Trump’s new aid program heavily privileges evangelical organizations — something that probably doesn’t surprise you. On August 6, 2026, the State Department announced nearly $2 billion over five years in health and humanitarian aid funding for faith-based organizations working in more than a dozen countries, something the White House touted as the largest allocation of global health foreign assistance to faith-based organizations in over 20 years.
Of that money, $1.5 billion falls under the broader umbrella of the new America First Global Health Strategy, announced last September and intended as a replacement for USAID, which was completely dismantled in early 2025. Of that $1.5 billion, $850 million will be managed by a consortium of faith-based organizations led by World Vision and including other Christian organizations, though not all of them are explicitly evangelical. Another $570 million comes under new government-to-government deals the administration has pursued with various countries, mostly in Africa at this point, and that money will be distributed by those governments. A separate $538 million will be a disaster response tranche going to Samaritan’s Purse, another very large evangelical organization, along with a World Vision and Compassion International consortium.
The $2 billion announced last week is just one piece of a larger aid regime that comes nowhere close to pre-Trump levels of aid. So far in the first nine months of this fiscal year, about $7 billion has been dispersed, compared to $85 billion dispersed annually pre-Trump 2.0. As has been widely reported, these cuts have probably cost approaching a million lives at this point, most of them children, according to academic modeling by Boston University.
This new aid regime isn’t just different in terms of the overall funding involved — it’s also structurally different. The government-to-government cooperation component represents almost a return to an earlier model seen in the 1980s and ‘90s: direct budgetary support. USAID and most donor governments had moved away from that model toward one that dispersed money through contracting smaller private NGOs.
The bigger difference is that these evangelical aid organizations received government grants under the USAID system, but they did so as part of a broader system of competitive contracting — competing with many other organizations, both international and American, as well as organizations local to the countries involved. Now they’re getting a major direct avenue of aid, and a lot more of it overall than they got under the old USAID funding. Under the old USAID regime, evangelical organizations received about 6% of total funds. Now it’s going to be much larger than that.
Let’s look at why this is significant, starting with some non-alarmist observations, in the interest of being fair. First, organizations like World Vision, Samaritan’s Purse, and Compassion International received a lot of government aid under the USAID framework, and they generally do very good, vital work in some very tough places. Often they’re the only organizations working there. I personally know people who work on the ground with both World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse at great risk to themselves — for instance, I have a friend working with Samaritan’s Purse right now responding to the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. These aren’t sketchy, inexperienced, or otherwise disreputable organizations. They’ve also long served populations and worked with local organizations without regard to religious faith, and they say they will continue to do so.
Another point: this new partnership arrangement, where the US government partners directly with host governments, actually addresses one long-standing criticism of the aid industry, particularly among analysts and experts in countries such as those in Africa. They often complain that the old model relieved political pressure and responsibility from governments in these countries by performing functions and offering services that those governments should be providing for their citizens. Instead of governments being blamed for certain problems, private NGO activity filled the gap and relieved the pressure on them. Under this new regime, governments will be on the hook, managing these funds and having to match US funds with a pledge of their own.
According to Kenyan American political scientist Ken Opalo, whom I reached out to on this issue, the new system could also help build already-growing capacity in developing countries. He wasn’t especially concerned about the corruption issue that was such a huge part of the aid story in the 1980s and ‘90s, when much aid went to direct budgetary support rather than through NGOs. He said the new system offers real benefits in addressing the aid dependency problem.
Beyond the overall massive reduction in aid — which has already proved incredibly deadly — this change can’t be separated from the administration’s broader and very clear Christian nationalist agenda, which seeks to erode the boundaries between church and state and privilege evangelical Christians, both here and around the world. Even though these organizations have pledged to operate from a position of religious neutrality, and indeed have a track record of doing so, and even though partner governments — which include majority non-Christian nations — remain free to distribute funds to non-Christian groups, the administration’s clear preferences incentivize the privileging of evangelical groups and communities, along with a broader domestic American agenda. That agenda includes the usual restrictions on aid, such as those around abortion and contraception, and likely prohibitions on aid to LGBT communities. In developing countries, these issues carry life-and-death ramifications well beyond what they carry here in the United States.
