase food security in Sudan’s Blue Nile state.” Of these funds, $200,000 was to be directed to a sub-grantee: the Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA).

ISRA, however, was and remains a listed terror organization. The U.S. designated the Khartoum-based group as a terror-financing organization in 2004, because of ISRA’s links to Osama bin Laden and his organization Maktab al-Khidamat (MK), the precursor of al-Qaeda. According to the U.S. Treasury, ISRA established formal cooperation with MK in 1997. By 2000, ISRA had raised $5 million for bin Laden’s group. The Treasury Department notes that ISRA officials even sought to help “relocate [bin Laden] to secure safe harbor for him.” It further reports that ISRA raised funds in 2003 in Western Europe specifically earmarked for Hamas suicide bombings.

The 2004 designation included all of ISRA’s branches, including a U.S. office called the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA-USA). Eventually it emerged that this American branch had illegally transferred over $1.2 million to Iraqi insurgents and other terror groups, including, reportedly, the Afghan terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

It seems USAID and World Vision undoubtedly knew of ISRA’s terrorism activities. In 2010, the executive director of ISRA’s U.S. branch (IARA-USA) and a board member pled guilty to money-laundering, theft of public funds, conspiracy, and several other charges. The plea was listed on USAID’s own website.

In 2012, former Congressman Mark Siljander, a frequent traveler to Sudan who has signed public declarations both authored and promoted by World Vision, went to jail for lobbying for ISRA’s U.S. branch, using stolen USAID money.

Notwithstanding, not bothering to vet its sub-grantees, USAID issued the grant to ISRA through World Vision, only pausing the process when World Vision finally felt impelled to talk with USAID about its terror partner’s inclusion on the U.S. terror list, after a whistleblower came forward.

World Vision desperate sought to circumvent the terror link proscription. In 2015, World Vision wrote to the Treasury Department and USAID Jeremy Konyndyk, the director of USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance, to apply for a new license from USAID to pay ISRA “monies owed for work performed.” According to Larry Meserve, USAID’s mission director for Sudan, World Vision argued that if they did not pay ISRA, “their whole program will be jeopardized.”

Certainly, ISRA and the Islamist Sudanese regime sought to pressure the complicit World Vision to act. World Vision, in turn, sent panicked and bullying emails to government officials demanding the release of the money and even threatening legal action. Treasury documents demonstrate that high-ranking staff for U.S. Congressman Adam Smith (D-WA), then-Ranking Member and later Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, repeatedly reached out to the Treasury Department on World Vision’s behalf.

Even more astonishingly, Jeremy Weinstein, deputy ambassador to the United Nations under U.N. Ambassador Samantha Powers (later the USAID head under the Biden administration), emailed the director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control in the Treasury Department, requesting Treasury circumvent the usual rules and “review” ISRA’s terrorist designation “without a formal request.”

On May 7, 2015, the license was granted, and USAID began “a one-time transfer of approximately $125,000 to ISRA.”

An investigation by the Senate Finance Committee, based on the Middle East Forum’s findings, criticized World Vision’s obfuscatory “posture” during their investigation, and suggested the evangelical charity risks a similar scandal in the future.

In fact, World Vision was working with ISRA for years before the scandal was brought to USAID’s attention. More astonishingly, after the scandal, it appears World Vision branches were still working with the terrorist organization. A World Vision job posting posted in December 2015, explicitly lists a partnership with ISRA as part of the job description.

ISRA was not World Vision’s first or last involvement with a terrorist organization. In 2006, World Vision signed a joint memoranda with the U.S. designated terror group Interpal, a financial supporter of Hamas. In 2012, World Vision appeared to use Australian government dollars to fund a known proxy for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

And in 2022, an Israeli court convicted and sentenced World Vision’s manager of operations for Gaza, Mohammad Halabi, on terror financing charges. Halabi was initially accused of diverting as much as $50 million of World Vision funds to Hamas.

USAID, however, has continued to fund World Vision, which remains impenitent. Almost $2 billion of taxpayers’ money has been authorized in USAID grants to the charity since 2008, with $200 million approved in just 2024.

