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CV NEWS FEED // Prominent humanitarian organization Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is facing a workforce reduction of nearly 50% due to the Trump administration’s freeze on funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
“We anticipate that we will be a much smaller overall organization by the end of this fiscal year,” CRS President and CEO Sean Callahan said in an internal email obtained by the National Catholic Reporter, News Nation reported.
Callahan said that the organization has already initiated layoffs and is closing programs that depended on USAID funding, which represented nearly half of CRS’ $1.5 billion budget. CRS said cuts would be across the board, impacting all divisions and departments.
CRS was the largest recipient of funds from USAID, receiving $4.6 billion from fiscal year 2013 to 2022, CatholicVote reported. CRS currently operates in 100 countries and serves approximately 200 million people globally.
Stephen Colecchi, former director of the Office of International Justice and Peace for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), criticized President Donald Trump’s move.
“If you want to review a program, you don’t simply freeze it in place, especially when local people are relying on it for lifesaving and life-changing programs,” Colecchi said. “What you do is a systematic review for effectiveness and then you decide which programs are to continue and which programs are to sunset.”
Trump’s executive order mandated the freeze for three months for all US foreign development assistance programs while their “programmatic efficiency and consistency with United States foreign policy” are reviewed, CatholicVote reported.
Trump asserted that the country’s foreign aid industry is “not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.”
The President said, “They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”
>> Secretary of State Marco Rubio to lead USAID programs <<
