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merican taxpayers have spent more than $1 billion in Afghanistan since the botched withdrawal, yet the Biden administration is refusing to give an accounting of the funds to a government watchdog.
The State Department says it will not comply with an investigation request by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, to look at reconstruction expenditures that have totaled $146 billion since 2002, the agency’s report to Congress says.
The U.S. Agency for International Development and the Treasury Department “refused to cooperate with SIGAR in any capacity, while the State Department was selective in the information it provided pursuant to SIGAR’s audit and quarterly data requests,” the report reads.
“The State Department and USAID refused to answer nearly all of SIGAR’s quarterly data requests regarding agency-supported programs in Afghanistan this quarter,” the report says. “State and USAID claimed without basis that US programming in Afghanistan is unrelated to reconstruction activities.”
Specifically, SIGAR said it wanted information on the collapse of the Afghan government, risks to the population, U.S. compliance on prohibiting the transfer of funds to the Taliban, and the status of humanitarian programs.
