Samaritan’s Purse Dodges Trump’s Foreign Aid Freeze
As Christian ministries scramble to discern and communicate the impact of President Donald Trump’s 90-day pause on foreign aid, Samaritan’s Purse wants to assure donors its global poverty-relief and disaster response efforts are secure.
“The recent stop order on foreign aid does not affect Samaritan’s Purse because the State Department has issued a waiver for life-saving essential aid such as food and medicine,” said Samaritan’s Purse President Franklin Graham in a statement released to MinistryWatch.
The Boone, North Carolina, nonprofit is one of the largest Christian nongovernmental organizations to partner with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a prime target of the Trump administration’s investigation into waste, corruption and inappropriate uses of federal tax dollars.
Brookings reports that over the last four years alone, Samaritan’s Purse received USAID funds totaling more than $90 million. Those grants were used for global relief efforts, such as the humanitarian response to the February 2023 earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
However, with USAID’s survival now in question, it is unknown how the agency’s potential elimination, restructuring or absorption into the State Department might affect Samaritan’s Purse’s ability to win future federal grants. And while Samaritan’s Purse, which reported over $1.8 billion in assets on its 2023 Form 990, may be large enough to weather the loss of its federal partner, such cuts could mean less food reaching distressed communities.
“At this point, it seems less than 5% of the funding that Samaritan’s Purse received in 2024 came from government grants for international relief,” said Samaritan’s Purse Media Relations Director Mark Barber. “These funds were mainly used for emergency feeding programs in difficult areas of Africa including Sudan, South Sudan, DRC, and Ethiopia, with the majority being spent in Sudan and South Sudan.”
For now, Samaritan’s Purse is shielded by a waiver signed by U.S. Secretary of State (and current USAID acting director) Marco Rubio on Jan. 28. Preceded by two other waivers exempting military funding for Israel and Egypt and emergency food assistance, the latest memo calls on “existing life-saving humanitarian assistance programs” to continue their work.
“For purposes of this waiver, life-saving humanitarian assistance applies to core life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter, and subsistence assistance, as well as supplies and reasonable administrative costs as necessary to deliver such assistance,” the memo states.
Activities explicitly excluded from the waiver include “abortions, family planning, conferences … gender or DEI ideology programs, transgender surgeries, or other non-life saving assistance.”
Rubio’s waiver is good news for the many faith-based nonprofits that depend on USAID to fund relief work around the world. Forbes reports that from 2013 to 2022, Catholic Relief Services was the top U.S. NGO to receive USAID funding ($4.6 billion). World Vision was another top contender at $1.2 billion, as well as Mercy Corps at $1.1 billion.
However, mixed messages about the implementation of the waiver may be a cause for concern. Christianity Today cited the case of PCEA Chogoria Hospital, a church-run Kenyan hospital that relies on USAID funds to care for HIV patients. The hospital received a stop-work order after Rubio announced the freeze but received no confirmation that funds would resume after Rubio announced the exemptions.
Members of the Samaritan’s Purse Disaster Assistance Response Team hand out blankets. (Photo via Samaritan’s Purse)
Christian ministry funding questions may, however, pale in comparison to the broader budgetary issues at stake. USAID is a $40–billion federal bureaucracy managing programs in 130 countries. Its reach is vast; and while much of the media response has focused on the loss of services, critics argue that the bulk of USAID money has been squandered.
On CBS News’ “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Brian Mast spotlighted USAID’s alleged financial mismanagement, stating that “10 to 30 cents on the dollar is what actually goes to aid, so there’s not enough command and control that’s going on with the way that it’s set up currently.”
In a statement at whitehouse.gov, the Trump administration said USAID “has been unaccountable to taxpayers as it funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats.”
The statement cites examples, including an alleged “$2 million for sex changes and ‘LGBT activism’ in Guatemala,” “millions to EcoHealthAlliance — which was involved in research at the Wuhan lab,” and “hundreds of thousands of meals that went to al Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria.”
Congressional Democrats have responded to the freeze by defending the importance of USAID for jobs, emergency services and foreign relations, and by questioning the constitutionality of Trump’s actions.
“Dismantling USAID is illegal and makes us less safe. USAID was created by federal law and is funded by Congress,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, in a statement. “This is self-inflicted chaos of epic proportions that will have dangerous consequences all around the world.”
While officials debate whether Trump can dismantle USAID, the institutional harm done by the funding pause has already been severe. The agency shut down its Washington D.C. headquarters, laid off thousands of contractors, took its website offline and put senior officials on leave. And though groups like Samaritan’s Purse are able to continue business as usual, at least for now, others have been blindsided by the sudden pause of thousands of aid programs around the world.
This piece is republished from MinistryWatch..
Tony Mator is a Pittsburgh journalist, copywriter, blogger and musician who has done work for World magazine, The Imaginative Conservative and the Hendersonville Times-News, among others. Follow his work and observations at twitter.com/wise_watcher.