[Washington Examiner] The Biden administration is spending tens of thousands of dollars on a new Space Camp program bringing teenagers in Libya to the United States so they can "experience being an astronaut," the State Department told the Washington Examiner.The program, which will see up to 20 students from the North African country attend Space Camp in August for one week in Huntsville, Alabama, is being run through the U.S. Embassy to Libya, which was evacuated and closed in 2014 due to violence in Tripoli just two years after attacks on U.S. government facilities in Benghazi. For its implementation, the State Department awarded $135,267 to Amideast, a charity in Washington, D.C., focused on creating "life-changing opportunities for education and cultural exchanges" between foreign countries and the United States, the agency said.
"You’ve got to question the rationale behind it," said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN), who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "Liberals see this and think it’s a great idea. They think it’s going to change what Libya thinks of America, and it won’t. It just doesn’t work because they hate our country, and as long as they’re burning the American flag, I just don’t think we ought to have anything to do with them."
The forthcoming August Space Camp is a window into how the federal government routinely partners with foreign nations and obscure organizations on initiatives that Republicans say are a classic waste of taxpayer dollars, often leading to lawmakers demanding grant records from Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Federal spending documents show the program is being administered by the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.