Alistair Dutton, the secretary general of Caritas Internationalis, the church’s global network of development, social service and disaster relief agencies, had a simple message for world leaders during his visit to New York for the U.N. General Assembly in September: Restore the funding!

Following the Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development in January 2025, other major donor states like the United Kingdom also sharply reduced foreign assistance. In the United Kingdom, under successive Tory and Labour governments, humanitarian aid has been “whittled away,” Mr. Dutton said, and is now “the lowest it has been since the Second World War as a percentage of [gross domestic product].”

He describes that turn of events as “just shameful.”

Even as some foreign aid flows have been revived in recent months, pledges from donor states remain far below the world’s needs, he said, and humanitarian actors are still struggling to recover from 2025’s debilitating cuts.

The collapse in aid shuttered health, education and other assistance efforts around the globe. It just “forced many, many programs to be closed overnight,” he said.

In the wake of the aid reductions, humanitarian actors were told by colleagues in government: “Do more with less.” Mr. Dutton did not exactly find that advice helpful.

“When [government funders] sit down [with us], they still have the same lists of things that they want us to be doing,” he said. “There’s this kind of magical thinking that it’s all going to continue. We can just ‘make it work’ somehow with less.”

“We’re going to do less with less,” he said.

International humanitarian funding has contracted by almost a third since 2023, according to The Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2026. The report finds that funding cuts in the United States and Germany together accounted for 90 percent of the foreign assistance reduction in 2025.

Cuts have been made in efforts to confront just about every major global crisis, according to the report, while “the largest funding gap on record for UN-coordinated appeals means countless people in need went unassisted in 2025.”

Signs of aid renewal in 2026?

There have been small signs of aid restoration in 2026. In June, Caritas member Catholic Relief Services received $240 million in funding for emergency disaster response from the U.S. State Department. According to Mr. Dutton, State Department officials are looking for ways to support church agencies like C.R.S. “because they really understand and appreciate the value of the presence of the church across Africa and the world.”

No secular NGO can compete with the church’s reach, especially in Africa, where Caritas and its contractors can tap into a network of thousands of parishes, health clinics, hospitals and other church sites, Mr. Dutton said. He pointed out that the church remains the provider of “somewhere between 40 to 60 percent of health care and education” in countries across Africa. He expects church-based health initiatives to play a significant role in containing the Ebola outbreak currently raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

C.R.S. and Caritas Cuba were also tapped by the State Department to administer humanitarian aid in Cuba, even as the Trump administration blocks fuel deliveries and tightens a broad trade embargo that has crippled the island’s economy.

The United States may have political goals in its relationship with Cuba, but church actors are merely responding in “compassion and solidarity with the people of Cuba in their suffering,” according to Mr. Dutton. “We are strictly humanitarian, but the role of the church, the presence of the church in Cuba and its ability to serve the people is profoundly recognized by the U.S. government and [Secretary of State Marco Rubio].”

In recent years, wealthy nations committed to contribute at least 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product to foreign assistance. Few ever reached that level, and now many are rushing away from the 0.7 pledge. In the United States, post-Cold War foreign assistance never reached higher than 0.44 percent of G.D.P. and dropped to 0.15 percent in 2025.

Federal agencies disbursed about $47 billion in foreign aid that year, about $26 billion less than in fiscal 2024. Spending on overseas assistance by the Trump administration in 2026 has been substantially lower, at about $7 billion so far, on track for the most parsimonious outlay in disaster relief and development aid in decades.

Development analysts seeking to put a positive spin on those cuts have suggested that they should at least force poorly performing local and state governments in the developing world to address long-term capacity issues and improve local expertise and social service delivery.

“We want the empowerment of peoples and for states to be able to provide for themselves,” Mr. Dutton agreed. “Nobody really gains any dignity if they’re just reliant on others.”

He nevertheless objects to the chainsaw approach applied by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency last year, which in the end hurt the world’s most vulnerable people.

“Let’s look at how we could do things differently,” he said, “and use our support to achieve that longer-term sustainability and achieve it more quickly.”

“But let’s not pull the plug on the poorest,” warning against sacrificing lives to test speculative theories about aid delivery. “Nobody deserves to be martyred in that way,” Mr. Dutton said.

According to Mr. Dutton, the foreign assistance funding coming back online this year seems to include “a definite bias toward the faith-based agencies.” The Trump administration assesses faith-based groups as more reliable relief and development partners.

That is good news for Catholic entities and “the people we serve,” Mr. Dutton said, but added that “it’s a double-edged sword because our colleagues, the other members of the international community, are not being funded in the same way.”

“So all of the expectations and all the cooperation and collaboration we did in the past, we are finding that we don’t have the same partners around us and certainly not at the same level.”

Now “the bits we’re trying to do, we need to be rethinking and redesigning because the bits others were doing aren’t around us,” he said.

The Middle East is ‘on fire’

Caritas officials also brought a message of concern to the U.N. General Assembly about deteriorating conditions across the Middle East. The region is “on fire,” they warned in a statement imploring a more intense multilateral focus on the region. World leaders, Caritas said, “cannot afford to watch passively as civilians continue to pay the price of war, displacement and destruction, in the denial of the most basic conditions for a life in dignity.”

Just before traveling to New York, Mr. Dutton had been in Oman to meet with Caritas teams and partners from across the Middle East. He called these Caritas leaders working in Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Iran examples of an “irrepressible human spirit.”

“To see the way they continue with strength, hope and dynamism and a real commitment to mission and the service of their people is just incredible,” Mr. Dutton said, “but it breaks my heart.”

In Gaza, two million unhoused residents are now “kettled” by Israeli forces into about 30 percent of the territory. Mr. Dutton described living conditions in Gaza, where most live in tents or bombed-out homes, as appalling.

The ceasefire is violated just about every day, he reported, as the death toll among Gazans rises even and the world has moved on to other concerns. Children in the tent cities are bitten as they sleep because of a vast rat infestation, and flows of humanitarian aid and private sector goods are still cut off by Israeli officials, according to Mr. Dutton.

“We have 12 mobile health clinics waiting to go into Gaza,” he said. “We’ve had them there for a year. We cannot get permission to take them in because they’re declared as dual-use, so people are being denied health care because euphemistically we’re being told that those clinics could be used for military purposes.”

Though conditions are not nearly as grave on the West Bank, Mr. Dutton worries that a normalization of land seizures, settler violence and civic oppression over time threatens the same outcome. In Lebanon and Syria, Caritas teams struggle to carry on under extreme circumstances as disorder continues. Southern Lebanon has been practically cut off by continued fighting and transit restrictions, he said.

Finally, “the situation in Iran remains dreadful,” he said, warning that U.S. sanctions “will only hurt the people, I’m afraid. They won’t hurt the regime.”

Altogether the region is enduring one of its most difficult times.

“Pope Leo’s papacy will probably be remembered [because of] his prime message, one of peace, and nowhere is peace more needed than in the Middle East today,” Mr. Dutton said.

If the tide of violence, deprivation and intolerance is not turned back, he said, “there is real heartfelt concern that there will be no Christians in the Holy Land in a matter of years.”

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Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).