Franklin Graham Thinks It’s ‘Very Good’ to Take a Pause on Foreign Aid

Few prominent Christians have been as publicly supportive of President Donald Trump as Billy Graham’s oldest son, Franklin. Unlike his father, who took a more bipartisan attitude to politics, Graham has been a staunch ally and advocate of the President and his agenda. As well as heading up his father Billy Graham’s evangelistic association, Graham leads Samaritan’s Purse, a global organization that provides aid in times of crisis and has worked in 170 countries.

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After the inauguration, the government froze funding worth $13 million that it owed Samaritan’s Purse, according to Graham, as part of a 90-day pause on all foreign aid it instituted while the activities of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) are examined for waste and diversity initiatives. Since that time USAID has been more or less completely dismantled, its executives put on administrative leave, its payment system rendered inactive, its contracts put on hold, and its activities taken over by the State Department. On the evening of Feb. 23, 1,600 employees were informed they were permanently being laid off. 

Although his organization has not been paid for work it has done in Sudan, Graham previously told TIME that USAID supplies less than 5% of Samaritan’s Purse’s international aid budget. He remains enthusiastic about the current Administration’s pause on all aid, and indeed is an amplifier of many of the White House’s talking points. TIME spoke to him on Feb. 21, the seventh anniversary of his father’s death at 99, about the purpose of aid, the future of USAID, and whether the President is dividing Christians.

Does any of what is happening in the foreign-aid realm at the moment concern you?

No, it doesn’t concern me. If anything, I think it is good, because 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.

Many faith-based groups have at least temporarily lost their funding and their ability to help. Isn’t that a net negative?

Well, I don’t know what those faith-based groups were doing, I know for us right now, we’ve got $13 million that USAID owes Samaritan’s Purse, and whether I get that I don’t know, but it’s not going to change the work that we do. We have not discontinued the work that we were doing for them in Sudan because we may not get that $13 million they owe us.

America used to provide about half the world’s foreign aid. Do you worry about the widows, the poor, the orphans, and what the Bible calls “the least of these” as that support disappears? 

Oh sure. Absolutely I worry about them. I think the biggest things that we should be focusing on are food and medicine. USAID got off that and got into some crazy things. It wasn’t saving widows and orphans and providing health care. I don’t think USAID should be done away with. I just think it needs to take a pause, reevaluate its priorities, and then go back to funding those priorities. 

But don’t you worry that by taking a pause, there are things that cannot be undone—children who are malnourished who will be stunted for their whole lives, people who will die because they have not got access to food—and that you could still do a review without the pause? 

But I think about the $1.5 million dollars that went to advance diversity and equity and inclusion in the Serbian workplace. I think about that $1.5 million that could have been used to feed people or to provide medicine, and maybe people died because somebody at USAID diverted that $1.5 million, or the $6 million for tourism in Egypt. I’m sure there’ve been many people that have died because USAID staff diverted money to their own personal agendas and causes that they want to champion. I think that’s even worse. We’ve been wasting billions of dollars, and it’s that waste that is causing the death and the malnourishment, the stunting of growth and so forth. And that’s been going on for years.

I understand your opposition to some of the diversity initiatives. But some of those diversity funds went to disabled people, some of them went to schools. Are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater when we blanket diversity initiatives as a negative thing? There are people who are left out, who are treated inequitably. 

You’re right on that. I agree. 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.

Have you spoken to President Trump at all about your concerns about USAID?

No, I have not talked about this. 

Do you agree with Elon Musk that USAID is evil?

I haven’t met Elon Musk, and I don’t quite understand sometimes the points that he’s trying to make. But do I believe that USAID is evil? No, I don’t.

Part of this is about efficiency. But there is a certain line you have to draw between ruthless efficiency and local tradition and human resources. If I go to a project in Ethiopia that’s run by a Christian organization, they’ll spend time singing and praying. And some people would say, well, that’s not efficient. Where do you see the line drawn between efficiency and a holistic program? 

That’s a hard question. I believe when somebody asks USAID for a grant to feed children and that grant goes to a Christian organization that runs a school and they feed people, while the kids are there, you have the curriculum, you have the singing, you have the preaching. But the money didn’t go for preaching. It didn’t go for the curriculum. It went to feed the children. You would hate for them to take the money and run off and do something else with it. I think that’s what’s happened, in USAID. Money that was given for specific causes was allowed to be diverted into other things.

Do you have any examples of that? 

No, but when you see $32,000 sent to a transgender comic book in Peru [Ed. note: this was a State Department grant, not USAID]—what has that got to do with saving life and feeding people? This is nonsense. Or $2 million for sex changes and LGBT activism in Guatemala. There’s so much money that has been spent on sex issues. That’s tragic, that we have allowed ourselves to be perverted like this. And maybe Elon Musk, when he talks about evil, maybe this is what he has seen, and maybe that’s what he’s calling evil. And I believe it is evil to take money, U.S. taxpayer money, to fund, you know, $70,000 for production of a DEI musical in Ireland. [Ed. note: this was also a State Department grant, for a music event at the U.S. ambassador’s residence to promote the “shared values of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.”]