USAID-funded Mercy-USA for Aid and Development is a charitable franchise with a long history of suspected terror connections. Mercy International’s Canadian branch was the subject of media scrutiny in the wake of Al-Qaeda’s 1998 East Africa bombings, with counter-terrorism analysts claiming the charity was “implicated” in the plot.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism reports that “Mercy International originally went by the name Human Concern International (HCI), an organization created in the 1980s to support the Afghan jihad against the Soviets. Their Pakistan offices were headed by Ahmed Khadr, a close associate of bin Laden and an al Qaeda moneyman. In 1989, HCI changed its name to Mercy International-USA and moved to Michigan.” Mercy has reportedly previously also operated under the names Mercy International Relief Organization and then Mercy International-USA.

Umar al-Qadi, the longstanding leader of Mercy-USA (and seemingly of its various previous iterations), has declared that his organization is not connected to terror-tied Mercy and Human Concern branches, and has been confused with that of another with the same name; although such claims have been treated skeptically.

The vice-chairman of Mercy-USA is Ali El-Menshawi, a psychologist based in Florida. Despite his Hippocratic oath, Menshawi’s Facebook page is replete with support for Hamas and its military wing, the Qassam Brigades.

Menshawi has also re-posted virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic screeds from an Islamist named Soliman Biheiri, seemingly the same Biheiri jailed as a Hamas fundraiser, and suspected of links to the East Africa bombings in which the Canadian branch was apparently implicated.

Federal prosecutors have revealed that one previous director of Mercy International USA was Abdurrahman Alamoudi, an Al Qaeda fundraiser who was jailed in 2004 for conspiring with the Libyan regime to assassinate the Saudi Crown Prince.

In more recent years, Mercy-USA and its staff remain closely involved with the Muslim American Society, the leading voice of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States. Previous board members of the organization have also included Mohamed Ashmawey, who was once president of the Muslim Arab Youth Association, which, under Ashmawey’s watch, ran events at which senior Hamas leader Sheikh Muhammad Siyam told the crowd to “exterminate” all Israelis. Ashmawey has since held top leadership positions at Islamic Relief in the UK, as well as the Islamist charity Human Appeal.

Mercy-USA is extremely active in the Gaza Strip, where it is a major partner of UNRWA. USAID has been a generous patron to this extremely radical charity, with at least $7million of grants approved for the charity, according to (inconsistent) data at https://usaspending.gov.

Founded in London in 1985, Muslim Aid has grown into one of the largest Islamic charities in the world, boasting revenue of tens of millions of pounds each year. Muslim Aid is a leading outpost of Jamaat-e-Islami, a violent South Asian Islamist movement. In 2013, a Bangladeshi war crimes tribunal sentenced to death in absentia one of the charity’s founders, Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, for his role leading a Jamaat-e-Islami killing squad that abducted and murdered 18 people during the country’s 1971 Liberation War.

In 2013, USAID authorized the transfer of over $1.5 million to Muslim Aid, a sub-grant provided by “international development organization” ACDI/VOCA.

Just a few years later, documents obtained by the Middle East Forum through a Freedom of Information Act request show, the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control apparently investigated Muslim Aid as a potential terror financier.

Counter-terrorism analyst Chris Blackburn writes that Muslim Aid’s Australian branch has supported jihadist-funding organizations in Indonesia; government agencies in Bangladesh included Muslim Aid in a list of ten Islamic charities supporting Islamist terrorism; and Spanish police have declared that Muslim Aid financed jihadists in Bosnia in the 1990s.

Muslim Aid has previously admitted to funding organizations controlled by the terrorist organization Hamas, including a grant of over $18,000 to the al-Ihsan Charitable Society, which is designated by the U.S. government as a sponsor of terrorism.

In Pakistan, meanwhile, both the U.K. and Pakistani branches of Muslim Aid partner openly with Al-Khidmat, the “charitable” arm of Jamaat-e-Islami’s Pakistani arm. Along with openly financing Hamas, Al-Khidmat also publicly works with Hizbul Mujahedeen, a designated terrorist group in both India and the United States.

