Stop Taxpayer Funding of Hamas Act
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Sen. Scott, Rick [R-FL]
ID: S001217
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3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Bill Summary
Another masterpiece of legislative theater, courtesy of the esteemed members of Congress. The "Stop Taxpayer Funding of Hamas Act" - a title that screams "Look over here, folks! We're doing something about terrorism!" while quietly perpetuating the same old pork-barrel politics.
Let's dissect this farce:
**Total funding amounts and budget allocations:** Ah, the bill doesn't actually specify any concrete numbers. How convenient. It's like writing a prescription without mentioning the dosage or medication. I suppose we'll just have to trust that our benevolent leaders will magically allocate funds wisely.
**Key programs and agencies receiving funds:** The bill mentions "United States Government funds" being expended in Gaza, but doesn't bother to specify which agencies or programs will receive these mysterious funds. Perhaps it's a secret? Or maybe they're just too embarrassed to admit where the money is really going?
**Notable increases or decreases from previous years:** Since there are no actual funding amounts provided, we can't even begin to analyze changes from previous years. It's like trying to diagnose a patient without any medical history.
**Riders or policy provisions attached to funding:** Ah, now this is where things get interesting. The bill includes a lovely provision that prohibits funds from being expended through United Nations entities unless they're certified as not promoting anti-Israel or anti-Semitic ideas. Because, you know, the UN is just a hotbed of Jew-hating terrorists. This rider reeks of AIPAC's fingerprints all over it.
**Fiscal impact and deficit implications:** Let's be real, folks. This bill has zero fiscal impact because it doesn't actually allocate any funds. It's a hollow shell of a bill designed to appease certain special interest groups while pretending to address terrorism. The deficit implications? Who cares? We'll just add it to the ever-growing tab and let future generations deal with it.
Diagnosis: This bill is suffering from a severe case of "Legislative Theater-itis," characterized by grandiose titles, vague language, and a complete lack of substance. Symptoms include pandering to special interest groups, ignoring fiscal responsibility, and treating voters like idiots who won't notice the emperor's new clothes.
Treatment: A healthy dose of transparency, accountability, and actual policy-making would be a good start. But let's be real, folks. This bill is just another example of Congress's chronic condition - an addiction to grandstanding and a complete disregard for the well-being of the American people.
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đź’° Campaign Finance Network
Sen. Scott, Rick [R-FL]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
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Project 2025 Policy Matches
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document. Higher similarity scores indicate stronger thematic connections.
Introduction
— 267 — Agency for International Development benefits financially from extending and expanding these large-scale programs for years, even decades, ensures little scrutiny of these ever-increasing appropriations. The massive growth in “emergency” aid distorts humanitarian responses, wors- ens corruption in the countries we support, and exacerbates the misery of those we intend to help. The permanence of this assistance, particularly in countries where we have little to no in-country presence and must rely on U.N. agencies to self-monitor, has morphed into a co-governance scheme in which the U.S. govern- ment effectively finances the social services obligations of corrupt regimes that threaten the United States. These governments can then redirect scarce budget resources away from costly health and education toward financing their wars, sup- porting terrorism, repressing their citizens, and enriching themselves. Examples of this abuse are spread throughout the world. l Over the past decade, the U.S. government has expended $14 billion in aid to Syria where the bloody regime of Bashar al-Assad—a close ally of Iran and Russia—skims nearly half of foreign aid through inflated official exchange rates, the diversion of food baskets to its military units, and procurement arrangements with compromised local contractors. l Yemen, once the breadbasket of the Arabian Peninsula, is now dependent on billions of dollars of aid as formerly productive Yemeni farmers cannot compete against “free food” while irrigation systems remain in disrepair, leaving the country to suffer from water shortages during long summer droughts and flooding during its rainy season. Iran-backed Houthi rebels divert substantial amounts of aid to support their war efforts. l In Afghanistan, the aid infrastructure built over 20 years of American military presence that three Presidents wanted to end collapsed with the failure of U.S.