In a private meeting at the State Department, senior Trump administration officials celebrated their success in dismantling foreign aid programs, leaving Christian charities—once staunch supporters—scrambling for answers and survival.
“Zeroing out” foreign aid: A political victory or a humanitarian crisis?
President Donald Trump’s senior aides held a closed-door meeting on Friday with faith-based charities at the State Department. They touted the administration’s success in “zeroing out” foreign aid. They predicted a future in which church groups and billionaires would replace the government in caring for the world’s most vulnerable.
According to two people who attended the meeting, Albert Gombis, a State Department political appointee, asked, “Do you want the country to get credit for foreign aid, or do you want the Creator to get the credit?”
Most of the aid groups in attendance, which were associated with evangelical Christianity, had viewed the Trump administration as a political ally. However, the leaders of the groups relayed painful effects on their organizations stemming from Trump’s cancellation of 90 percent of all foreign aid contracts at the U.S. Agency for International Development, the termination of more than 1,600 positions, and the placement of almost all of USAID’s 10,000-strong workforce on administrative leave.
People in the room said the vice president of World Vision, Edward Brown, reported that his Christian charity would have to lay off a few thousand workers if the administration’s policies weren’t reversed. Other charity leaders said the Trump administration never paid them for providing life-saving assistance that was supposed to be exempt from the freeze under a waiver issued by Secretary of State Marco Rubio.Â
Some had secured exemptions for their aid programs. Still, they were only informed last week that Rubio had cancelled them altogether, a significant source of frustration.
One person in the room said that the aid leaders artfully explained, one after the other, the benefits of foreign assistance and what would be lost by ending it. Others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential meeting that had not been previously reported.
Christian charities face the fallout
The gathering included about 35 people and faith-based groups, including World Relief, Samaritan’s Purse, Christian Aid, Food for the Hungry, Compassion International, and the National Association of Evangelicals. It also included the Muslim charity Islamic Relief.
The U.S. officials, led by USAID deputy administrator Pete Marocco, said they could not explain the justification behind the terminations of any given program but insisted the cuts had been a success. An attendee reported that all of them looked at one another in disbelief; according to them, they care about the poor and hungry people and do not know how this is claimed as successful.
While faith-based organizations voiced polite objections, others in the aid community reacted with fury. Demonstrators on Capitol Hill shouted on Wednesday, “Blood on his hands,” as Marocco, Trump’s chief dismantler of USAID, met with lawmakers in a closed-door briefing.
According to two congressional aides at the meeting, Marocco told lawmakers that USAID was a “money-laundering scheme” that had lost its way and that he was examining whether foreign assistance was constitutional. He said he considered making “multiple” criminal referrals to the Justice Department for alleged and unspecified crimes.
He also accused USAID of pushing LGBTQ issues in the developing world and provoking the so-called Color Revolutions that upset authoritarian governments in former Soviet states, a critique shared by far-right politicians in Russia and Hungary. One lawmaker asked Marocco where he was on Jan. 6, 2021, a nod to unconfirmed reports that he was among the rioters in the Capitol building. Marocco declined to answer, saying it was not the topic of the meeting.
Charity 101: USAID’s future in limbo as Trump administration pushes for closure
The State Department, USAID, Marocco and Gombis did not respond to requests for comment. Rubio, who empowered Marocco and approved his directives, was once a big proponent of foreign aid but, since becoming secretary of state, has harshly criticized USAID, saying it acts as a “global charity irrespective of whether it is in the national interest” and is guilty of “insubordination.”Â
He has sought to assuage concerns, telling critics and his employees that “the United States is not walking away from foreign aid.” Still, it is hard to square that assurance with Marocco’s closed-door claims of “zeroing out” U.S. foreign aid and relinquishing responsibilities to the private sector.
The dissonant signals within the administration have angered Democrats, including Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who asked how the administration could claim to be conducting a measured review of USAID while also moving to gut the agency’s workforce, of which he said 94 per cent had been fired or “essentially permanently furloughed.”
“I just don’t think you can have it both ways,” Murphy said during a nomination hearing for officials, including Christopher Landau, Trump’s pick for deputy secretary of state.
Landau, who served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico during Trump’s first term, believes that Trump “wants to ensure that we are doing the American taxpayers’ bidding by carefully reviewing these programs and ensuring that we separate the baby from the bathwater.”
The Aid Community’s outrage and political backlash
Murphy rebuked Landau for saying he did not know what percentage of the U.S. humanitarian workforce had been eliminated or sidelined. In an astonishingly short time, Trump has radically transformed America’s foreign assistance apparatus in ways even his staunchest critics never imagined.
