From NCR:
Catholic Relief Services is bracing for massive cuts — as much as 50% this year — because of draconian reductions in U.S. foreign assistance ordered by the Trump administration, according to an internal email from the chief executive of the international relief organization.
CRS is the top recipient of funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development, known as USAID, which the Trump administration has targeted with a spending freeze, office closure and extensive staff cuts this week.
Layoffs have already begun as CRS has been forced to begin shutting down programs funded by USAID, which supplies about half of the Catholic organization’s $1.5 billion budget, said CRS president and CEO Sean Callahan in a staffwide email sent Feb. 3.
“We anticipate that we will be a much smaller overall organization by the end of this fiscal year,” Callahan wrote in the email, which was reviewed by National Catholic Reporter.
CRS officials at its headquarters in Baltimore did not respond to requests for comment. The U.S. bishops’ conference, which created the organization 82 years ago, also did not respond to a request for comment.
Retired Tucson, Arizona, Bishop Gerald Kicanas, a former board chairman of Catholic Relief Services, said eliminating USAID would be a huge mistake. “These are desperate people, living in desperate situations, struggling day by day, hour by hour,” Kicanas told NCR.
The cuts would amount to one of the biggest blows ever to CRS, a relief group founded in 1943 by Catholic bishops in the United States to serve World War II survivors in Europe. CRS reaches more than 200 million people in 121 countries on five continents, according to its website.
Callahan said that CRS has already received notifications that some projects for which it is subrecipient have already been terminated and that more are coming.
The staffing cuts and cost-saving measures would be across the board, impacting all divisions and departments of CRS, Callahan said. Temporary furloughs would not be enough to avoid staff cuts, he added.
The cuts will be devastating, said Stephen Colecchi, director of the Office of International Justice and Peace for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops from 2004 to 2018.
“To target this tiny portion of the federal budget in such a haphazard and irresponsible way is going to cost people’s lives and livelihoods,” Colecchi said. “It is not a thoughtful or humane way to go about treating programs that help the poorest of the poor all over the world.”