Muslim Aid’s Pakistan branch is particularly shadowy. In 2009, it appointed a senior official of Pakistan’s infamous, terror-connected Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as chairman of its board of trustees.

Other terrorist operatives have made use of Muslim Aid’s infrastructure. In 2012, three terrorist operatives used Muslim Aid identities to raise money for a series of suicide bombings. Although Muslim Aid was apparently unaware of this scheme, Britain’s charity regulator later censured the organization for having “insufficient measures in place to monitor its spending” and activities, leading British officials to fear, among other things, that it might be “inadvertently funding a proscribed terrorist organisation.” Concerns over the charity’s management have continued to surface over the past few years.

Other Muslim Aid officials have included Manazir Ahsan, a leading British Islamist who helped to coordinate Islamist riots in the UK against novelist Salman Rushdie over his book, The Satanic Verses; and Iqbal Sacranie, another infamous British Islamist who said of Rushdie: “Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him.”

Another key Muslim Aid official, Jafer Hussain Qureshi, mostly operates out of the U.K, where he manages the affairs of the terror-connected international Islamist preacher Zakir Naik, currently on the run from law enforcement in India.

The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF) is best known in counter-terrorism circles for its previous close collaboration with the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation, which the U.S. government convicted in 2008 “on charges of providing material support to Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization.”

In 2003, a U.S. Justice Department document noted that a Hamas website featured hyperlinks to “several United States-based charities, including Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, the Islamic Association of Palestine, and the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.”

Meanwhile, in 2004, the New York Times quoted an Al-Qaeda supporter declaring: “‘P.C.R.F. is a front for Islamic Jihad,” another Palestinian terrorist group designated in the United States. That same year, Hamas’s Holy Land Foundation, then under investigation, applied to have its frozen funds transferred to PCRF.

According to NGO Monitor, one PCRF official ran a website that openly glorified jihad. NGO Monitor also notes that the Facebook profile picture of PCRF’s “coordinator” in the Palestinian territories features a “photoshopped image of a soldier stomping the beheaded head of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and in the background a picture of a boy raising the flag of Palestine at the Dome of the Rock.”

The PCRF works in Gaza with organizations linked directly to the Hamas authorities, such as the Eastern Association for Agriculture and Development. The Eastern Association boasts that its officials take part in protests against the “occupier” and promises a “return to our stolen homes.” It operates in close cooperation with the Hamas government, with Hamas government officials sending representatives to each of the group’s board meetings, and sending delegations to honor the association’s work.

In Gaza, the PCRF runs the pediatric cancer unit inside Al-Rantisi Children’s Hospital. During fighting in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military claimed to have found that hospital housed “a Hamas ‘command and control center’ and may have been used to hold hostages.” Weapons caches were also found.

PCRF job positions and news about the organization are reported extensively in Hamas’s own media outlet, Felesteen News.

In 2016, USAID provided PCRF with a sub-grant of $90,000 dollars, provided through Catholic Relief Services.

The violent South Asian Islamist movement Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) operates an enormous network of registered charities and community organizations in South Asia, Europe and North America. One of the most prominent is the Rural Education and Development (READ) Foundation.

READ manages almost 400 schools in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the Pakistani-controlled area of the Kashmir region, as well as in nearby Pakistani rural areas. These schools teach over 120,000 students. Although based in Pakistan, READ has offices in the United Kingdom and a network of representatives in the United States. Other JI-controlled USAID-funded groups such as Helping Hand for Relief and Development (profiled above) frequently describe READ as their “partner.”

As Canadian journalist Sonya Fatah notes, READ is part of a “complex web of organizations” run by JI. These welfare and social-services agencies serve both to “gain converts in poor rural communities” and to “win votes.”

READ’s “sister organizations” include the Al Khidmat Foundation and the Ghazali Education Trust, two other Pakistani charities focused on schools and education, which openly identify as JI institutions. In 2006, JI’s own website announced that Al Khidmat had given 6 million rupees ($100,000) to Hamas for their “just Jihad.” Officials from both the Al Khidmat Foundation and the Ghazali Education Trust work closely with Syed Salahuddin, the leader of Hizbul Mujahideen, JI’s paramilitary wing. Both Salahuddin and Hizbul Mujahideen are designated as terrorists by the U.S. government.

