College for terrorists is just one USAID funding folly Trumps right to bring the pain

One more reason to tune out the histrionic whining over USAID: A recently resurfaced record reportedly shows that it paid for Anwar al-Awlaki — yes, that al-Awlaki, the terrorist preacher and suspected al-Qaeda recruiter rightly droned by the Obama administration — to attend Colorado State University when he was a student here in the ’90s. How did Awlaki, an US citizen, get this plum grant? By lying about his birthplace and saying he was from Yemen!You’d think that the “experts” in charge of handing out USAID’s big bucks might have, you know, demanded some proof. But they didn’t (a classic example of liberal racism, by the way: Someone with a furrin’ soundin’ name like “Awlaki” couldn’t possibly be American). And so this radical-in-waiting committed an easily detectable fraud and stole a bunch of money from hardworking taxpayers, then grew up to become a murderous America-hater.Great work all round, guys. And that’s not even the only example of USAID handing over taxpayer dollars to monstrous terrorists. Less than a week before Oct.7, the agency gave $900,000 to a Hamas-linked charity in Gaza. A mere drop in the bucket compared to the $122 million the Middle East Forum uncovered going direct from USAID to groups aligned with designated terrorists and their backers.You read that right: $122 million. No wonder the agency is so desperate to avoid any real oversight, even lying to Sen.

Jon Ernst about certain grants made in Ukraine being classified and about the specific ways its overall grant spend was going to cover so-called “indirect costs” (a catch-all category covering rent and other miscellaneous expenses, and thus ripe for fraud). To be clear: Some foreign aid is a good use of our taxpayer bucks, and the chainsaw approach Team Trump has taken needs to be refined. But the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth over it is a smokescreen meant to hide the bad stuff.  ...