Humanitarian Aid Cuts and Catholic Social Teaching

This episode is about the significant reduction in global humanitarian assistance that started in 2025 and continues into 2026.

Here are notes and references:

1. A Generational Collapse: Tracking the Toll of Trump’s Humanitarian Aid Cuts - February 5, 2026
2. Documents reveal scope of Trump’s foreign aid cuts - March 26, 2025
3. The Great Aid Recession: 2025’s Humanitarian Crash in Nine Charts - Dec 23, 2025
4. The Impact of Foreign Aid Cuts – Interactive map, country by country summary
5. Update on Lives Lost from USAID Cuts - December 16, 2025 
6. Marco Rubio said no one has died due to U.S. aid cuts. This mom disagrees
7. US government will let lifesaving aid expire in seven African countries - Feb 22, 2026
8. Catholic Vision for U.S. Humanitarian and Development Assistance 2025 - US Conference of Catholic Bishops
9. 5 Reasons Why International Humanitarian Aid Matters - August 8, 2025 - Catholic Relief Services
10. Foreign aid from the United States saved millions of lives each year - Sept 29, 2025 - chart showing $ totals and % of Gross National Income of 10 major donor countries in 2023
11. KFF Health Tracking Poll February 2025: The Public’s Views on Global Health and USAID - 5th bullet point at top of article addresses US public misconception of percentage of budget going to aid
12. Podcast website with full transcripts for this episode and all other episodes

Transcript

Welcome to “Headline News and Catholic Social Teaching,” where we take a brief look at stories in the news, not from a left or right political perspective, but through the lens of Catholic Social Teaching.  I’m your host, Tom Mulhern, and my hope, as always, is that this podcast will help us grow in our love of God and love of our neighbors. 

This episode is about the significant reduction in global humanitarian assistance that started in 2025 and continues into 2026.  This reduction in foreign aid has been driven primarily by the United States, but major European donors like Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands have also reduced their support for humanitarian crises around the world.

Reasons for the European pull back vary from country to country, but common themes are budget deficits and increased military spending.

Here in the United States, in January 2025, the Trump administration shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, which for several decades had been the primary agency responsible for US foreign aid.  Funding for essentially all USAID-funded projects was frozen while the State Department conducted something it called the International Humanitarian Assistance review.  Following the 6-week review, the US then canceled more than 5,300 grants and contracts totaling $27 billion dollars in multi-year funding, determining that these previously-approved projects did not advance the core national interests of the United States.  It continued supporting approximately 900 projects with multi-year budgets totaling just over $8 billion dollars.

Now I want to share a personal observation here.  Way back when I was in my twenties, I worked for Catholic Relief Services in two different African countries, Gambia and Burundi, over a four and a half year period, and I had direct experience working with USAID funded programs.  As a Catholic agency, we were able to help a lot of very poor people in their struggle for survival and we did so using private donations and US government food and funding.  

So, with the recent cuts, US funding for international humanitarian aid went from $14 billion in 2024 to less than $4 billion in 2025.  To put that in perspective, Americans spent more money on Halloween candy in 2025 than the US government spent on humanitarian aid.  For 2026, the US has announced a pledge of $2 billion dollars for the so-called “humanitarian reset” initiative of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.  The aid is targeted to 17 specific countries currently experiencing humanitarian crises.

Now, $2 billion dollars is a lot of money, and it shows that the US continues to support international humanitarian assistance.  But it’s a lot less money than the US contributed to such efforts in recent years.  And because we’re talking about life-saving assistance to people in crisis situations, that reduction in funding, and the abrupt way it was carried out, has had and continues to have a real human cost.

I’ll put a link in the notes to an article that goes through a representative, country-by-country summary of some of the impacts of the cuts in US assistance.  I really encourage you to look at it, as these brief descriptions of affected programs tells a story that goes beyond the number of dollars.

And there are other numbers coming out of this story that are more disturbing.

Researchers and public health specialists have attempted to estimate the increase in morbidity and deaths worldwide related to the reduction in US support for humanitarian and global health programs.  One of the more conservative estimates, from the Center for Global Development, an organization that generally gets high marks for reliable reporting, is that the US aid cuts may contribute to 500,000 to 1 million preventable deaths per year.  Now, they acknowledge that, given the gaps in available information, these estimates are just that, rough estimates.  However, they conclude that “While quantification is difficult, there is little doubt many people have died . . . , and without action many more will die in the future.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly denied that anyone has died because of reductions in US humanitarian assistance.  However, to date he hasn’t provided any evidence to support this claim.

