The State Department routed approximately $2 billion in contracts through World Vision, a faith-based charity whose Gaza manager was convicted by an Israeli court in 2022 for funneling $50 million to Hamas. Separately, HHS sent $80 million to fourteen organizations flagged by watchdog groups and a Senate committee for links to terrorism and extremism.
Eighty-seven percent of that funding was approved under the Biden administration.
Two federal agencies — State and HHS — distributed taxpayer money to charities with documented connections to Hamas, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. CAIR-California received $42.2 million from HHS despite CAIR's designation as an "unindicted co-conspirator" by federal prosecutors and a 2004 lawsuit settlement. ICNA Relief pulled in $10.6 million. The Muslim American Society's Sacramento chapter got $90,000. Dar Al-Hirjah, the Northern Virginia mosque where two of the 9/11 hijackers were housed, received $340,000 in sub-grants. Five overseas organizations collected $14 million.
And then there's World Vision's own sub-granting. The charity transferred a $125,000 USAID-backed sub-grant as part of its sprawling network of contracts. A senior Trump administration official said that "World Vision is severely compromised by ties to Islamist terrorists and a radical left-wing climate change agenda." The organization's Gaza operation alone was the pipeline for $50 million to Hamas before Israeli authorities shut it down.
Gregg Roman, Executive Director of the Middle East Forum, put the Afghan refugee angle in focus. "Washington took the most vulnerable people on earth, refugees who fled the Taliban, and delivered them into the hands of the organizations most likely to radicalize them," Roman said. The domestic charities receiving HHS money weren't just administratively connected to extremist networks — they were providing direct services to refugee populations.
The Islamic American Relief Agency, which operated under various names including Islamic Africa Relief Agency, had its U.S. accounts blocked by the Treasury Department in 2004, was sanctioned by Treasury in 2014, and was shut down in 2016 after illegally providing $1.4 million to Iraq. The Senate Finance Committee investigated the network in 2019. None of this prevented adjacent organizations from collecting new federal contracts.
CAIR-California responded that "all contributions and grants that CAIR-CA receives are fully reported, accounted for, and used strictly for their intended purposes." A State Department spokesman called any implication that the Trump administration is permitting diversion of funds to terror-linked groups "baseless" — though the contracts in question were overwhelmingly approved before this administration took office.
The pattern is institutional, not accidental. The same agencies that run background checks on Americans applying for security clearances couldn't manage to flag charities whose terror connections were documented in court convictions, Treasury sanctions, Senate investigations, and federal prosecutions. The vetting infrastructure exists. It was applied selectively — rigorous for some, apparently optional for organizations distributing billions in contracts to groups the FBI had been watching for decades.