NGO Review 2-7-25

DOGE reviews of NGOs are revealing grants from USAID for WOKE cultural indoctrination in multiple countries. The US can save $1 trillion per year by closing USAID and other NGOs who support illegal migration. NGOs have typically given US Food Aid to Terror organizations in other countries. 

How the Catholic Church Became a Champion of Biden’s Open Borders by Steven Malanga, 2-4-25

Church groups grew massively with government funding for the controversial immigrant and refugee programs that Trump is now cutting.

Vice President J. D. Vance has emerged as one of the Trump administration’s unwavering defenders on many issues. One of his most widely quoted retorts to critics occurred on the January 26 edition of CBS’s Face the Nation. Vance was responding to statements by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemning as “deeply troubling” the administration’s enforcement actions against illegal aliens and its pause of government-funded refugee-resettlement programs. As a Catholic, Vance said, the criticism left him “heartbroken.” Then he hit out at the church for its role in garnering hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts to serve immigrants over the last several years. “I think that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line?”

The Catholic Church has indeed emerged as one of the largest government contractors of immigration services. In the process, it has not only rapidly expanded its role as a taxpayer-supported nonprofit but also became one of the chief facilitators of the Biden administration’s loose borders policy. That relationship has troubled many politicians and other critics, who fear that reduced border enforcement has worsened numerous social problems, including human trafficking. “I believe the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, if they’re worried about the humanitarian costs of immigration enforcement, let them talk about the children who have been sex trafficked because of the wide open border of Joe Biden,” Vance said in the Face the Nation interview.  He went on to slam church leaders for not being good partners in “common sense immigration enforcement.”

The Catholic Church has long positioned itself as an advocate for poor immigrants and provided them with services in the United States. But for decades, including during the great migration waves of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of the church’s work was charitable in nature, funded by contributions from parishioners. Over the past 50 years or so, however, Catholic Church-affiliated organizations, especially Catholic Charities, have become government contractors with a stake in a growing welfare state. Even before the last four years of explosive immigration, Catholic Charities nationwide derived more than six of every ten dollars of revenues from government contracts. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic Charities have been among the biggest beneficiaries.

Now, with Trump changing the immigration focus to border enforcement and deportation, most of the Biden programs that aided in resettling immigrants are being curtailed, along with their funding. That policy change may represent an existential crisis for nonprofits dependent on government contracts, including dozens of Catholic Charities branches around the country. This conflict of interest makes it harder for Catholic leaders to claim the moral high ground on immigration.

The Biden administration used radical changes in immigration policies, especially through its so-called parole program, to justify a vast expansion of federal spending on migrant services. Under Biden’s plan, those seeking entry into America received dates to appear in immigration court, often months in the future, and then were released into the country, usually without any means to support themselves. To service the swelling numbers of unsettled immigrants, including a sharp uptick in those applying for refugee status, the Biden administration and Congress dramatically expanded spending on immigration services. Funding for refugees and other “entrants” soared fourfold annually, from $2.2 billion in 2021 to $8.9 billion in 2022 and then to $10 billion in 2023. The biggest increases were in annual funding for unaccompanied minors, from $1.7 billion to $5.5 billion—suggesting the magnitude of the problem that Biden’s open-borders policy facilitated. Medical services for refugees and others grew fourfold, from $225 million to $1 billion. Large chunks of this money made its way to nonprofits as discretionary grants from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, which rose from $33 million in 2021 to $400 million in 2022 and then $616 million in 2023, according to Open the Books.

Catholic groups were among the leading recipients of this money. Total federal grants and contributions made to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and its affiliate organizations for refugee-assistance programs rose from $14.6 million under the first Trump administration in 2019 to $122.6 million in 2022, according to audited financial statements. In just three years under Biden, those grants totaled more than $200 million. One signature federal program, Preferred Communities, tries to integrate immigrants into local communities. In 2023, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was the top recipient of these grants, garnering $66.5 million, reports Open the Books. Over three years, Catholic groups received some $110 million from this program alone.

This federal money, often heavily supplemented by local government contracts, has led to a startling growth in groups like Catholic Charities across the country in just four years. The ProPublica database of the financial filings of nonprofits lists 234 Catholic Charities entities around the U.S. The top 25 had revenues of slightly more than $2 billion in 2023, the last year filings are available for all groups. That’s an almost 50 percent increase, a gain of about $660 million, in four years. Some of these groups have been utterly transformed. Catholic Charities Fort Worth has become one of the nation’s largest local Catholic groups, with revenues of $289 million in 2023, compared with just $32 million in 2020. And like so many religious social services groups today, the charity exists almost entirely on government funds. Catholic Charities Fort Worth’s 2023 federal 990 form, which nonprofits must file, lists $270 million in total government grants. Much of that money appears in the form of pass-through grants to local organizations for “refugee case management assistance,” such as a $29.7 million grant awarded to a local YMCA.