USAID and the State Department have provided, through intermediaries, at least $600,000 of taxpayers’ money to the READ Foundation.

This money has subsidized READ Foundation schools, which encourage students to praise the actions of Mumtaz Qadri, an extremist who, in 2011, murdered Punjab governor Salman Taseer because of his public support for a Pakistani Christian woman convicted of blasphemy. A READ social media post featured a portrait of Mumtaz Qadri with a caption that states: “We are all in your debt, O messenger of Allah.”

Other social media posts by READ Foundation schools include references to “American Secular Terrorists ... dirty people” who “destroyed Iraq and killed 150,000 Iraqis” on the “instructions of Iran.” A number of READ schools have also published photos from school ceremonies in which young children act out gun battles, reminiscent of events in the Gaza Strip under Hamas.

The Tides Foundation is a wealthy grant-making foundation which serves as a fiscal sponsor to dozens of radical organizations, including groups accused of links to Hamas and the PFLP. Tides’ influence has been keenly felt by Jewish students during recent campus protests and disruptions, which were organized by groups dependent on the Tides Foundation for funding.

In 2024, the chairman of Congress’s Ways and Means Committee, Representative Jason Smith, declared the Tides Foundation was “at the center of antisemitic incidents that have taken place across college campuses since Hamas’ attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023.”

A follow-up letter to the Internal Revenue Service urged Commissioner Wefler to revoke Tides Foundation’s tax-exempt status, noting that Tides “has engaged in conduct directly intended to incite riots, cause chaos, and disrupt college campuses – including acting as one of the largest funders for several groups involved in antisemitic activity across the country.”

That same year, the Washington Free Beacon reported that the Tides Foundation “bankrolled the fiscal sponsor of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, an anti-Semitic group sanctioned in the United States for providing financial support to terrorists.”

In 2022, the State Department handed the Tides Foundation over $217,000 for a project in Tunisia.

Founded in 1984, InterAction is the largest alliance of international NGOs in the world, comprising over 180 separate groups “working to eliminate extreme poverty, strengthen human rights and citizen participation, safeguard a sustainable planet, promote peace, and ensure dignity for all people.” Federal agencies, foreign governments, journalists, and independent researchers have repeatedly found that a proportion of InterAction’s member-bodies work towards a very different set of ideals. InterAction members include several radical charities tied directly to criminal or terrorist activity, including a number of charities profiled above.

The Together Project

The most dangerous part of InterAction is its Together Project, which was launched in 2017, in theory, to “confront discrimination or targeted prejudicial regulations in the U.S. due to their operating principles or religious faith.” In practice, the Together Project is a coalition of extremist-linked Islamist charities that work together under an InterAction banner. Their implicit goal seems to be to stifle criticism of Islamist charitable fronts and undermine terrorism-finance laws. InterAction has been hijacked to serve as a lobbyist for extremist networks.

Astonishingly, this work is subsidized by the taxpayer. InterAction has received grants totaling tens of millions of dollars over the last decade from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department — $2.6 million in 2024, while it’s 2023 tax return lists over $3.7 million of “government grants.”

The Together Project (in recent years renamed to “Civic Space”) works closely with prominent extremists, organizing events, for instance, with activists such as Hatem Bazian, a Hamas-linked academic who has put forward deeply anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about supposed Jewish control of American universities, and has circulated references to Jews as “ashke-nazis.”

The attraction to anti-Semitism makes more sense upon considering the make-up of the Together Project, which comprises five core Islamist charities with documented links to extremist movements: Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD), Islamic Relief, Zakat Foundation of America, American Relief Agency for the Horn of Africa, and United Muslim Relief. The extensive terror links of Islamic Relief and HHRD are profiled above.

