A US Catholic aid agency is bracing for massive cuts – as much as 50 per cent this year – because of reductions in foreign assistance ordered by the Trump administration. Source: NCR Online.
Catholic Relief Services is the top recipient of funds from the US Agency for International Development, known as USAID, which the Trump administration has targeted with a spending freeze, office closure and extensive staff cuts this week.
Layoffs have already begun as CRS has been forced to begin shutting down programs funded by USAID, which supplies about half of the Catholic organisation’s $US1.5 billion ($2.4bn) budget, said CRS president and CEO Sean Callahan in a staff-wide email sent on Monday..
“We anticipate that we will be a much smaller overall organisation by the end of this fiscal year,” Mr Callahan wrote in the email.
CRS officials at its headquarters in Baltimore did not respond to requests for comment. The US bishops’ conference, which created the organisation 82 years ago, also did not respond to a request for comment.
Tucson Bishop Emeritus Gerald Kicanas, a former board chairman of Catholic Relief Services, said eliminating USAID would be a huge mistake.
“These are desperate people, living in desperate situations, struggling day by day, hour by hour,” Bishop Kicanas said.
The cuts would amount to one of the biggest blows ever to CRS, a relief group founded in 1943 by Catholic bishops in the US to serve World War II survivors in Europe.
CRS reaches more than 200 million people in 121 countries on five continents, according to its website.
USAID has been an early target of President Donald Trump’s efforts to curtail government spending, led by billionaire Elon Musk who is heading the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, an extra-governmental operation that has been empowered in the administration.
Democrats in Congress have challenged the legality of the attempts to slash USAID funding or shutter the office entirely.
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Catholic Relief Services lays off staff, cuts programs after USAID shakeup (By Brian Roewe and Brian Fraga, NCR Online)
