The Council on American-Islamic Relations' California chapter collected $42.2 million from the Department of Health and Human Services. Seven of CAIR's board and staff members have been arrested or convicted on terrorism-related charges. Those two facts exist in the same federal filing system.
Nobody in Washington connected the dots — or nobody wanted to.
A report from the Middle East Forum documents how two federal agencies — HHS and the State Department — routed taxpayer money to at least 14 organizations with documented ties to designated terrorist groups. The total from HHS alone: $80 million. Eighty-seven percent of that funding was approved under the Biden administration.
The numbers get worse the deeper you go. The Islamic Circle of North America's relief arm, ICNA Relief, took in $10.6 million. The Muslim American Society's Sacramento chapter received $90,000 — the same MAS that a federal appeals court once described as the "overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America." Dar Al-Hirjah, a Virginia mosque that helped two 9/11 hijackers find housing, received $340,000 in HHS sub-grants.
Then there's the State Department side. World Vision holds roughly $2 billion in State Department global health contracts. In 2022, an Israeli court convicted World Vision's Gaza operations manager of funneling $50 million to Hamas. A 2019 Senate Finance Committee investigation flagged the arrangement. In 2014, a USAID-backed transaction moved a $125,000 World Vision sub-grant to the Islamic Relief Agency — an organization the Treasury Department sanctioned in 2004 for ties to Osama bin Laden.
The Islamic Relief Agency's American affiliate, the Islamic American Relief Agency, pleaded guilty to violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, money laundering conspiracy, and obstructing internal revenue laws before being shut down in 2016. That organization had illegally sent $1.4 million to Iraq. Five overseas organizations linked to terrorism received a combined $14 million through these funding channels.
Gregg Roman, Executive Director of the Middle East Forum, didn't mince words. "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. "That is not compassion. That is a recruitment pipeline built at public expense, and every official who signed these awards owns it."
CAIR-CA responded that "all contributions and grants that CAIR-CA receives are fully reported, accounted for, and used strictly for their intended purposes, subject to rigorous internal and external auditing and reporting." Worth noting: CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas financial support case, and the FBI formally ended contacts with the organization over terrorism concerns. A 2004 lawsuit settlement even acknowledged that anti-CAIR statements about its terror ties were accurate.
A State Department spokesman pushed back on the report's implications, stating that "no administration has held Hamas and other radical Islamist terrorist organizations more accountable than the Trump administration." The spokesman called any suggestion that the current administration permits diversion of funds to terror-linked groups "baseless" — a fair point, given that 87% of the HHS money moved under Biden's watch.
The machinery here isn't complicated. Federal grants flow through a bureaucracy that doesn't check — or chooses not to check — whether recipients have terrorism connections that are already documented in other federal databases. Treasury sanctions an organization. HHS funds it. The FBI cuts ties with a group. HHS writes it a check. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and the checkbook stays open.
Eighty million dollars. Fourteen organizations. Seven arrests and convictions. All of it in the public record, none of it caught before the money went out the door.
That's not an oversight failure. That's a system performing exactly as designed.