United Muslim Relief (UMR) is an international aid charity currently led by Abed Ayoub, the former President of Islamic Relief’s U.S. branch. UMR works closely with other Hamas-financing Islamist charities such as LIFE for Relief and Development, Baitulmaal, which are also InterAction members. UMR staff include former Islamic Relief official Omar Shahin, who, in 2002, preached: “You will keep on fighting with the Jews until the fight reaches the east of Jordan river then the stones and trees will say: oh Muslim, oh (servant) slaves of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.” In Gaza, UMR supports the Hamas-linked UFA charity (profiled above). UMR also advertises in Hamas newspapers.

As for the Zakat Foundation of America, this charity was founded by Halil Demir, a former official at the Benevolence International Foundation, an Al-Qaeda charitable front designated in 2002 by the U.S. Treasury. According to Professor Ahmet S. Yayla, director of the Center for Homeland Security at DeSales University, the Zakat Foundation is today a key component of the brutal Turkish regime’s network of proxy organizations across the United States.

These charities and the InterAction are all closely involved, logistically and financially, with an organization named the Charity & Security Network (CSN).

Charity & Security Network

The Charity & Security Network (CSN) advocates on behalf of groups caught up in terror finance investigations, works to undermine laws countering terror finance, and appears to be in charge of managing InterAction’s Together Project on behalf of terror-connected radical charities.

The links are patent. Staff of InterAction involved with Together Project are former employees of the Charity & Security Network (CSN). InterAction senior manager, Andrea Hall, “spent six years at Charity & Security Network,” according to her biography on the InterAction website. The former director of the Together Project, Princess Bazley-Bethea, served as an executive committee member of CSN, according to her LinkedIn page. The Together Project openly boasts of an “affiliation with the Charity & Security Network.” And CSN lists most of the Together Project’s core member charities as its own “supporting members” and funders.

CSN is an ideologically-troubled organization itself. Its head, Kay Guinane, has solicited support for Veterans for Peace, a fringe organization known for its support for the Assad regime. Its website, to which Guinane linked, also openly propagandizes for the North Korean regime.

CSN claims to support civil society’s ability to carry out “peacebuilding, humanitarian aid, human rights, and development work” in the face of “overbroad counterterrorism policies.” While this appears a welcome check on government’s tendency to use national security laws to infringe on the rights and privacies of its citizens, it quickly becomes clear that CSN is not a champion of liberty, but a highly politicized activist group.

CSN does not defend innocent Muslim charities caught up in over-zealous international terror finance regulations and the problem of Islamist exploitation of humanitarian aid; instead, it devotes its time to assisting the very extremists complicit in this exploitation. For instance, CSN has repeatedly denounced the government’s decision to freeze the assets of recognized terror-financing groups as “a serious infringement on their right of religious expression.”

Indeed, this is one of CSN’s chief preoccupations. It claims that charities should actively be able to partner with terrorist organizations. In 2011, Ms. Guinane argued that there was no evidence that funding a terrorist group’s social wing would benefit its military wing. A 2012 report published by CSN praised charitable partnerships with the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba and its political arm, Jamaat ud-Dawah — both designated terrorist organizations under U.S. law and involved closely with the 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which 164 people were murdered. In 2013, CSN “spearheaded” a petition to allow “peacebuilding organizations” to “engage” with designated terrorist organizations.

Terror Lobbyists

InterAction appears to provide CSN with a taxpayer-funded platform for its pro-terror work. Consequently InterAction openly and unashamedly runs interference for the terror links and bigotry of its Islamist partners. It even discourages other InterAction members from voicing discontent: former official Bazley-Bethea has urged member charities not to question the actions of fellow member charities, insisting that they “compromise or defer to a partner’s judgment in decision-making to move towards the greater common goal.”

Over the past two years, InterAction staff met with dozens of members of Congress – legislators who have expressed concern about charities’ terror finance, racism and ties to hostile overseas regimes – to discourage congressional investigation and to let these radical charities operate with impunity.

Some of these meetings have been announced openly by InterAction, while others have been carried out in apparent secrecy. One letter from a InterAction official, sent to a congressional office, and obtained by the Middle East Forum, states:

The bill in question, H. Res 160, sought to highlight violence against civilians in Bangladesh and called for an investigation into the operations of the violent, Pakistani-regime backed violent theocratic movement Jamaat-e-Islami, of which HHRD is a key component. Helping Hand for Relief and Development, a Together Project member with close relations to the Pakistani regime, employed taxpayer-funded InterAction to lobby against the bill.

