Sam Westrop, director of the Middle East Forum’s (MEF) Islamist Watch project, is the primary author of the Middle East Forum’s report on the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) subsidy of global Islamist terrorist organizations. Westrop spoke to a March 11 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
MEF has tracked federal funding of Islamist groups since 2017, knowing that “Islamism thrives on government monies.” It uncovered that the State Department and USAID have given $164 million in taxpayer funds to radical Islamist groups, of which at least $122 million was sent to organizations aligned with U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. “The amount of monies coming from USAID and State accounts for roughly half of the entire federal government’s funding of Islamism.”
USAID provides the “the biggest bulk of taxpayer dollars to Islamist aid charities,” but the scope of the problem extends far beyond, to other departments and agencies.
MEF’s investigation exposed the extent to which various federal government agencies finance extremist and terrorist organizations. The disturbing results begin with USAID, which provides the “the biggest bulk of taxpayer dollars to Islamist aid charities,” but the scope of the problem extends far beyond, to other departments and agencies.
After the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas on Israel, the Hamas network in the U.S. drew some much-needed scrutiny. It is through lawful charities that terrorist organizations benefit because “welfare and charity is key to Islamism.” Hamas rose to power with an image as the “incorruptible welfare voice of the Palestinian people in the face of the intransigent and corrupt Palestinian Authority.”
For years, USAID beneficiaries in Gaza have indirectly subsidized terror through Hamas front groups even though these groups have not themselves been designated as such. Examples are the Unlimited Friends Association (UFA) in Gaza, which received USAID money through the American Near East Refugee Agency. These grants are difficult to track; a UFA grant, for example, does not appear in federal spending records.
USAID awarded $188,000 in taxpayer funds to Helping Hand for Relief and Development (HHRD), a group that MEF exposed in 2018 as openly connected to terror. HHRD partnered with Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group that committed the 2008 Mumbai attacks, as well as with other terror proxies in Pakistan. USAID funded the group even after Congress wrote to USAID about HHRD’s connections.
Two decades ago, in the aftermath of 9/11, the federal government had the “political will” to understand that “when you help terrorists build homes, you’re helping terrorists build bombs.” Back then, there was a greater willingness to prosecute such organizations or, at the very least, refuse to fund them with taxpayer monies. But “the first Trump administration, the Obama administration, and the Biden administration chose not to prosecute.”
And yet there is much to prosecute. In 2014-2015, World Vision, a large Christian evangelical charity, worked with a designated terrorist organization in Sudan, the Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA), which previously raised funds for terrorists including Osama bin Laden and in 2003 financed Hamas suicide bombers. MEF investigated and exposed that “certain federal officials had actively participated in lobbying Treasury to authorize the transfer of this money” through USAID under the Obama administration. Federal officials even “actively encourage[d]” Treasury to delist ISRA from the designated terrorist list. At the very least, there was misconduct by federal officials who misappropriated USAID taxpayer monies; at worst, this “may have crossed the lines into something illegal.”
At the very least, there was misconduct by federal officials who misappropriated USAID taxpayer monies; at worst, this “may have crossed the lines into something illegal.”
Charities funded not by USAID but by other parts of the federal government, such as Rahma Worldwide, seemingly break material support laws with impunity. Rahma, while receiving funding from the U.S. government’s Department of Health and Human Services, signed agreements with senior Hamas politburo members and took money from a designated Kuwaiti terrorist organization. Yet Rahma has not been prosecuted. In fact, just last year, Rahma’s “head official was invited to the White House to meet with the National Security Council.”
Islamists established a “vast charitable infrastructure” here in the West as a form of da’wah, or proselytizing. The infrastructure constitutes a lucrative nonprofit industry that generates “billions of dollars of annual revenue” in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. When they are not funding terror proxies, Islamist groups that receive USAID funds “and other federal subsidies” use the monies to “advance extremist ideas” in the U.S.
Such funding affords these organizations legitimacy, shaping the make-up of American Islam. Islamists use this financing to “cement leadership over Muslim communities,” distract from their extremism, and “obfuscate their finances.” Islamist networks aligned with Hamas, taking advantage of a “deeply imperfect legal and charitable infrastructure,” impose “just as much damage” as do violent extremists, but without having to resort to illegality.
Welfare and charity systems as a means to advance Islamism have not only been used by Islamists in the West and Hamas in Gaza. They have also been employed by “broader ideological movements” such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat-e-Islami, and other terror networks such as al-Qaeda to gain legitimacy, recruit new members, and raise money.
