Church agencies warn ‘ruthless’ cuts to US foreign aid threaten lives

The Archbishop-elect of Washington Cardinal Robert McElroy said the US government was pursuing a ‘war of fear and terror’ against migrants.

The Trump administration’s decision to halt all foreign threatened to cripple Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the US arm of Caritas International.

In an email obtained last week by the National Catholic Reporter, CRS’ president Sean Callahan indicated that the organisation would be obliged to half its programmes.

“We anticipate that we will be a much smaller overall organisation by the end of this fiscal year,” Callahan told his staff.

CRS received half of its annual $1.5 billion budget in grants from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), more money than any other agency.

Caritas Internationalis warned on Monday that millions of people would die as a result of the “ruthless” halt to funding, condemning hundreds of millions more to “dehumanising poverty”. In a statement on 10 February, its secretary general Alistair Dutton called the halt “an unhuman affront to people’s God-given human dignity, that will cause immense suffering”.

Cardinal Michael Czerny, the Czech-born Canadian Jesuit who heads the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, commented that “while every government is qualified to review its budget in the case of foreign aid, it would be good to have some warning because it takes time to find other sources of funding or to find other ways of meeting the problems we have.”

The Jesuit Refugee Service USA joined a statement organised by InterAction, an alliance of international non-governmental organisations and partners in the US, saying: “This halt interrupts critical life-saving work including clean water to infants, basic education for kids, ending the trafficking of girls, and providing medications to children and others suffering from disease.”  Pax Christi USA urged members “to resist the unconstitutional dismantling of our government”. 

USAID accounts for around 40 per cent of the global aid budget. It became an early target of President Donald Trump’s Department for Government Efficiency, which has not been legally constituted as a government department and is run by the billionaire Elon Musk.

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On 20 January, the day Trump took office, he signed an executive order halting all foreign aid for 90 days so his administration could review the grants. However, field offices have reported that payments for work already accomplished has not been made, and noted that some programmes, such as those that provide life-saving medicine to HIV patients, can’t be delayed for 90 days without grave damage to those being helped by the programs.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, acting as interim director of USAID, said he was granting waivers for life-saving programmes, but recipients of the funding said the waivers were not having any effect and the bills were going unpaid by Washington.  

Musk put most USAID employees on administrative leave. Both he and the White House have justified their measures by citing false stories about the agency granting $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia and $70,000 for a diversity, equity and inclusion stage musical in Ireland. Neither project was funded by USAID.

Last week, workers removed the USAID name from the façade of the agency’s office building in Washington.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCCB) also announced a cut of 50 staff from its office for migrant and refugee services because of the “continuing uncertainty regarding refugee resettlement and the overall future of those programmes”.

The sum in excess of $100 million the federal government provided the USCCB annually to help resettle refugees who have been legally approved for residency does not fully cover the costs of the programmes. Vice President J.D. Vance’s claim that the bishops supported liberal immigration policies because of that funding was “scurrilous”, said Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York.

At a prayer service in San Diego on 9 February, the Archbishop-elect of Washington Cardinal Robert McElroy said the government was pursuing a “war of fear and terror” against migrants.

“We can do nothing other than come together and pray and proclaim our belief that the rights of every man and woman and child and family are in violence in our midst,” he said during the service at St Joseph’s Cathedral.

“We must speak up and say: ‘Go no farther’ because the safety … humanity of our brothers and sisters, who are being targeted, are too precious in our eyes and in God’s eyes.”

Cardinal McElroy called the cuts affecting immigration programmes “the antithesis of being Christian”. The controversial televangelist Paula White, whom Trump appointed to lead the White House Faith Office, said on 7 February: “Prayers are being answered and God is moving in America.”

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