Disinformation operations seem to lie at the heart of InterAction’s approach. Its Together Project published a toolkit that teaches members how to control negative press by promoting “alternative messages” and “new narratives.” By tying legitimate criticism of its members to “fake news,” internet “trolls” and “bots,” and even Russian interference in the 2016 election, InterAction helps its radical members to distract and confound.

In line with the agenda of its CSN partner, InterAction has endorsed letters to the House and Senate pushing for the weakening of terror-finance laws, met with lawmakers from key committees, lobbied against legislation targeting terror financing in South Asia, and worked to revise financial regulation in ways that would downplay the risks associated with money laundering and terrorist financing.

Islamist terror-tied charities in America can count on a taxpayer-subsidized umbrella organization, with powerful legislative and executive connections, lobbying on their behalf.

Inconsistent federal data on foreign government spending makes it difficult to track the full range of foreign radical beneficiaries. Funding from the State Department, not routed through USAID, is particularly murky. And yet even cursory Middle East Forum research has found that State Department sections such as the U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs publicly collaborate with and facilitate funding for terrorist proxies.

The Fares Al-Arab Foundation, for example, is a Gaza-based charity, and a frequent partner of the U.S. government’s activities in the Gaza Strip. Its Facebook page indicates dozens of joint projects and funding arrangements. The Fares Foundation has received at least $81,000 from the State Department; although with inconsistent results recorded in government spending disclosures, the true amount is likely much more (see next section).

On October 8, the Fares Foundation published a statement mourning the “martyrdom” of Sami Labad.

A since-deleted social media post from his relative, Haitham Lubbad, claimed that Labad, who worked for Hamas’ Ministry of Health, was killed “assisting the mujahideen on the Gaza Strip border” during Hamas’s October 7 mass-terror attack. Another relative notes he died while “engaged in battle, providing aid and treating the storming fighters in the heart of the carnage.”

The Fares Foundation is a partner for a number of USAID-backed Western charities, including United Palestinian Appeal, the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, and the Palestinian branch of Islamic Relief.

The State Department network in places such as Gaza is incestuous, with many individual beneficiaries of U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs programs also working for terror-tied charities. Mohammed Jaber, for example, has spent several years closely involved with the State Department’s programs in Gaza.

Jaber is the “field manager” for Heroic Hearts, a radical Illinois charity. Heroic Hearts officials are overt supporters of Hamas leaders and have also posted songs on social media which call on Muslims to “pick up a keffiyah and dagger at the waist” to win back Al-Aqsa.

Multiple advertisements in the Hamas newspaper Felesteen News notes Heroic Hearts’ partnership with the Hope Bridge Charitable Association, a charity in Gaza that solicits donations through the use of footage from Hamas’s TV station, Quds News Network. One senior official of Hope Bridge has often posted radical material on social media, including expressions of mourning for the death of a Hamas Security Force operative killed in fighting with Israeli troops.

The State Department-backed Jaber has also been listed as the “activities coordinator” for the Reach Education Fund, one of the most radical pro-Hamas charities in North America. Ahmed Gebreel, director of Reach’s Palestine Office, has referred to himself as a follower of Hitler, cheerfully noting the Nazis had wiped out millions of “impure” Jews. Ayyad Yassin, Reach’s current chairman, has published “congratulations to all our people in Gaza” following Hamas’s killing of Israeli soldiers, as well as praise for a terrorist attack by Hamas’s Qassam Brigades.

Government records do not indicate grants awarded to the Reach Education Fund, although the radical charity’s 2021 tax return discloses over $34,000 of contributions in its “government grants” field.

The dollar amounts in this data consist of approved awards; the actual amounts eventually outlaid are unknown, with government data unreliable and often not matching public reporting of the grants. Counteracting that, however, given the data discrepancy problems listed above, the number of grants identified in this report, and aggregated below, are unlikely significant underestimates of the true amounts approved. Indeed, a consistent theme throughout this report has been the clear inconsistencies within government spending data. Federal records, which are disclosed at usaspending.gov, are replete with duplicate, missing and contradictory data.

