Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is continuing its march through the federal government after two months of chaos, and Christian organizations are beginning to feel the heat.
On March 10, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that 83% of USAID programs would be canceled or consolidated into the State Department. On March 18, DOGE members entered the U.S. Institute of Peace after firing most of the nonprofit’s board. The Los Angeles Times reports several California environmental offices are facing contract terminations. A court filing has alleged that a fired DOGE staffer sent unencrypted data to administration officials against BFS policy.
The sheer volume of DOGE’s actions is voluminous and hard to track.
DOGE’s actions continue to draw criticism, even within the Trump administration itself. Trump reportedly dressed Musk down at a March 6 cabinet meeting in which he addressed internal complaints against Musk and reminded him his role is only advisory.
Externally, the administration faces numerous political and legal challenges. Democratic congressmen in the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight Committee filed a Freedom of Information Act request this week for information against DOGE’s access to private information and regarding the extent of its power. The administration also is buzzing with legal challenges, with The New York Times reporting at least 46 court rulings have paused Trump’s initiatives.
This does not mean Trump and DOGE’s initiatives won’t have an effect, as funding already has been paused for many of these organizations for nearly two months. The Center For Global Development has alleged thousands of people die per day while aid is cut.
You reap what you sow
As BNG previously reported, religious organizations are in a tough spot with the hollowing out of USAID due to their perceived philosophical disagreements with the administration. Christian organizations working in international aid have either had their funding temporarily or permanently cut, resulting in multiple NGOs and nonprofits laying off staff. The Washington Post even reports evangelical groups were told in a March 5 closed-door meeting that the administration has no desire to reinstate their USAID funding.
Regardless, many Christian groups continue to praise the cuts. White evangelicals remain one of Trump’s strongest supporting demographics.
“They have no one but themselves to blame for the political path they have chosen.”
University of Pennsylvania Professor Marci A. Hamilton argues this moment should be eye-opening for evangelical Christians who have overwhelmingly thrown in their lot with the MAGA movement. Their half-century alliance with Republican politics is butting up against the priorities of the administration, and many are being left in the cold.
Marci Hamilton
“The fact that these groups got an audience to explain the cuts is testimony to their unflagging support for Trump in both his campaigns for the nation’s highest office,” Hamilton writes. “They have no one but themselves to blame for the political path they have chosen. They are merely reaping what they have sown for more than four decades.
“The white evangelicals are learning to be careful what you wish for. When religious groups obtain the right to receive taxpayer dollars for their missions, they also insert themselves into a pipeline that can be turned on and off at will. Having loyally argued for low taxes and small government for more than a generation, having deconstructed the separation of church and state laid out in the First Amendment, they now find themselves on the short end of their bargain with the GOP.”
Even Samaritan’s Purse president and evangelist Franklin Graham is beginning to feel the heat, chafing in a March 12 Twitter/X post against Trump’s public use of profanity. He previously prayed for Trump at his inauguration and has fully thrown his support behind the president, despite his charitable organization being affected by the USAID gutting.
Move fast and break things
According to a March 12 statement from the National Immigration Forum, the Trump administration is going to take months to comply with its outstanding court orders to reinstate refugee resettlement programs after he so quickly suspended them “until such time as the further entry into the United States of refugees aligns with the interests of the United States.”
The short term has resulted in dozens of refugee programs across the country scrambling as they face a “significant deterioration of functions.” This includes prominent Christian charities.
“Building such organizations takes years or decades, yet it only takes a day to completely tear them down.”
“As resettlement funding stalls, local communities are scrambling to meet refugees’ basic needs. In Central Ohio, where some refugee-serving organizations have had to scale back support and cut staff, the city of Columbus has stepped in to fill gaps and prevent refugees from becoming homeless,” says NIF.
“In Austin, Matt McGovern of Fox 44 News reports that Catholic Charities of Central Texas will entirely stop providing refugee resettlement services because federal funding to sustain its programs is not coming through. As federal humanitarian aid funds remain frozen, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ annual donation ‘has taken on a very urgent significance,’ Bishop Daniel H. Mueggenborg told Gina Christian of the National Catholic Reporter.”
Building such organizations takes years or decades, particularly large organizations like international charities. Yet it only takes a day to completely tear them down, and rebuilding them afterward is either difficult or impossible.
Musk’s philosophy of “move fast and break things” may work in Silicon Valley, but it is butting up against Washington norms and institutions. It’s only viable insofar as Trump’s claim of massive fraud within the federal government is true, but even then there are still questions about how ethically DOGE is operating within its prescribed advisory role.
However much fraud there really is, nonfraud is getting caught in the crosshairs and Christian organizations stand to reap the whirlwind and get left picking up the pieces.
Tyler Hummel is a Wisconsin-based freelance critic and journalist, a member of the Music City Film Critics Association, a regular film and literature contributor at Geeks Under Grace, and was the 2021 College Fix Fellow at Main Street Nashville.
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