Feds spent $500,000 to promote atheism in Britain

The State Department sent about $500,000 in taxpayer money to a British-based humanist outfit that promoted atheism in Nepal and another that helped pregnant migrants to the U.S. obtain abortions, according to a new congressional report.

The department also funded “hyper progressive” feminist work in West Africa, LGBTQ rights education for children in Laos and groups that work to “suppress” speech here in America — particularly from conservatives — the House Foreign Affairs Committee said in the report released Wednesday.

The report argues that the Biden administration has injected a new level of partisanship into foreign affairs grants, picking partners that are at odds with mainstream American beliefs.

“For the entirety of the Biden-Harris administration, bleeding-heart liberals at the State Department have played politics with foreign assistance,” said Rep. Brian Mast, current chair of the panel’s oversight subcommittee who is poised to lead the full committee next year.

The report claimed that some of the spending is “arguably unconstitutional,” such as the money that went to a humanist group in Britain that taught humanist groups in Nepal “how to proselytize and to expand atheist networks in the region.”

When confronted by congressional investigators, the department “doctored” its documents to try to hide what the money was paying for, the report says.

Internally, department officials celebrated their “innovative” approach. But Republicans said the spending itself ran afoul of the Constitution’s bar on supporting religion, since atheism is equivalent to a religion for purposes of First Amendment law.

“Here, the department promoted atheism and humanism over all other religions,” the report said.

On the U.S.-Mexico border, the department paid the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society nearly $3 million in 2021 and 2022. HIAS used the funding to coach migrants on how to make asylum claims and delay deportation, the committee said. Part of the advice was to hide any economic motives for coming to the U.S. and instead claim persecution at home.

It wasn’t until the committee raised the coaching with officials at the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration that they acknowledged the coaching was problematic.

“In other words, PRM was not monitoring the content of HIAS’s department-funded briefings,” the committee concluded.

PRM also funds the International Organization for Migration, which refers pregnant migrants to abortion providers.

“PRM’s support for abortions in this way implicates potential violations of federal law and serves as another example of the department using foreign assistance to promote partisan values abroad,” the committee said.

In a hearing Wednesday with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Mr. Mast questioned other spending decisions, such as $14.9 million to teach Afghans how to do carpet weaving and $75 million to teach Afghan women to be farmers.

“They can’t even dance in the streets or speak to one another or go to school. I’m not sure that we can trust that that $75 million is being used to teach them agriculture,” Mr. Mast said.

Mr. Blinken indicated he was comfortable with the spending.

“Each of these institutions, as verified by the department, has in place processes to make sure that the money that we provide, and others provide is spent appropriately,” he said.

He added: “I think that the work that we have done through these partners and many other countries have done has saved many, many lives in an incredibly difficult situation.”