A Department of State grant to the radical READ Foundation in Pakistan, for instance, scraped seven years ago from government data by the Middle East Forum no longer appears in federal government spending data, either under the grantee name or the unique award identification number.

Similarly, records of the “USAID-funded Unlimited Friends Association [UFA] educational and community center in Gaza,” boasted about on USAID’s own website, do not appear in federal spending data. Government officials have so far failed to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request sent to USAID a year ago, by the Middle East Forum, to inquire about this UFA grant.

And among the data just for the charities profiled above, multiple discrepancies become apparent. Tabular data exploring USAID funding of Mercy-USA, for instance, indicates just $7 million of funding. An accompanying visualization lists $28 million, while a separate page lists $30 million.

Similar issues arise for the Fares Al-Arab Development Foundation, which variously reports receiving either $80,000 or $140,000 from the State Department. A third grant found names the Fares Al-Arab Development Foundation in the accompanying description of a $30,000 grant, while listing the explicit grantee only as the “MISCELLANEOUS FOREIGN AWARDEES” in Gaza.

The recurring federal records reference to “miscellaneous foreign awardees” is found across USAID data in particular. Over the past 18 years, the beneficiaries of almost 2,000 USAID grants worth over $29 billion combined are listed in government spending databases under these “miscellaneous” categories. These untraceable grant programs include funding efforts in locations such as Gaza, Syria, and Afghanistan.

In November, federal authorities revealed that $9 million of USAID grants ended up with “armed combatant groups, including the Al-Nusra Front, which is a designated foreign terrorist organization affiliated with al-Qaida in Iraq.” The Middle East Forum uncovered that these grants were all handed out through these “miscellaneous” programs.

By suppressing public, media and congressional ability to keep an eye on State and USAID behavior, it is hardly surprising that millions of federal aid dollars end up in the pockets of terrorists and extremists.

If the Trump administration is serious about reforming government spending, then part of the solution can be an absolute and sincere commitment to transparency. USAID must publicly disclose all applicants for public funds, solicit public submissions about beneficiaries’ propriety, and end all censorship and redaction of USAID records.

Over a year after the October 7 attacks, Hamas-aligned charities, components of large and powerful industries of domestic Islamist institutions and operatives tied to violence overseas, have continued to operate with no apparent fear of prosecution. No indictments have been filed and there is little evidence of ongoing criminal investigations.

In spite of clear evidence illustrating domestic institutions’ ties to designated foreign terror organizations and their proxies, as well as violations of terrorism material support laws, the security establishment’s limited and waning prosecutorial interest in Hamas has been restricted to overseas persons and networks.

In particular, injudicious security ideas have encouraged federal friendliness towards radical charities. Since the government conspicuously shut down efforts to monitor and prosecute Hamas networks in the United States around 2008, terror proxies and supporters have flourished.

Indeed, many Islamist charities have come to be regarded as partners in the battle against Salafi-jihad. Jonathan Schanzer at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies noted in testimony before Congress, “One official candidly told me that suspected Hamas activists in the United States were viewed then as protected sources in the fight against the Islamic State terrorist group.”

Middle East Forum has encountered similar attitudes, hearing intelligence officials explicitly discourage action against Islamist organizations belonging to Hamas and similar Islamist networks.

Such attitudes do not necessarily prove USAID and the State Department’s funding of terror-connected organizations was ever an explicit choice, but they do perhaps help explain the incaution of USAID’s regular charitable partners; and the perfunctory, inadequate efforts by government to vet its grantees.

A lack of proper transparency in USAID funding accompanies starkly deficient vetting policies in place at the agency. The Hamas charity, Bayader Association for Environment and Development, for example, was a sub-grantee for major Western charities and regular partners of USAID: Catholic Relief Services, International Medical Corps, and Global Communities Inc. These charities were required by USAID to vet their sub-grantee, and manifestly failed, apparently without notice or consequence.

