Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), one of the leading Senate advocates for the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, told Jewish leaders on Wednesday that he is working with administration officials to ensure that NSGP funding moves forward quickly, but acknowledged that it had already taken too long.

Though the administration recently released freezes on reimbursements for past NSGP grants, it still has yet to announce awards for a supplemental grant round for which nonprofits applied in the fall of 2024, and has not yet opened the application for 2025 grants.

“That funding is not at risk. It is going to be let go, and it should be let go very, very quickly,” Lankford told an advocacy group organized by the Jewish Federations of North American and Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

He continued, “We do have wide agreement to be able to say this needs to be done. It needs to be done faster, rather than slower. It’s already been held up too long. It’s June, almost July. The decision should have already been made to be able to move this.”

The Oklahoma senator, a co-chair of the Senate antisemitism task force, said he’s been in regular contact with Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought — seen as a key fiscal hawk inside the administration — about moving the funding ahead.

“He has assured me again that it is moving,” Lankford said, who spoke to Vought on Wednesday. “They are getting all the details worked out. They continue to be able to work with DHS to be able to make sure that funding is moving. That is not at risk. It is caught up in all the initial – we’re holding everything to be able to look at it. But that funding is not at risk.”

Lankford said he’s continuing to engage with the OMB and other parts of the administration, communicating “this is just common sense, that we need to be able to do this.” The senator urged advocates to keep calling their representatives to continue pushing the issue.

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the chair of the House Rules Committee and former chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, also addressed the group, and said she plans to introduce legislation regarding Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions policies on college campuses, which is “going to hold the schools responsible for any BDS activity.”

Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) warned that he plans to excoriate the president of Georgetown University at a congressional hearing next month if the school hasn’t fired a university professor who urged Iran to attack U.S. forces in retaliation for the U.S. strikes on Iran.

Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), who is mounting a bid for Senate, told the group that she’s a “proud Zionist” who “stand[s] with the Jewish community to call out rampant antisemitism, disgusting and egregious antisemitism.” 

“My name is Haley Stevens, and you will always have a fierce ally in me,” she said. 

She said she’s working to increase funding for the NSGP, noting that an attack like the one in Boulder, Colo., could happen at a synagogue in her district or anywhere in the country.

Other lawmakers who attended the meeting included Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Greg Landsman (D-OH), Lisa McClain (R-MI), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Celeste Maloy (R-UT), Gabe Amo (D-RI), Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Brad Sherman (D-CA), George Latimer (D-NY), Shri Thanedar (D-MI), Scott Franklin (R-FL), Joe Morelle (R-NY), Randy Weber (R-TX), Gary Palmer (R-AL) and Lois Frankel (D-FL).

President Donald Trump and other administration officials denied a report that U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities had only set Iran’s nuclear program back by several months, continuing to insist the nuclear sites were “completely destroyed” and “obliterated.”

CNN reported on Tuesday night that an early intelligence assessment by the Pentagon found that the core components of Iran’s nuclear program were still intact and the regime could continue seeking a nuclear bomb, according to seven people briefed on the matter. 

Speaking from the NATO Summit in the Netherlands on Wednesday, Trump told reporters, “That was a perfect operation. … And also, and nobody’s talking about this, we shot 30 Tomahawks from submarines … and every one of those Tomahawks hit within a foot of where they were supposed to hit. Took out a lot of buildings that Israel wasn’t able to get. … This was a devastating attack and it knocked them for a loop. And, you know, if it didn’t, they wouldn’t have settled. … If that thing wasn’t devastated, they never would have settled.”

“I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima. I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same thing that ended that war,” he said later. “This ended that with the war. If we didn’t take that out, they’d be fighting right now.”

“It was obliteration,” he said of the U.S. strikes in Iran. “And you’ll see that, and it’s going to come out. Israel is doing a report on it, I understand. … You know, they have guys that go in there after the hit, and they said it was total obliteration.”

“I don’t think they’ll ever do it again,” Trump continued, referring to Iran’s enrichment of uranium. “They just went through hell. I think they’ve had it. The last thing they want to do is enrich.” 

The president also posted on Truth Social earlier, saying, “FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES IN HISTORY. THE NUCLEAR SITES IN IRAN ARE COMPLETELY DESTROYED! BOTH THE TIMES AND CNN ARE GETTING SLAMMED BY THE PUBLIC!”

Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, speaking to Fox News shortly after the CNN report was released, called the leak “treasonous” and said, “There is no doubt that it [Iran’s nuclear program] was obliterated. So the reporting out there that in some ways suggests that we didn’t achieve the objective is just completely preposterous.” He said it was “not even conceivable” that Iran could still achieve a nuclear weapon within months.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio similarly denied the report but offered a more measured assessment of Iranian nuclear capabilities, telling Politico on the sidelines of the NATO Summit on Wednesday that, “The bottom line is, they are much further away from a nuclear weapon today than they were before the president took this bold action. That’s the most important thing to understand — significant, very significant, substantial damage was done to a variety of different components, and we’re just learning more about it.” 

White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said, “This alleged ‘assessment’ is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community. … Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”

A CNN spokesperson said in a statement to Jewish Insider, “CNN stands by our thorough reporting on an early intelligence assessment of the recent strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which has since been confirmed by other news organizations. The White House has acknowledged the existence of the assessment, and their statement is included in our story.”

David Albright, president and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security and an expert on the Iranian nuclear program, called the report “hard to believe” and “misleading.” Among other analyses, he said Iran has “likely lost close to 20,000 centrifuges at Natanz and Fordow, creating a major bottleneck in any reconstitution effort. Moreover, there has been considerable damage to Iran’s ability to build the nuclear weapon itself.”