A Year After USAID Shutdown, the World's Poorest Are Still Paying the Price

As followers of Christ, we are called to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and shelter the stranger. For generations, America's foreign aid did exactly that—in His name, through the hands of churches and ministries across the globe.

In January 2025, the Trump administration shut down USAID.

Now the head of Caritas Internationalis—the Catholic Church's worldwide network of relief and development agencies—is telling world leaders the truth about what happened next. Alistair Dutton came to the United Nations in September with one plea: restore the funding.

Government officials, he said, keep asking aid groups to "do more with less"—while handing them the same list of work they expected before. His answer is blunt: they're doing less with less.

According to the Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2026, global humanitarian funding has dropped by nearly a third since 2023, and cuts from the U.S. and Germany alone account for 90 percent of last year's decline. The United Nations faced the largest funding gap on record for its emergency appeals, which means millions of people in crisis simply went without help in 2025.

America spent roughly $26 billion less on foreign aid in 2025 than the year before. So far in 2026, the figure is about $7 billion—on pace for the lowest level of American generosity in decades. For perspective, foreign aid has never been more than a sliver of the federal budget. That sliver was the difference between life and death for children we will never meet.

The Church is still showing up—but it cannot do this alone.

This summer, the State Department gave Catholic Relief Services $240 million for emergency disaster response and tapped the Church to lead humanitarian work in Cuba. Officials say they trust faith-based groups because the Church is already there: across Africa, Catholic parishes, clinics, and hospitals provide somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of health care and education. Church health workers are now on the front lines of the largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—more than 6,000 confirmed cases and 3,000 deaths as of September.

But Dutton calls this a double-edged sword. The secular partners who once worked alongside the Church—running the water projects, the vaccine programs, the food pipelines—have not been funded the same way. Many are gone. The Church is being asked to carry a load that was built for many hands.

“We want the empowerment of peoples and for states to be able to provide for themselves,” Dutton said. “Nobody really gains any dignity if they’re just reliant on others.” What he objects to is the chainsaw approach of Elon Musk's DOGE, which pulled the plug on the poorest to test a theory. As he put it, "Nobody deserves to be martyred in that way."

Scripture reminds us: "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." (Matthew 25:40) Foreign aid is a fraction of what America spends. Yet it feeds the hungry, heals the sick, and shields the innocent—and it lets Christian ministries be the hands and feet of Jesus where no one else will go.