Pushback to Trump’s foreign aid cuts is coming from a surprising corner

Evangelical Christians who made an alliance with President Donald Trump to end abortion rights are now seeing how much it’s cost one of their other priorities: caring for the poor.

Four in five evangelicals voted for Trump in November. But Trump’s decision to pull back hundreds of millions in foreign aid and shutter the agency that dispensed it have proven costly to evangelicals who run some of the many nonprofits that have long partnered with the U.S. government to provide help to countries that don’t have enough food.

Eager to see assistance flowing again, the National Association of Evangelicals will take its concerns to Capitol Hill after lawmakers return this week from their summer break. The lobbying campaign by the association’s 40 Christian denominations marks a rare policy split with Trump. Its success or failure will show whether evangelicals have enough clout to convince GOP lawmakers loyal to Trump to cross him.

“We certainly would affirm that every administration has an obligation to review the programs of the government and try to make them better,” said Galen Carey, who was an Africa-based employee of the evangelical aid group World Relief before he became the association’s lobbyist. But Carey still thinks Trump could have exercised more caution when he shut down U.S. aid in January: “A more thoughtful approach maybe would have been better.”

Trump has said foreign aid must more directly serve U.S. interests and that nations must step up to help their own people. His administration has promised to continue “life-saving” assistance after the cuts of the winter, but aid providers say the damage he did to the groups that carry out the mission has proved lasting.

Some of the world’s most prominent groups providing the help have Christian roots, from Samaritan’s Purse to World Vision, and they’re eager to see assistance continue.

Samaritan’s Purse Chief Executive Franklin Graham, the son of legendary evangelist Billy Graham, is a Trump ally who’s attempted to reassure the group’s church-going donors that foreign aid cuts won’t affect it. It had received tens of millions in support from the U.S. Agency for International Development that Trump shut down in February.

But that’s less than 5 percent of Samaritan’s Purse’s budget last year, an organization spokesperson said, adding that the dismantling of USAID “will not change the fact that Samaritan’s Purse will continue to help people in need.”

The federal government paid the organization $19 million in March for supplies and staff as part of an agreement with USAID, the spokesperson said.

For World Vision, the world’s largest evangelical aid group, Trump’s cuts have been devastating, said Margaret Schuler, the organization’s chief impact officer. “Due to U.S. government cuts, World Vision has been forced to stop emergency humanitarian programs in all regions of the world, over 20 countries, leaving over a million people without emergency assistance,” she told POLITICO.

A missionary’s plight

Mark Moore’s nonprofit, MANA Nutrition, has also absorbed the blows of Trump’s swift overhaul.

His lobbying to get his peanut butter paste flowing again also shows that at least some GOP lawmakers are trying to contain the damage.

Moore got into the therapeutic food business — malnourished children recover over six weeks on $40 of his paste — after working as a Christian missionary in Uganda for a decade, starting in the 1990s, when the country was recovering from civil war.

He grew up in the evangelical Church of Christ and worked for Mary Landrieu, the former moderate Democratic senator from Louisiana, as an Africa specialist before starting MANA Nutrition.

“People who claim to be Christian, Muslim and Jewish, all agree on a narrative where we started in a garden, and that was I believe, not for sentimental reasons, but because we believe in a transformative force, a God who wanted us to be nourished,” Moore said.

Moore chose Georgia as his nonprofit’s home 15 years ago to be near its peanut fields. A small container of his paste packs 500 calories, is easy to digest and has a two-year shelf life. His company’s name is an acronym for “mother-administered nutritional aid.” It also alludes to the story in the Book of Exodus about how manna, or bread, fell from heaven to feed the Israelites during their 40 years in the desert.

“We're looking for a target population that is born hungry, living hungry, and too often dying hungry,” Moore said.

Trump briefly cut MANA Nutrition's contracts in January and the government owed it millions of dollars in payments. Thanks to the intervention of the lawmakers who represent the district where MANA Nutrition has its warehouse, Republican Rep. Buddy Carter, and manufacturing plant, Republican Rep. Austin Scott, Moore said it has received its payments. Moore also enlisted the two Democrats who represent Georgia in the Senate, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.

After months in limbo, MANA Nutrition won a State Department tender in August to produce roughly 500,000 boxes of its ready-to-eat therapeutic food.

About 100,000 of some 400,000 boxes from an older government order in MANA Nutrition's warehouse started moving to Nigeria and South Sudan after months of uncertainty.

Carter’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Scott said in an emailed statement that he’d spoken with the State Department regarding MANA Nutrition’s contracts to ensure its products continue to ship during the Trump-ordered transition of foreign assistance funding from USAID to the State Department.

“I remain in close contact with the leadership team at MANA and am proud of the great work they continue to do," Scott said.

In the meantime, Republican House appropriators have required in their version of the foreign aid appropriations bill for the 2026 fiscal year that therapeutic food the government has already paid for “be distributed quickly, prioritizing areas of greatest need and taking expiration dates into account to avoid waste.”

The bill, which the House Appropriations Committee approved in July, would provide $300 million for American-made therapeutic food in the next fiscal year. It’s unclear whether it will become law in its current form.

But evangelicals want lawmakers to go further in supporting foreign aid.

“There's been a focus on what are described as life-saving interventions but I think oftentimes there's not maybe an adequate conception of what goes into making something life-saving,” said the National Association of Evangelicals’ Carey.

Conflict prevention and resolution, poverty alleviation through development and education and protecting human rights so people can live freely and not have to flee their countries are some examples of things that can ultimately save lives, and in which the U.S. has played a leading role, Carey said.

He said evangelicals are watching closely how the Trump administration addresses children’s needs and to what extent it strengthens partnerships with faith and community groups.

For now, a spokesperson for the State Department, which now oversees MANA Nutrition’s contracts, said that it’s given money to the United Nations Children’s Fund “to program the 1,209 metric tons of [therapeutic food] prepositioned in manufacturer warehouses for use in global nutrition programs. We anticipate these commodities will move in September.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a May congressional hearing that his department was not responsible for the shipping delays. The White House Office of Management and Budget did not respond to a request for comment on those delays. The White House said Friday it was canceling nearly $5 billion more in foreign aid funding mostly focused on democracy and peacekeeping, in a controversial move that leaves out Congress.

Rubio says the U.S. will maintain life-saving aid, but that assistance broadly should provide concrete benefits to Americans, be targeted and time-limited.

“We will favor those nations that have demonstrated both the ability and willingness to help themselves and will target our resources to areas where they can have a multiplier effect and catalyze durable private sector, including American companies, and global investment,” Rubio wrote in a July State Department post, explaining how the administration is remaking foreign aid.

“This is America first,” Moore said of MANA Nutrition. “We're talking about American peanuts and milk and sugar and packaging. This isn't money that's leaving America.”