Responding to the Trump administration’s drastic curb on refugee-resettlement programs, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has announced its decision “not to renew the cooperative agreements with the federal government related to children’s services and refugee support.”
Excuse me? Did I miss something? The federal government has withdrawn funding, and so the USCCB has decided not to run the programs that Uncle Sam had subsidized? In effect, then, the USCCB’s message to the White House is a variation on an old theme: “You can’t fire me; I quit.”
Archbishop Timothy Broglio, the USCCB president, said that the decision to end these programs was “heartbreaking.” But the bishops really didn’t have to make a choice at all; the decision had been made for them. Anthony Granado, a spokesman for the USCCB, was candid enough to tell the National Catholic Reporter: “It is clear that the government has decided that it wishes to go about doing this in a different way that doesn’t include us, and so we were kind of forced into this position.”
”Over the years, partnerships with the federal government helped expand lifesaving programs,” Archbishop Broglio said. But it might be more accurate to speak of contracts with the federal government rather than partnerships. Uncle Sam provided the funding (and was particularly generous during the Biden years); the USCCB carried out the programs.
Oh, it’s true that the government did not cover all of the program costs. The USCCB actually reported operating losses on the refugee-resettlement contracts, with donations from the faithful making up the difference. But the government was providing the lion’s share of the funding, and without that income the programs were unsustainable. Archbishop Broglio conceded: “As a national effort, we simply cannot sustain the work on our own at current levels or in current form.”
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