When the Trump administration dismantled USAID in early 2025, one prominent voice cheered the demolition — and his own Christian aid organization has since benefited enormously from the agency's shuttering.

Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and CEO of Samaritan's Purse — a Boone, North Carolina-based evangelical relief organization known for its Operation Christmas Child program and disaster-zone field hospitals — echoed Elon Musk's unsubstantiated claims of waste and fraud at the agency and expressed confidence that President Donald Trump's team would "make good decisions." Musk's cost-cutting effort, the Department of Government Efficiency, had driven the push to shutter the agency. Graham, who prayed at Trump's first inauguration in 2017, has long been one of the president's most prominent evangelical supporters. According to The Bulwark, Graham had reason to be confident: Secretary of State Marco Rubio quickly exempted Samaritan's Purse from the initial aid freeze.

A year and a half later, that trust has paid off handsomely. Samaritan's Purse is now set to receive $300 million over two years — nearly double what it received annually in government funds before the cuts. The organization is one of the central beneficiaries of a new $2 billion grant program, announced Aug. 6, that channels foreign assistance mostly to evangelical Christian organizations. The redirection caps a broader upheaval: USAID, created by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, had grown into one of the world's largest distributors of humanitarian and development aid, dispersing tens of billions of dollars a year across more than 100 countries. Its abrupt dismantling left food, medicine, and global health programs in limbo worldwide.

Meanwhile, direct grants to non-Christian aid groups have been cut to zero. Mainline Protestant organizations such as Church World Service and Lutheran World Relief — groups long active in refugee resettlement and overseas relief that have criticized Trump policies and supported resistance to mass deportation — received nothing, despite previously collecting $114 million to $250 million annually.

American Jewish World Service says it was not even consulted, despite the new system's supposedly ecumenical design. Catholic Relief Services, whose leadership has criticized Trump, remains funded only because it was historically the single largest faith-based recipient and is likely too big to exclude.

Oversight has all but disappeared, according to The Bulwark. The old USAID system relied on competitive bidding and an independent inspector general, but the new aid flows through a small State Department office with no dedicated inspector general and no separate congressional reporting requirement — leaving allocation far more exposed to political influence. That office took over after USAID was formally folded into the State Department on July 1, 2025, with Rubio, the agency's acting administrator during the wind-down, presiding over the merger.

Samaritan's Purse's funding surge comes even as watchdog groups have soured on its finances. MinistryWatch, an independent group that rates Christian ministries, downgraded the charity to "withhold giving" after it quit the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, an evangelical financial-accountability group, and reporting has flagged its $750 million in unused reserves and Graham's nearly $1 million salary.

"All told, the United States' new aid system appears to be a religiously motivated, insufficiently transparent regime with clear potential for, if not already visible evidence of, political leverage over evangelical Christian organizations and leaders that might otherwise be voices of conscience against some of Trump's more inhumane policies," wrote Holly Berkley Fletcher for The Bulwark.

"These organizations' donor base heavily overlaps with Trump's most vital political base," she added. "Keeping them onside is politically important for the MAGA movement, but their participation in the president's political project lends Christian credibility to an administration that is anything but."