Less than a month ago, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas supposedly ended “pay for slay,” the infamous program through which Abbas uses a ballooning share of his authority’s budget to pay terrorists and their families. On Thursday, those terrorists lined up at the PA’s post offices to get their money as usual.
The unimpeded flow of “pay for slay” funds isn’t a surprise. Both Abbas and other Palestinian officials“reaffirmed their support for mass murderers of Israelis in general and the terrorism payments in particular” following Abbas’s February decree outlining purported reforms to the terrorist payment system, our Andrew Tobin reports from Jerusalem. Still, it is “the clearest sign yet that the Palestinian Authority does not intend to follow through” on those reforms.
READ MORE: Palestinian Authority Appears To Resume Terrorism Payments It Vowed To End
“SHALOM COLUMBIA”: That’s how the White House announced it had pulled $400 million worth of grants and contracts from Columbia “over its failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment.”
The Trump administration’s anti-Semitism task force launched a review of the Ivy League institution’s federal funding on Monday. By Friday morning, Columbia lost nearly a tenth of the $5 billion in federal funding commitments it enjoys.
The speedy turnaround reflects the high-priority nature of the administration’s efforts to combat campus anti-Semitism. The Justice Department launched a task force on the issue in early February, and it has hit the ground running particularly following Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s confirmation on Monday.
Columbia hasn’t addressed the funding cuts specifically, but hours after they hit, it did announce the suspension of four students who occupied the Barnard library on Wednesday.
Under normal circumstances, an EPA grantee receives taxpayer funds to perform a specific service over a defined period of time. The Biden administration’s $1.9 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grant to New York-based eco group Inclusiv has taken on a different structure—one that is impeding the Trump EPA’s oversight efforts.
Inclusiv is using the overwhelming majority of the money—$1.7 billion—to fund not its own operations but rather green projects taken up by local organizations across the country. To do so, it transferred $651 million to 108 credit unions across 27 states and Puerto Rico. Now, those credit unions will select local groups who want access to the funds, cutting the EPA out of the process entirely, our Thomas Catenacci reports.
“The passthrough structure of these grants is a significant deviation from how EPA regularly conducts oversight of grantees,” agency spokeswoman Molly Vaseliou told us. “EPA has no visibility nor role into understanding how these taxpayer dollars are being spent on the ground.”
The structure “raises additional questions about the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund in particular,” writes Catenacci. “Zeldin has likened the program to a ‘green slush fund’ and has opened broad probes into the fund as a whole.”
Away from the Beacon:
- Muriel Bowser’s administration quietly removed a webpage that championed D.C.’s “sanctuary city” status before tearing down a homeless encampment near the State Department. Progress!
- Al Sharpton’s nonprofit—the same one the MSNBC host used to rake in $500,000 from Kamala Harris for their pre-election interview—is hosting the “fearless” Al Green at its annual convention in April. Sharpton lauded Green for “boldly walking out” of Trump’s congressional address (he was forcibly removed from the chamber).
- As the Trump administration scrutinizes NPR’s taxpayer funds, two of the organization’s South Carolina stations are going independent, citing their desire to “reduce reliance on national programming hours and expand our coverage of local issues that matter to our community.” In other words: They don’t need NPR’s descriptions of Hamas’s “somber” hostage celebrations.