-trained Afghan forces to repel the Taliban’s 2021 advances. Yet the country has received nearly $1 billion more in U.S. humanitarian aid since the Taliban’s takeover and absent a U.S. embassy to ensure that it is not diverted to the Taliban and other terrorist groups. l In Burma, U.S. aid finances all of the food and medical care for hundreds of thousands of persecuted Rohingya that the military regime forces to live in open-air concentration camps. l In northern Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis—targeted for genocidal extermination by ISIS—remain in miserable camps unable to return home because of the Iraqi government’s refusal to clear out Iran-backed militias occupying their homeland. — 268 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise In effect, humanitarian aid is sustaining war economies, creating financial incentives for warring parties to continue fighting, discouraging governments from reforming, and propping up malign regimes. Nefarious actors reap billions of dollars in profits from diversions of our human- itarian assistance, but so do international organizations. The WFP charges 36 percent in overhead while Oxfam International’s overhead has reached 70 percent in Yemen, reflecting the high costs of foreign staff, security, and logistics. With pow- erful lobbies in Washington, D.C., and in leadership positions throughout USAID and the Department of State, the aid industry adroitly exploits Congress’s dispo- sition to increase funding year on year to assist those in dire need but provides no evidence to justify the mounting budget requests. In 2020, USAID’s leadership fused formerly bifurcated food and nonfood emergency relief operations into a single Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance to improve the management of the agency’s largest portfolio, but this reform was not sufficient to address the problem. The next Administration should resize and repurpose USAID’s humanitarian aid portfolio to restore its original purpose of providing emergency short-term relief, prepare vulnerable communities for tran- sition, and do no harm in the following ways: l Work with Congress to make deep cuts in the IDA budget by ending programs that do more harm than good in places controlled by malign actors, such as in Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan, where our aid is consumed by fraud, diversion, and partner overhead costs. l Require USAID and the State Department to devise country-based exit strategies that term-limit the duration of humanitarian responses and transition funding from emergency to development projects. This will require robust diplomacy to press host governments to integrate displaced persons in lieu of keeping them in expensive and dehumanizing camps financed by the international community. l Transition from large awards to expensive, inefficient, and corrupt U.N. agencies, global NGOs, and contractors to local, especially faith-based, entities that are already operating on the ground. This approach provides a far less expensive and more effective alternative for aid delivery. Local partners more ably navigate corrupt environments and are more likely to steer vulnerable populations away from dependence on aid toward self-sufficiency. l Require that BHA avail itself of existing IDA authorities that it fails to use, including to dispense with the cost-reimbursement model that disqualifies
Introduction
— 267 — Agency for International Development benefits financially from extending and expanding these large-scale programs for years, even decades, ensures little scrutiny of these ever-increasing appropriations. The massive growth in “emergency” aid distorts humanitarian responses, wors- ens corruption in the countries we support, and exacerbates the misery of those we intend to help. The permanence of this assistance, particularly in countries where we have little to no in-country presence and must rely on U.N. agencies to self-monitor, has morphed into a co-governance scheme in which the U.S. govern- ment effectively finances the social services obligations of corrupt regimes that threaten the United States. These governments can then redirect scarce budget resources away from costly health and education toward financing their wars, sup- porting terrorism, repressing their citizens, and enriching themselves. Examples of this abuse are spread throughout the world. l Over the past decade, the U.S. government has expended $14 billion in aid to Syria where the bloody regime of Bashar al-Assad—a close ally of Iran and Russia—skims nearly half of foreign aid through inflated official exchange rates, the diversion of food baskets to its military units, and procurement arrangements with compromised local contractors. l Yemen, once the breadbasket of the Arabian Peninsula, is now dependent on billions of dollars of aid as formerly productive Yemeni farmers cannot compete against “free food” while irrigation systems remain in disrepair, leaving the country to suffer from water shortages during long summer droughts and flooding during its rainy season. Iran-backed Houthi rebels divert substantial amounts of aid to support their war efforts. l In Afghanistan, the aid infrastructure built over 20 years of American military presence that three Presidents wanted to end collapsed with the failure of U.S.-trained Afghan forces to repel the Taliban’s 2021 advances. Yet the country has received nearly $1 billion more in U.S. humanitarian aid since the Taliban’s takeover and absent a U.S. embassy to ensure that it is not diverted to the Taliban and other terrorist groups. l In Burma, U.S. aid finances all of the food and medical care for hundreds of thousands of persecuted Rohingya that the military regime forces to live in open-air concentration camps. l In northern Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis—targeted for genocidal extermination by ISIS—remain in miserable camps unable to return home because of the Iraqi government’s refusal to clear out Iran-backed militias occupying their homeland.
