'It's just obscene': House eyes crackdown on US dollars going to Taliban
Rep. Tim Burchett told Fox News Digital that he hopes his bill will dry up funding to the Taliban, which has ruled Afghanistan since August 2021.
The House of Representatives is expected to pass a bill on Tuesday aimed at blocking countries that receive U.S. foreign aid from sending money to the Taliban.
Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., introduced his No Tax Dollars for the Taliban Act late last year. If passed, it would force the State Department to report out which countries give aid to the Taliban – which has ruled Afghanistan since 2021 – that also get U.S. assistance.
It would also force the secretary of state to weigh if those countries should keep getting American dollars and develop a strategy to discourage them from continuing aid to the Taliban.
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"It's just obscene that any money would get to the Taliban," Burchett told Fox News Digital in an interview on Tuesday. "We are $35 trillion in debt and do not need to be funding our enemies one bit."
He argued that foreign cash being funneled to the Taliban is, in effect, wasting U.S. taxpayer dollars.
Burchett, the vice chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s subcommittee on the Middle East, also accused the State Department of being deliberately vague about how many federal dollars total have gone to the Taliban.
"If this was an oversight of them, funding our enemies, that just tells you they have zero management and zero quality control at all, they don't know what's going on," Burchett said. "They obviously – somebody knows what's going on, and those people need to be out."
Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan nearly three years ago, the U.S. has provided over $2.8 billion to address the humanitarian crisis there, according to a Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report released in May.
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Republican national security hawks were outraged, arguing that at least some of that funding likely fell into the Taliban's hands.
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"It is unacceptable for any U.S. funding to benefit the Taliban. The Biden administration must take immediate action to prevent U.S. taxpayer dollars from going to the Taliban," House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said at the time.
House GOP leaders are putting the bill up for a vote under suspension of the rules, which is generally referred for noncontroversial legislation that’s expected to get bipartisan support.
Fox News Digital reached out to the State Department for comment on the bill and Burchett’s accusations.