It appeared as if faith-based groups, especially conservative Christian evangelicals, would enjoy a leg up over their secular counterparts in a second Trump administration. After all, Republicans have long lamented that the development sector tends to marginalize religious aid groups.

However, it appears religion has offered no safe harbor for faith-based groups that have found themselves ensnared in Trump’s foreign aid freeze.

The first Trump administration sought to champion the priorities of religious charities, establishing a $50 million program at USAID to promote religious freedom and diversify the agency’s aid recipients. It also heralded programs that helped religious minorities, such as Christian and Yazidi communities in northern Iraq.

Furthermore, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook, from which Trump has borrowed several pages, singled out faith-based groups, arguing that: “The next conservative Administration must champion the core American value of religious freedom, which correlates significantly with poverty reduction, economic growth, and peace.”

Yet today, some of the largest Christian aid organizations, including World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, and Samaritan’s Purse, have been subject to the same cuts as other secular aid agencies and are competing for the same waivers, my colleague Colum Lynch writes.

“I initially thought this was a misunderstanding,” Noah Gottschalk of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society tells Colum. “We all wanted to believe that, oh, if we can just explain that actually a pause is really harmful people would say oh, okay, oops that wasn’t our intention, let's fix it. That point has been made and it’s not being heard.”

In fact, it’s having some cruelly ironic consequences.

“In May 2024, then-Sen. [Marco] Rubio spoke at an International Republican Institute (IRI) event honoring exiled Catholic Bishop Rolando Álvarez for his advocacy of religious freedom in Nicaragua,” Samah Alrayyes Norquist, who served as the first Trump administration’s religious freedom envoy at USAID, wrote in Newsmax. “What Rubio likely didn’t know is that IRI’s work on religious freedom in Nicaragua was funded by USAID.”

Ironically, she added, the State Department’s stop-work order prevented IRI from participating in this month's International Religious Freedom Summit, where U.S. Vice President JD Vance delivered a speech underscoring Washington’s commitment to persecuted religious minorities.

Read: Trump’s 'beautiful Christians' left knocking on White House’s door