Sen. Lindsey Graham spent more than a decade defending USAID funding on Capitol Hill. Now a congressional letter and a think-tank report say that money reached organizations tied to Hamas and Al Qaeda.
President Trump effectively shut down the agency in 2025. But the damage, according to House committee chairmen, stretches back nearly two decades, and the South Carolina Republican's fingerprints are all over the budget line that made it possible.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast (R-FL) laid out the numbers in a March 2025 letter, as reported by Breitbart News:
"From 2007 through 2024, USAID and the State Department sent at least $122 million to NGOs aligned with designated terrorist organizations."
That wasn't the worst of it. The chairmen went further:
"USAID and the State Department have even provided direct support to Hamas and other terrorist groups."
Jordan and Mast also stated that many of those NGOs "openly espoused antisemitic rhetoric and encouraged violence against Jewish individuals." This warning arrived months after Trump moved to shutter the agency, and years after Graham fought to keep its budget intact.
One case stands out. USAID issued a grant to the Bayader Association for Environment and Development, a Gaza-based NGO, on October 1, 2023. Six days later, Hamas launched its terrorist attacks on Israel.
A February 2025 report from the Middle East Forum found that Bayader had received at least $900,000 in U.S. government funding since 2016. The group was not some distant acquaintance of Hamas. At a February 2023 event organized by Bayader, staff embraced senior Hamas officials, including Abdul Salam Haniyeh, son of the late Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
American tax dollars went to an organization that held joint events with the leadership of a designated terrorist group. That is the pipeline Graham spent years defending.
This wasn't a secret alliance. Graham bragged about it. In a resurfaced video message to USAID, the senator said:
"You've made a big difference in the world. You're a force for good, create a great impression for our country, and you change lives."
He doubled down in the same message:
"[You] take taxpayer dollars and you improve the lives of others, which is good foreign policy, good national security policy. And to all the folks throughout the world who work for USAID, local hires, thank you. I've been a big champion for a long time. Enjoy this anniversary and when it comes to USAID, the best is yet to come."
As far back as 2011, Josh Rogin wrote in Foreign Policy that "there's one senior Republican who's willing and able to fight for maintaining the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development budgets: Sen. Lindsey Graham." That reputation followed Graham for over a decade.
Graham's instinct to protect foreign-aid spending surfaced again in a separate context. Fox News reported that after voting against a Senate foreign-aid package, Graham expressed optimism about a House bipartisan proposal combining $66 billion in foreign aid with border-security measures. "I don't want to wait, I want to act now," Graham said on CBS's "Face the Nation."
Today Graham is the loudest voice on Capitol Hill calling for Trump to strike Iran. He has pushed to escalate the conflict and even threatened Saudi Arabia's American aid unless Riyadh joins the fight.
"Why should America do a defense agreement with a country like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that is unwilling to join a fight of mutual interest?"
Graham warned that "consequences will follow." Meanwhile, threats from Iran and its network of terror groups created a tanker bottleneck at the Strait of Hormuz, the very chokepoint that drives global oil prices.
The irony is brutal. The senator who shielded the funding pipeline that enriched Hamas now demands American military force to clean up the chaos those groups helped create. Hamas itself sent a letter to Iran's new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, encouraging Iran to "activate all fronts" against American-led resistance.
Consider the sequence:
Trump shut down USAID. USAID's offices are dark. That was the right call.
Graham has since cosponsored the SAVE America Act, Trump's top legislative priority. "I look forward to voting on the SAVE America Act," he said in a February statement. The Senate took up the bill on Tuesday, and Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill in July 2025.
But cosponsoring a popular bill does not erase a record. Breitbart News reported that it asked Graham's office about his oversight of USAID spending and did not receive a response. That silence speaks volumes, especially as the Senate navigates war-powers questions and Republicans rally behind Trump's Iran campaign.
Establishment Republicans like Graham and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), whom the article identifies as having worked against Trump's reelection efforts, face growing scrutiny from the base. Republican voters in South Carolina have raised their own questions about Graham's judgment.
The facts assembled by Jordan, Mast, and the Middle East Forum paint a damning picture. For years, Congress appropriated money. USAID distributed it. Terror-linked groups collected it. And one senator fought harder than anyone to keep the spigot open.
Graham now wants to send American service members into harm's way against the very forces that American tax dollars helped sustain. Voters deserve to know: did he ever ask where the money went?
You can't fund the fire and then demand credit for calling the fire department.