It is noteworthy that Catholic Relief Services is a regular partner of several radical charities profiled above, including Islamic Relief and ANERA. Indeed, in places such as Gaza, the same staff move between the organizations with apparent ease.

Similarly, evangelical World Vision was entrusted with the vetting of the Bin Laden-linked Islamic Relief Agency. Not only did World Vision initially fail to alert the government about its partner’s well-documented ties to terrorism, but it subsequently insisted the government allow the taxpayer-funded partnership with the terror group continue. World Vision escaped federal censure, and continues to operate as a major recipient of USAID monies today.

Government funding practices are broken and dangerous. If foreign aid grants are to continue, reform must include the imposition of overwhelming transparency rules, accompanied by important changes in vetting practices.

That funding should not be used, per the existing USAID rules, “for the purpose of recognizing or otherwise honoring individuals who commit, or have committed, acts of terrorism” is insufficient. Instead, it must be understood that any funding to an organization which supports terrorist operatives serves to facilitate support of terror. The vetting procedure must be widened to exclude any organization which, whether through its activities or the opinions of its staff, supports terrorist groups or leaders, or lionizes terrorists’ behavior.

USAID’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) has, since the October 7 attacks in particular, sounded the alarm over deficiencies in vetting procedures, drawing attention to the considerable potential for abuse by “armed groups,” who manipulate funding programs and approved local partner lists.

OIG reports, for instance, warn that vetting requirements for non-U.S. organizations apply only to “key individuals.” But as OIG notes, “the only individuals subject to USAID’s procedures are those whose implementing partners and their subawardees self-identify as ‘key individuals.’”

Additional OIG memoranda note that current vetting procedures are patently unable to identify ties between aid organizations and designated terrorist groups; and fail to keep track of sub-awardees and their activities. United Nations agencies and various foreign NGOs are the object of particular criticism, with OIG staff noting UN staff’s obfuscation and a consistent failure to report “misconduct.” The OIG even notes the repeated refusal of UN bodies to cooperate with USAID investigators.

Meanwhile, over the past several years, the OIG has also started to investigate grants to recipients such as Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD), following Middle East Forum investigative pieces exposing terrorism ties, which was accompanied by congressional and media interest. However, OIG concerns were apparently ignored, with additional grants still being issued.

Clearly, changes are required at USAID and State; and indeed, across the entire federal government. All grantees, all sub-grantees, and all their staff and partners, must be subejct to vetting. In contrast to current rules, primary grantees cannot be trusted to vet sub-grantees. In-depth, extensive vetting by USAID staff should always be conducted, and public submissions for each beneficiary solicited. These are public charities, and should be subject to public input. USAID should publish lists of vendors under consideration. Opening up this process will not only place greater public trust in USAID, but will help prevent future mistakes, and provide general grassroots assistance for USAID’s vetting responsibilities.

In addition, USAID should publish the results of its efforts to vet grantors and grantees, so that its efforts and conclusions can be checked and improved.

In all of the cases highlighted above, online searches about government grantees and sub-grantees would have uncovered media reporting and social media posts detailing terrorism links and extremism. Reviews of existing public source information, available through simple Google searches, could decimate the amount of public funds that ends up in the hands of violent extremists.

In addition, any organization benefiting from USAID funds should be required to provide:

• complete lists of names and positions of staff, partners and their own vendors;
• details of funding from other government bodies and authorities (in the Gaza Strip, this would include details of their involvement with the Hamas authorities, for instance);
• a full list of other contributors to the organization.

In particular, domestic 501(c) organizations that receive federal funding should be not be allowed to redact certain parts of their published 990 tax returns. During years in which the federal government funds a 501(c), that public charity should publish the full un-redacted copy of both Schedule B and Schedule F, which catalog the charity’s contributors and foreign activities respectively.

All organizations who fail to meet these requirements must be barred from all future State Department and USAID support.

As Secretary of State Marco Rubio has urged: “every dollar we spend, every program we fund, and every policy we pursue” must make America “stronger,” “safer,” and “more prosperous.” For that to happen, the federal government’s relationship with the nonprofit sector must undergo fundamental change. USAID’s behavior offers a good place to start.