The most striking aspect of President Donald Trump’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) isn’t that unsavory aid recipients have misused taxpayer dollars. It’s that anyone is shocked by the revelations of waste, fraud, and abuse. After all, watchdog groups have sounded the alarm for years about misuse of USAID funds.
People shouldn’t just be enraged by USAID’s wasteful spending. They should also focus on what that spending supported—particularly when it promoted terror or aligned with Hamas’s interests.
Rather than being used to provide humanitarian aid and stabilize conflict-ridden regions—in accordance with USAID’s stated goal—American funds have often been funneled into corrupt, Hamas-tied institutions, with minimal oversight. A new multiyear study of USAID by the Middle East Forum identified $164 million in grants to radical organizations, including $122 million to those “aligned with designated terrorists and their supporters.” The MEF also found that “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.”
The money has kept flowing, as the U.S. has distributed $2.1 billion in Gaza since Hamas killed 1,200 people and took 250 hostages on October 7, 2023. But the warning signs predate October 7. The USAID’s Inspector General—now raising the alarm about Trump’s shutdown of the agency—has consistently voiced concern over lax vetting mechanisms and inadvertent terror funding in the region.
The watchdog community has echoed these concerns. In December 2024, the group NGO Monitor highlighted USAID’s lack of transparency, reporting that it allocated $200 million to “miscellaneous foreign awardees” operating in the West Bank and Gaza. USAID identified neither the recipients of these funds nor their local partners. In 2021, NGO Monitor warned that alterations to USAID’s anti-terror vetting practices made the group “vulnerable to engagement with grantees and/or partners linked to terrorist organizations, or with groups that support, glorify, or excuse violence.”
Such misuse of taxpayer dollars could not have happened without significant failures of oversight from the State Department, which needs its own reckoning. The State Department should have more strictly supervised and prevented the agency’s corruption. Instead, department staffers were busy enacting soft coups from within by pushing back against former President Joe Biden’s Middle East policy, which they absurdly deemed too pro-Israel.
These subversive trends were mirrored within USAID itself. As revealed this week by the Washington Free Beacon, “USAID staffers went as far as to urge the Biden State Department to end military aid to Israel.” In 2021, then-USAID Administrator Samantha Power refused to meet with Israel’s ambassador unless Israel reached a ceasefire with Hamas—in direct contradiction to the plans of the White House National Security Council.
The absurdity here is as staggering as the implications are disturbing. For years, a contingent within USAID has actively subverted American foreign policy and greenlit aid to terror-tied entities without properly vetting them or, worse, vetting them and greenlighting anyway. We are only now scratching the surface of what’s happened.
The solution isn’t just closing USAID. A full investigation, led by newly confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio, must be launched into the State Department’s role in these failures. The American people deserve answers—not just about USAID’s missteps, but about a State Department that let this happen on its watch.
Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images
