Many faith-based charities that have long partnered with the government have experienced setbacks to the point where they will not be likely to return to their former missions and levels of activity, according to leaders of religious social services during a recent New York conference attended by RW. The conference, sponsored by Religion News Service in mid-October, included a panel of leaders of longtime Jewish and Christian faith-based social services, who spoke about how safety-net and refugee ministries and work have changed under the Trump administration. Stanley Carlson-Thies, founder of the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance, said that sources of government support for relief and refugee assistance three decades in the making through the Charitable Choice law of 1996 and President George W. Bush’s faith-based and Community Initiatives Office have largely been dismantled since the second Trump administration. It was largely cuts made by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that affected these programs. Carlson-Thies added that while this pattern is strongly evident at the level of federal government partnerships, there is considerable local and state government support for such efforts, and there may be some refunding efforts to groups that have lost federal support, such as the HIV-AIDS program PEPFAR.
Mark Hetfield of the Jewish-based HIAS, one of the oldest and largest refugee resettlement organizations, estimated that the group has lost about half of its revenue and has largely halted its consultations with refugees. As the administration has de-prioritized resettlement of persecuted religious minorities, HIAS’s Iranian program has been shut down. The organization no longer partners with the U.S government. Hetfield noted that 8 of the 10 groups partnering with the government on refugee resettlement are faith-based. Since his organization has been helping resettle refugees for over 100 years, often without government assistance, it will continue in this work, but the faith-based resettlement programs will not likely return to their pre-2025 status. Eugene Cho of Bread for the World said that the 50-year-old hunger relief organization is facing a serious setback in its work after the government cut USAID funding. “So much trust has been broken. Many [faith-based social service] groups are saying, we’re moving on and believe things will not be restored,” he said.
