Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is preparing for massive cuts after President Donald Trump slashed the federal government’s funding for mass migration into Americans’ communities.
CRS is one of the biggest recipients of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funding, but with Trump’s spending freeze, the charity is quickly moving to scale back its organization, lay off employees, and retool, according to the National Catholic Reporter.
Some layoffs have already taken place, and insiders say that the organization may reduce by as much as fifty percent this year.
“We anticipate that we will be a much smaller overall organization by the end of this fiscal year,” CRS president and CEO Sean Callahan told staffers in an email.
Callahan added that some of its planned programs have already been canceled.
The organization was founded in 1943 by a gathering of Catholic bishops in the U.S. to respond to refuges escaping the devastation of WWII in Europe. It claims to serve 200 million people across 121 countries today.
Stephen Colecchi, a former director of the Office of International Justice and Peace for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, blasted the cuts and said that “targeting” the “tiny portion” of federal dollars USAID gives out is “a haphazard and irresponsible way” to save money. “It is not a thoughtful or humane way to go about treating programs that help the poorest of the poor all over the world,” he added.
That “tiny portion” amounts to $4.6 billion in U.S. tax dollars between 2013 and 2022, the magazine added.
CRS is not the only faith-based charitable organization preparing to downsize in the face of USAID cost cutting.
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) is also laying off staffers and scaling back in light of President Trump’s cost cutting and by as much as 20 percent, according to Forward.
However, HIAS can’t lay all its cost cutting at Donald Trump’s feet, because much of its woes come from severe mismanagement that recently came to light.
In a separate article, Forward notes that “an accounting error” revealed that HIAS had engaged in “unsustainable spending.”
The magazine went on to note that chief financial officer Lara Moninghoff has left her position after a review discovered that she overspent “due to a combination of technology transition and human error that our internal controls failed to identify.”
HIAS officer Beth Oppenheim insists that Moninghoff did not commit any crime and added that “There was no mismanagement of donor funds and HIAS remains a responsible steward of donor funding around the world.”
The organization’s chief work recently has focused on shuffling an increasing number of migrants into the U.S.A. but not without controversy. Last year it found itself accused of supplying maps to migrants in South and Central America as well as Mexico to show illegal aliens how to get to the U.S. border.
But with the Trump administration’s freeze on new migrants, HIAS is now seriously constrained from what it had been doing under the Biden administration.
HIAS was the recipient of at least $500 million in U.S. funds during the Biden administration for its migrant importation efforts.
But an internal investigation into its spending also discovered that the charity did not properly vet the outside organizations it was passing federal money on to. HIAS now says that “corrective actions” are being taken to insure that partnering organizations are in compliance with federal regulations.
The group is still going ahead with bringing migrants into the U.S., and has sought private funding for the 67 “refugees” it was welcoming into Chicago this month after the Trump administration froze $363,000 in funding, the Detroit Jewish News reported.
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