The incentive system of this new structure also privileges the administration’s pet issues and narratives, whether or not they’re actually based in reality. The administration can use these government-to-government partnerships to demand concessions, and it already has. For example, the US government recently signed one of these health deals with Nigeria, a roughly 50-50 Muslim-Christian nation. The deal includes an explicit requirement that Christian organizations be prioritized, and it makes the overall agreement conditional on the US government’s “religious security assessments.” This connects to the Trump administration’s Christian persecution narrative in Nigeria, which I covered here a month or so ago. As I explained then, that narrative greatly oversimplifies a more complex situation driven more by ethnic tensions, resource competition, and weak state capacity than by religious persecution. Nonetheless, Nigeria’s health agreement has been made contingent on satisfying the administration’s requirements regarding Nigerian Christians.
In addition, the new aid regime replaces a competitive bid system with one that directly hands grants to these organizations, creating a pay-to-play dynamic similar to what we see elsewhere in government contracting during the Trump era, where political allies get money and political enemies do not. At the very least, it pressures Christian aid organizations — which could and should be voices of conscience standing up against the administration’s inhumane and unchristian policies — to put up and shut up on these issues or risk losing funding. It might even incentivize them to endorse administration policy, lending it moral credibility and easing the stricken consciences of white evangelicals in America, on whom the Trump administration greatly depends politically.
Samaritan’s Purse illustrates this dynamic well. The organization is headed by one of Trump’s chief evangelical defenders, Franklin Graham. When USAID closed, did Graham use his influence with Trump to defend the agency from which his own organization received tens of millions of dollars every year? No. He instead downplayed the impact of USAID’s demise on Samaritan’s Purse’s operations and even vocally supported the agency’s closure. I called this a year ago or more. Now Samaritan’s Purse is getting a windfall from this new tranche of government funding — double what it got before Trump took office. In the pre-Trump years, Samaritan’s Purse received about $76 million annually from the US government through USAID, based on the organization’s financial filings. Under this new tranche, the group stands to get roughly $150 million a year. That’s double what it received before, and far more than other aid groups are getting — though not to the extent Samaritan’s Purse is. Some other aid groups, like World Vision, raised more concerns about USAID’s closure, albeit fairly tepidly and timidly. Is this a coincidence? Maybe, but I don’t think it is.
I also have concerns about how this new aid system might harm democracy and human rights around the world, which is of course no longer a US priority. I’m old enough to remember when it was the main US priority — when I worked for the US government, this was something the American government really pursued around the world. No longer.
Under the old system, USAID was increasingly moving toward funding and empowering local organizations. It still wasn’t reaching anywhere near USAID’s own target goals for funding such organizations — only about 10% of USAID’s funding actually went to local NGOs. But the contract system meant that any NGO could bid on and ostensibly receive funding based on its work and ideas, not its political connections or how palatable its work was to the government, although administration priorities were of course a factor in how USAID approved grants. This system had the broader effect of increasing the vibrancy, energy, and capacity of civil society in many developing democracies, and the growth of civil society is a major benchmark for democratic progress. Often these organizations not only provided services for underrepresented groups and communities but also provided political accountability, becoming a thorn in the side of less-than-democratic governments and a key component of these countries’ democratic development.
Under the new system, partner governments could instead choose who gets funding based on their own political needs or their need to manage their relationship with the US. So in both the US context and the overseas context, this inserts a possible political incentive system. Overall, this new aid framework replaces a competitive system that had a lot of accountability — which, granted, wasn’t always the most efficient thing, since accountability always breeds bureaucracy, and bureaucracy always clogs the system with inefficiencies — with one that greatly incentivizes support for an American Christian nationalist agenda.
Maybe this will prove not to be a big deal, but I have some concerns, and we will have to see how it plays out on the ground. Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.
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