Budgeting is difficult to begin with, but budgeting the federal government is downright… Budgeting is difficult to begin with, but budgeting the federal government is downright thorny. For example, money needs to be allocated for education, $400 hammers and terrorism.

That’s right, terrorism. The Associated Press reported on Oct. 7 that during the Clinton administration, the FBI had sent “several thousand dollars in U.S. money … to suspected terror supporters” in the hopes of tracking their cash flow and linking it to terrorist actions.

No prosecutions resulted from the undercover sting, based out of Phoenix, Ariz., which gave money to the Islamic Resistance Movement, also known as Hamas, a Palestinian militant group. In fact, the operation stopped abruptly when the FBI’s main contact, Arizona businessman Harry Ellen, had an affair with a woman suspected of espionage.

The operation, at first, just seems like an asinine waste of money. Why give money to a group that already claims culpability for terrorist attacks? And if that money were used, what would the FBI then do?

Tracking money is a good way of fighting crime. Give marked money to drug traffickers and see where it goes. Track its circulation on U.S. soil, and they can be prosecuted for white-collar crimes, if they can’t be held for possession or dealing.

But funding terrorist groups leads to terrorist actions. Even if the operation was ineffective, who knows where the money went? Not the FBI, apparently.

And, moreover, not informing Clinton’s national security adviser of these actions is rather suspicious. While former Attorney General Janet Reno signed off on them, Sandy Berger, Clinton’s security adviser, denies knowledge of this.

The blame then falls to the FBI, and not the Clinton Administration, which, at the time, was trying to negotiate peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Obviously, in the interests of national security, the FBI couldn’t have made its sting public. But shouldn’t it, and other executive branch organizations, be held accountable to the other parts of the government? The higher-ups should have known about the FBI’s use – or misuse – of money.

In order to infiltrate terrorist organizations, the United States funded one. This places the blame, and whatever blood was shed as a result of this funding, squarely on the United States. Suddenly, those $400 hammers don’t seem so costly.