In more recent news, according to an article published in The Atlantic magazine on February 22, 2026, based on internal State Department email messages obtained by the magazine, the US plans to let all humanitarian funding for 7 African countries expire in September.  These are programs that survived the first round of USAID cuts last year because they were deemed to be lifesaving.  The reason cited in the email messages for the termination of these programs is that “there is no strong nexus between the humanitarian response and U.S. national interests.”  So, these programs are presumably still lifesaving, but they’re not important to US national interests.  The State Department has neither confirmed or denied this report.

OK, how do these aid cuts look through the lens of Catholic Social Teaching?  Well, both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition make it clear that helping those in need, whatever their faith or nationality, is a moral imperative.

In response to the reductions in US foreign aid, last year the US Catholic Bishops articulated a pro-life, Catholic vision for US humanitarian and development assistance.  In it, they state that both the US government and the Church (that is, all of us) share a responsibility to advance the common good.  I’ll put a link in the notes.

Now, some have argued that care for the poor and those in need is a matter for personal and private charity, and that we shouldn’t expect the government, any government, to do it for us.  And while Catholic Social Teaching, not to mention the Gospels, calls each of us to personal and even sacrificial levels of generosity toward others in need, the Church has also been very clear and consistent that both personal and governmental responses are needed, and that wealthy nations have a duty to assist poor countries.

Note that the Church doesn’t try to tell any government how much aid it should provide to poorer nations.  The US for many years has given more money for international humanitarian assistance than any other country, and that appears to still be true even after the recent cuts.  But the US is the wealthiest country in the world, and we should be at the top of the donor list.

And that’s in terms of total dollars contributed.  If you look at foreign aid provided as a percentage of Gross National Income, the US is not at the top.  Back in 2023, before the recent cuts, America was 11th on the list of donor countries in terms of percentage of Gross National Income contributed.  Again, there’s a link in the notes.

Some have argued that the US has been too generous to people in other countries in the past, that we as a country can’t afford to give so much to humanitarian crises around the world, that we need to put “America first,” and therefore they support the recent cuts in US aid.  This perspective has political support, even among some Catholics.  However, it’s a view that may be based on a faulty understanding of how much aid the US is actually giving.

When asked in opinion polls to estimate what percentage of the US budget goes for international assistance, the average response is around 25 percent of the budget.  The reality is that foreign aid has been around 1% of the US budget for many years, and now it’s less than 1%.

OK, I want to wrap up by noting that Catholic Social Teaching on aid to those struggling to survive, wherever they are in the world, rests on three principles: human dignity, solidarity, and subsidiarity.

– Human Dignity: every human life is precious in the eyes of God.  The children in Sudan who lost their emergency food source when the American-funded soup kitchens abruptly shut down last year, they’re just as precious in God’s eyes as our own children are to us.

– Solidarity: we should help others through genuine partnerships and real collaboration, rather than trying to impose what we want and what we perceive to be in our personal or national interest.

– Subsidiarity: when we try to provide help, we should do so in a way that strengthens local leaders and local communities, rather than making them subservient or dependent.

In the gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, verses 31 to 46, Jesus describes the last judgment and the separation of all people, some to eternal life and some to eternal punishment.  The passage could not be clearer – or, for many of us, more frightening – in its description of the consequences of failing to provide assistance to Christ Himself in those who are hungry and in need.

Fortunately, there are other passages in Scripture that describe Christ’s mercy to sinners, and that mercy gives us hope.  But we’ve got to do our part, and our part includes both our own personal generosity for those in need and our advocacy for lifesaving assistance from the government that represents us.

Well, that’s all for this episode of “Headline News and Catholic Social Teaching.”  If you found it worthwhile, I invite you to share it with others.  If you’d like to make a comment or send me a message or a question, there’s a link in the notes that will enable you to send a text message.

And I do hope that, in some small way, this episode might help us live our lives guided by the Holy Spirit through the teachings of the Church.  

Thank you for listening.