Last week, teary-eyed aid workers packed up their desks at the now-gated USAID headquarters in the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington while thousands of USAID personnel stationed overseas remain uncertain. They are unsure when they will become unemployed, when families will be forced from their homes and schools, and if they will be compensated for a move back to the United States.
The cuts have had stark effects on Christian aid groups, which receive millions of dollars from the U.S. government annually. According to a February National Reporter, Catholic Relief Services anticipates up to 50 percent program layoffs and reductions. The same month, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops laid off 50 staffers in its migration and refugee services office, attributing the layoffs to a delay in government reimbursements.
World Vision declined to comment on future staffing changes. A person familiar with the matter said the organization “is continuing to assess the full extent of the impact based on a fluid situation.” Suppose grants for life-saving aid are not reinstated soon, and the organization doesn’t receive pending payments. In that case, it will be “forced to furlough or terminate many staff across more than 40 countries,” the person said. Devex first reported the group’s expected layoffs.
The Supreme Court provided some hope to aid groups on Friday in a 5-4 ruling clearing the way for the Trump administration to restart nearly $2 billion in payments for aid work already done. But Marocco clarified in his meeting with lawmakers that the U.S. government should get out of the philanthropy business, raising expectations for future showdowns at the Supreme Court.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are also awaiting a notice from the Trump administration that it intends to collapse USAID under the auspices of the State Department, which has already taken over some of its functions, including public affairs communications. Only a few hundred people remain active in their jobs at USAID and not on administrative leave.
Career officials say those bureaucratic adjustments are much less necessary than the impact on the world’s most vulnerable. A draft memo written by Nicholas Enrich, USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health, approximated that ending programs to fight Ebola, polio, malaria, and drug-resistant tuberculosis would result in the deaths of millions of children and cost the United States billions of dollars for the treatment of citizens infected with diseases that had been at bay in foreign countries.
Faith leaders divided as GOP Elders warn of dangerous consequences
The memo said the USAID suspension would lead to 71,000 to 166,000 malaria deaths annually. Polio, on the cusp of being globally eradicated, would surge back, crippling around 200,000 people per year and rebounding to hundreds of millions of cases over the next 10 years, the memo added. Deadly hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola or Marburg could spread to around 28,000 cases.
The youngest would suffer the most. Around 1 million children would not be treated for severe acute malnutrition when food is so severe that the body starts digesting its tissues. And 2 million to 3 million children would die from entirely preventable diseases because they would not receive vaccines, the memo said.
The memo foresees more communicable diseases reaching U.S. shores, causing health costs to spiral. Treating one patient with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, the prescription when a patient interrupts their drug regime costs more than $154,000 and can reach around half a million dollars if the strain is extensively drug-resistant.
The dramatic impacts have alarmed the elder politicians of the GOP, who want to preserve the party’s legacy on programs such as PEPFAR, the George W. Bush-era HIV prevention program estimated to have saved tens of millions of lives in Africa.
In February, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Rubio’s top aide, Mike Needham, her former Stanford student. According to a GOP official familiar with the call, Rice expressed concern that the disembowelment of foreign aid was affecting not only USAID but also a range of saving-life programs both Republicans and Democrats care about.
A spokesperson for Rice declined to comment on the private call. Unlike older Republicans, Marocco is much more cynical about PEPFAR. He has told lawmakers that the program squanders billions of dollars through waste, fraud, and abuse, but he has not provided examples.
While Marocco received heated criticism from Democrats during Wednesday’s meeting, two people said many faith-based group leaders praised the intent of the Trump administration’s changes, particularly Ken Isaacs, vice president at Samaritan’s Purse. When asked for comment, Isaacs said that the State Department has a demanding job, and he appreciated that the director of foreign assistance took the time to hear from the many organizations represented during the meeting.
He shared his long-standing belief that U.S. foreign assistance should be aligned with other national interests, which requires reviewing and reforming the system. At the same time, he strongly encouraged the State Department to continue to provide life-saving humanitarian aid through foreign assistance.
Another attendee reported that Marocco’s presentation revealed the scope of the Trump administration’s ambitions and its intention to significantly reduce the U.S. role. A senior aid executive said it was abundantly clear that they were reframing the entire enterprise of foreign aid as a kind of philanthropy, which the government doesn’t need to be involved in.
The Trump administration’s drastic cuts to foreign aid have left Christian charities reeling, with many facing financial ruin. As millions of lives hang precariously in the balance, the president of Catholic Charities USA has also urged the Trump administration to reconsider its pause on federal funding for grants and loans to non-governmental organizations so people are not left scrambling to stay afloat.