When the Trump administration dismantled USAID in early 2025, one prominent voice cheered the demolition – and now his own Christian aid organization has benefited enormously from the shuttering.
Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and CEO of Samaritan's Purse, echoed Elon Musk's unsubstantiated claims of waste and fraud at the agency and expressed confidence that President Donald Trump's team would "make good decisions," and The Bulwark reported he had reason to be confident, because Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly exempted Samaritan's Purse from the initial aid freeze.
A year and a half later, that trust has paid off handsomely. Samaritan's Purse is now set to receive $300 million over two years — nearly double what it received annually in government funds before the cuts. It's one of the central beneficiaries of a new $2 billion grant program, announced Aug. 6, that channels foreign assistance mostly to evangelical Christian organizations.
Meanwhile, direct grants of foreign aid to non-Christian groups have been reduced to zero, according to the report, and mainline Protestant organizations were shut out of the new $2 billion structure. The Bulwark reported that Church World Service — whose affiliated churches have opposed multiple Trump policies and been on the frontline of resistance to mass deportation — received nothing under the new program, despite previously collecting an average of $114 million to $250 million annually.
American Jewish World Service told the outlet it wasn't even consulted, despite the new system's supposedly ecumenical design. Catholic Relief Services, whose leadership has criticized Trump, remains funded only because it was historically the single largest faith-based recipient and is likely too big to exclude, The Bulwark noted.
Oversight has all but disappeared, according to The Bulwark. The old USAID system relied on competitive bidding and an independent inspector general, but the new aid flows through a small State Department office with no dedicated inspector general and no separate congressional reporting requirement — leaving allocation far more exposed to political influence.
Samaritan's Purse's funding surge comes even as watchdog groups have soured on its finances. MinistryWatch downgraded the charity to "withhold giving" after it quit an evangelical financial-accountability group, and reporting has flagged its $750 million in unused reserves and Graham's nearly $1 million salary.
"All told, the United States' new aid system appears to be a religiously motivated, insufficiently transparent regime with clear potential for, if not already visible evidence of, political leverage over evangelical Christian organizations and leaders that might otherwise be voices of conscience against some of Trump's more inhumane policies," wrote Holly Berkley Fletcher for The Bulwark.
"These organizations' donor base heavily overlaps with Trump's most vital political base," she added. "Keeping them onside is politically important for the MAGA movement, but their participation in the president's political project lends Christian credibility to an administration that is anything but."
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Lutheran World Relief had criticized Trump administration policies, supported resistance to mass deportation, and previously collected $114 million to $250 million annually. Those characterizations and that funding figure applied to Church World Service, not Lutheran World Relief. The reference to Lutheran World Relief has been removed.