Islamist sympathizers in U.S. government positions can influence funding appropriations when family members of “prominent Islamist leaders” in the charitable sector are given political appointments in large federal departments.
A 2023 MEF report listing the charitable network in the U.S. that subsidizes Hamas, as well as the donors behind the network, includes MedGlobal, a radical U.S. charity that partners with the so-called “Ministry of Health” in Gaza (the “Hamas Statistics Bureau” more accurately describes the office). MEF discovered that under the Biden administration, the son of MedGlobal’s head was appointed to a senior position in USAID.
Other government departments that are top federal donors through subsidy programs include the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Education’s school voucher programs.
In addition to USAID and the State Department’s funding of Islamism, other government departments that are top federal donors through subsidy programs include the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Education’s school voucher programs. Another is the Department of Homeland Security, which funds Islamism through two revenue streams. The first is the non-profit Security Grant Program, “a congressionally appropriated program to provide security for religious institutions” that benefits Islamist groups like the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and radical mosques across the country. The second is through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which radical groups such as the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) work with through its ICNA Relief charity. ICNA Relief, which is part of Jamaat-e-Islami, the violent South Asian Islamist movement, has partnered with radical and terror-aligned groups in the U.S. and abroad. Under the first Trump administration, ICNA Relief received $10 million, “the largest single grant ever given” to an Islamist charity. “It remains to be seen what a second Trump administration will do.”
One of the most significant problems tracking USAID money “in particular, is that it moves money to anonymous grantees.” USAID operates “to some extent as an arm of American intelligence.” Monies are hidden both for America’s safety as well as its grantees, especially in places such as Syria. The government is obliged to report these monies, but the federal records stipulate them as “miscellaneous grantees.”
Just last year, the Department of Justice prosecuted an individual who embezzled millions of dollars of USAID funds for terrorists in Syria. An MEF investigation tracked the monies back to those anonymous grant programs. Grants designated as “miscellaneous” are not insubstantial amounts; they can run into the “tens of billions of dollars.”
The federal government has “turned a blind eye” to terror financing and USAID funding of these groups since as early as 2008. Ignored as a “minor issue” by some congressmembers and “certain federal employees,” these groups were even considered, by some policymakers and intelligence officials, useful assets “in a broader strategic battle against Islamism.” Pitting “good political Islam” against “bad political Islam,” groups were not investigated or prosecuted as part of a “very explicit decision to embrace one arm of political Islam in the fight against another.”
“We could be talking about a billion dollars’ worth of federal, state, and city funding of Islamist groups in the United States. This is a big industry, and the taxpayer is a big part of that.”
MEF contends that “the federal government is not just subsidizing violent extremism abroad; it’s helping shape Islam here in America for the worse. It’s helping give Islamists control over community centers and mosques, and whole Muslim areas of the United States by funding the wrong people, by legitimizing the radicals as the representatives.”
Although it is up for debate whether “wiping out USAID is a good idea,” the data trail exposes a “huge amount of waste and coverup [that] has led to the overt financing of America’s enemies, of terrorist groups bent on causing harm to the United States.” The decision to fold USAID into the State Department may not stem the flow of monies to extremist and terror organizations because “State is even less transparent than USAID.” The Inspector General’s office at USAID learned valuable lessons investigating vetting and terror funding, and the federal government now risks losing such expertise as USAID is destroyed. Based on the State Department’s past behavior, it is doubtful it will stop funding Islamists. The proposed changes risk “making a murky system even murkier.”
This would only be avoided if the State Department absorbed USAID “and said at the same time we are going to open up the process by which we fund third parties, both domestically and overseas, every application will be made public. Every report on the program’s progress will be made public. Every vetting document will be made public. We’ll publish lists of every applicant for a grant. All these things so that media, Congress, the public, the Middle East Forum, can assist the government and [ensure] it doesn’t fund radicals, then I would have confidence that this move will work.”
More can be done to ensure that it will be “impossible for supporters of violence to receive government monies,” even a designated terror organization such as Hamas that operates through its network of charitable fronts.
Since 2008, the total amount of federal government funds that have gone to domestic Islamist groups totals some $430 million. Add to that the hundreds of additional millions of dollars coming from state and city governments across the country which are funding Islamists and their causes: “So, all in all, we could be talking about a billion dollars’ worth of federal, state, and city funding of Islamist groups in the United States. This is a big industry, and the taxpayer is a big part of that.”