Introduction
— 7 — Foreword Instead, party leaders negotiate one multitrillion-dollar spending bill—several thousand pages long—and then vote on it before anyone, literally, has had a chance to read it. Debate time is restricted. Amendments are prohibited. And all of this is backed up against a midnight deadline when the previous “omnibus” spending bill will run out and the federal government “shuts down.” This process is not designed to empower 330 million American citizens and their elected representatives, but rather to empower the party elites secretly nego- tiating without any public scrutiny or oversight. In the end, congressional leaders’ behavior and incentives here are no differ- ent from those of global elites insulating policy decisions—over the climate, trade, public health, you name it—from the sovereignty of national electorates. Public scrutiny and democratic accountability make life harder for policymakers—so they skirt it. It’s not dysfunction; it’s corruption. And despite its gaudy price tag, the federal budget is not even close to the worst example of this corruption. That distinction belongs to the “Administrative State,” the dismantling of which must a top priority for the next conservative President. The term Administrative State refers to the policymaking work done by the bureaucracies of all the federal government’s departments, agencies, and millions of employees. Under Article I of the Constitution, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.” That is, federal law is enacted only by elected legislators in both houses of Congress. This exclusive authority was part of the Framers’ doctrine of “separated powers.” They not only split the federal government’s legislative, executive, and judicial powers into different branches. They also gave each branch checks over the others. Under our Constitution, the legislative branch—Congress—is far and away the most powerful and, correspondingly, the most accountable to the people. In recent decades, members of the House and Senate discovered that if they give away that power to the Article II branch of government, they can also deny responsi- bility for its actions. So today in Washington, most policy is no longer set by Congress at all, but by the Administrative State. Given the choice between being powerful but vulnerable or irrelevant but famous, most Members of Congress have chosen the latter. Congress passes intentionally vague laws that delegate decision-making over a given issue to a federal agency. That agency’s bureaucrats—not just unelected but seemingly un-fireable—then leap at the chance to fill the vacuum created by Congress’s preening cowardice. The federal government is growing larger and less constitutionally accountable—even to the President—every year. l A combination of elected and unelected bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency quietly strangles domestic energy production through difficult-to-understand rulemaking processes; — 8 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Bureaucrats at the Department of Homeland Security, following the lead of a feckless Administration, order border and immigration enforcement agencies to help migrants criminally enter our country with impunity; l Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms; l Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists; l Woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend “training” seminars about “white privilege”; and l Bureaucrats at the State Department infuse U.S. foreign aid programs with woke extremism about “intersectionality” and abortion.3 Unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening. Nearly every power center held by the Left is funded or supported, one way or another, through the bureaucracy by Congress. Colleges and school districts are funded by tax dollars. The Administrative State holds 100 percent of its power at the sufferance of Congress, and its insulation from presidential discipline is an unconstitutional fairy tale spun by the Washington Establishment to protect its turf. Members of Congress shield themselves from constitutional accountability often when the White House allows them to get away with it. Cultural institutions like public libraries and public health agencies are only as “independent” from public accountability as elected officials and voters permit. Let’s be clear: The most egregious regulations promulgated by the current Administration come from one place: the Oval Office. The President cannot hide behind the agencies; as his many executive orders make clear, his is the respon- sibility for the regulations that threaten American communities, schools, and families. A conservative President must move swiftly to do away with these vast abuses of presidential power and remove the career and political bureaucrats who fuel it. Properly considered, restoring fiscal limits and constitutional accountability to the federal government is a continuation of restoring national sovereignty to the American people. In foreign affairs, global strategy, federal budgeting and pol- icymaking, the same pattern emerges again and again. Ruling elites slash and tear at restrictions and accountability placed on them. They centralize power up and away from the American people: to supra-national treaties and organizations, to left-wing “experts,” to sight-unseen all-or-nothing legislating, to the unelected career bureaucrats of the Administrative State.
Showing 3 of 5 policy matches
About These Correlations
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.