The growth has been especially noticeable in border states, where the Biden administration released many of its parolees to local groups. Catholic Charities Dallas recorded $188 million in revenues from 2021 to 2024, compared with just $64 million over the previous four years. Similarly, Catholic Charities San Diego saw its local revenues rocket to $70 million in 2023, up from $12 million in 2020, with $64.9 million of that money in the form of government grants. In Phoenix, meantime, Catholic Charities recorded nearly $47 million in revenues in 2023, up from $33 million in 2019. Nearly 80 percent was in government money.

Because taxpayers increasingly support these swelling budgets, the organizations have attracted more criticism. Just a few days after Vance replied to the bishops on television, reports emerged of a Catholic Charities in Milwaukee releasing on its website a video from an immigration lawyer coaching illegals on how to deal with workplace raids by immigration authorities and recommending not cooperating with authorities, among other strategies. Other such incidents have occurred in recent years. In late December 2022, Texas governor Greg Abbott called for investigations into reports that a Catholic group was using taxpayer funds to help illegal aliens.

Government-backed Catholic groups have also taken heat for lobbying for benefits for illegals. For example, Catholic Charities of Trenton, New Jersey, one of the 20 largest taxpayer-funded Catholic groups, has promoted a campaign to award drivers’ licenses to illegals, including organizing protest marches in the Garden State. Catholic officials have sought to justify their work as a “safety issue” for state drivers—but that’s disingenuous, because local governments that provide illegals with access to such government programs as drivers’ licenses or unemployment insurance (as New Jersey did during Covid) encourage illegals to come to their area, adding to the burden on public services and raising calls for greater government funding.

Though some Democrats and liberal commentators have criticized Republican scrutiny of church immigration contracts, Democratic administrations have also found fault with Catholic Charities and other church-affiliated organizations in the past. Catholic adoption agencies, for instance, saw contracts yanked by Democratic-controlled state governments for refusing to facilitate adoptions by gay couples. The Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services withdrew a contract for helping victims of sex trafficking from a Catholic group because it wouldn’t provide the victims with condoms.

As Vance’s remarks suggest, the Church’s role in helping to carry out the undeniably controversial immigration resettlement policies of the Biden administration is potentially divisive within Catholicism itself, because it appears to be at odds with what the American Catholic congregation broadly supports. Within the pews, there’s growing discontent, reflected in Vance’s criticism, of what some regular churchgoers call “professional Catholics”—that is, the administrative class that organizes and carries out the social-welfare mission of groups like Catholic Charities and lobbies for liberal social policies to support their work. Polls suggest they are out of sync with everyday Catholics. A Pew survey last year showed that 55 percent of those who identified as Catholic supported Trump. Even Hispanic Catholics were almost evenly divided in their support of the candidates. Catholics who said they attended church regularly were even more supportive of Trump. Those results were part of broad backing among religious voters for Trump. By contrast, about seven in ten voters claiming no religious affiliation or belief said they supported Biden.

In his Face the Nation interview, Vance described himself as a “practicing” Catholic—that is, one who regularly attends church. Though polls suggest as many as 20 percent of American adults, or about 50 million people, identify as Catholic, only about 28 percent of them, or 14 million, say they go to church frequently. Once, parishioners financed the church’s social mission, their contributions a vote of confidence in this work. But as the numbers in the pews have diminished over the years, the church has turned to the state for support; individual donations from churchgoers now represent a minuscule portion of its funding for social work. That dynamic has produced a church whose leadership and mission seem increasingly out-of-step with its own congregants.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/catholic-church-immigration-government-funding-jd-vance

Comments

As a life-long Catholic, I have always recognized the fallibility of the Catholic Church. From it becoming a Department of the Roman Empire to its merger to take bribes to create “Prince Bishops”, to its sale of Indulgences published in Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. I witnessed the errors made in Vatican II from 1962 to 1965  that resulted in the exodus of Priests and Nuns after 1965 and the sale of Catholic Hospitals in the 1970s.

We grew up in the 1950s, when the US Catholic Church was at its height. From the 1970s to the 2000s We were active as Marriage Encounter and Engaged Encounter Leaders from 1974 to 2000 and ended our service as Marriage Ministry Leaders in the 2010.

We were happy with Pope John Paul II 1978 to 2005 and Pope Benedict XVI 2005 to 2013, but when Pope Francis was elected in 2013, I shopped going to church.

In 2015, the US received 1.9 million Refugees and Catholic Charities was hired to place them in US jobs.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader