(MinistryWatch) — Samaritan’s Purse has confirmed that $19 million in frozen U.S. Agency for International Development funds has been released to the ministry.
Payments to the North Carolina-based evangelical aid organization had been stalled since January, when President Donald Trump ordered a 90-day pause on all federal foreign aid.
News of the release follows the Supreme Court’s March 5 ruling that the Trump administration must unfreeze nearly $2 billion for foreign humanitarian work already completed at the government’s behest.
“The funding grants that Samaritan’s Purse has with USAID are reimbursement agreements,” said Samaritan’s Purse President and CEO Franklin Graham in a statement to MinistryWatch. “We pay for the supplies and staff in advance and they reimburse us. We have just received reimbursement for $19 million to provide life-saving aid in Sudan.”
Graham, who endorsed Trump’s election campaign and has expressed support for the president’s crackdown on USAID, previously told Time magazine that only $13 million had been frozen. Mark Barber, Samaritan’s Purse’s media relations director, explained to MinistryWatch that the amount owed went up as the ministry continued its contract work in Sudan, South Sudan and Congo.
“It has been nearly a month since that last report and Samaritan’s Purse has continued to spend money as part of our funding agreements to provide emergency food and medicine,” Barber said. “We provide life-saving food, nutrition and medicine through these funding agreements.”
In February, Samaritan’s Purse had told MinistryWatch it expected to be shielded by a federal waiver exempting “existing life-saving humanitarian assistance programs” from the freeze.
However, the waiver produced a backlog of applications from nonprofits requesting exemptions, while layoffs at USAID disrupted the normal process for delivering grants. Samaritan’s Purse did not respond to repeated requests to clarify whether its application was accepted.
But while many charities have criticized Trump’s foreign aid pause for the risk it poses to communities that depend on USAID-funded programs, Graham has defended the process as an important step in reining in federal waste and fraud.
“There has never really been a review of the policies and the procedures and expenditures. To take a pause and to shake things up and hold people accountable, I think, is very good,” Graham told Time.
However, Graham admitted to being concerned Trump may go too far. “Because the staff at USAID was allowed to misappropriate billions of dollars, I think the pendulum is going to swing to a point where the baby may be thrown out with the bathwater. And that is tragic, but it’s because the culture of USAID got so far off track,” he said.
Throughout the federal shake-up, Graham has continued to associate closely with Trump, meeting him in January at the site of the Hurricane Helene disaster in North Carolina, praying with the president at the opening of the White House Faith Office and posting “We thank God for President Donald J. Trump” on Facebook on Presidents Day.
While the freeze dealt a heavy blow to ministries such as World Vision, which received about 44% of its $1.5 billion annual revenue from federal grants, Samaritan’s Purse depended on federal grants for about 4% of its $1.2 billion in annual revenue. Thus, while the dismantling of USAID has brought chaos and confusion elsewhere, the impact on Samaritan’s Purse has arguably been negligible.
This story originally appeared on MinistryWatch.com.