But, with respect, those numbers are very small, and to pause an entire program for those expenditures…

I don’t think it’s an entire program being canceled because of what you would call small issues. I think this is a tip of an iceberg of something that’s much bigger, and I think that’s what Elon Musk and others are looking into. Again, I don’t want to see USAID abolished, but I think it is healthy for it to be reviewed right now and needs to be reviewed.

Another executive order that shut down all refugee programs and stranded people who had legally applied to be in this country is also upsetting a lot of Christians. Do you have any concerns about that?

These executive orders that have shut down these programs, I don’t see this as permanent. I think when it’s reviewed, there will be adjustments, and they will come back.

Do you think the USRAP, the Refugee Admissions Program, should be abolished?

I’m not saying abolish, but I think it should be reviewed, because there’s so much abuse, and it’s good to have things reviewed. Every year we have auditors come in and audit Samaritan’s Purse. I have met with them today, going over some of our programs overseas, and then sometimes we find problems and we adjust it and fix it. But I don’t think USAID has ever had this before. 

People at USAID would say they do audits. That’s partly why the staff got so big. The Government Accounting Office audits USAID. It was recently discovered that four PEPFAR nurses had done abortions in Mozambique, and that came out from an audit. Is it really true to say there was no auditing?

I didn’t want to imply that there’s no auditing, but I don’t think USAID has ever come under this kind of scrutiny, and that’s the point I’m making. I know USAID does audit, and we have had audits of some of our programs that we’ve done with them, and we’ve had disagreements with them, where they saw the audit one way and we saw it another way. I just believe that our government has gotten so big and these programs have gotten so big, and the waste is everywhere. Donald Trump has been in office just a month, we’ve never had a President in the history of this nation that has shaken Washington like this.

In the end, though, the point of the USAID shake-up is to spend less money. Could you make a case for spending the same amount of money but doing it more efficiently?

The world is constantly changing, and so the needs constantly change. You look at programs in Ukraine and now Sudan, where the civil war has caused a famine problem that didn’t exist a few years ago, and now they do, and so we may need to spend more money on issues like that because of political changes in the world. We have a limited amount of resources. Whatever it is, how many billion we have, that’s all we’ve got, and we need to spend it more wisely.

The USAID budget is about $44 billion. The question I’m asking: is aid the place where we should be cutting back? 

That’s a hard question to ask, because we’ve got to be limited on how much—whether it’s $44 billion or if you cut it back to $30 billion this year—whatever it is, that’s what we have to spend, and we need to spend it more wisely. It’s OK to tighten our belts every now and then.

I know you’re doing work on the ground in Sudan. Are you hearing anything from the field because other organizations have had to withdraw?

No, I haven’t seen it as of yet, because all this has just happened. The food that’s in the pipeline right now is there, and it will take some time for that money to be spent. We’ll be seeing some shortfalls, I think, in the next few months, but I haven’t seen anything right now.

One of the things President Trump has shaken up is the American church, where some people regard him as a very Christian president, and some people regard him as a very unchristian president. Do you understand both those views?

I believe Donald Trump believes in God. He’s certainly very friendly to people of faith, not just the Christian faith, but he’s friendly to Jewish people, to Muslim people. I was with him when he went to the U.N. and encouraged nations to protect people of faith. No President’s ever done that. Not everybody’s going to be happy with things he does. I think he’s going to be overall supportive of people of faith, and I think the churches in this country will benefit. 

But do you understand the people who doubt that he believes in God, because of his behavior?

You have to remember lots of the things that Donald Trump has done–and I’m talking about his girlfriends and things–those were done 15 to 20 years ago. That’s not part of his lifestyle now. He’s changed. I think he’s very committed to his family. I think he will serve America to the best of his ability, not to benefit himself, like other Presidents have used the White House to benefit their families.

But some Christians point to the fact that he punches down. He seems to worship at the altar of Mammon. He doesn’t really go to church. He doesn’t know the Bible. He has said that he doesn’t believe he needs to be forgiven. You don’t think any of that holds water? 

I think a lot of that would be talking points that they used in his previous Administration. But when that bullet went through his ear in Butler, Pa., that had an effect on him, and I’ve seen it, and there is much more seriousness to President Trump. And I mean, he’s still President Trump; if he gets mad, he’s still going to say things and maybe call a person a name, which he does from time to time, but I have seen a change in him. No question. He realizes it was God that turned his head and it wasn’t luck. He believes God saved his life. 

Are you saying you’re personally aware that he’s now dedicated his life to Jesus?  

Some of these things are private conversations you have with people and I can’t comment on them. 

The White House has established a Faith Office and a task force to look into bias against Christians. Where do you see the anti-Christian bias in the United States? 

Oh my. You see it in the media. You see it certainly within the Democratic Party. You see it in certain government levels. And I think what President Trump was wanting with the faith-based office is to give people of faith access to him. We had really no access during the Biden Administration. If you want some examples, think about the businesses. The florist out in Washington put out of business because she wouldn’t make flowers for a gay wedding. [Ed. note: After nine years of legal battles, the florist wrote, “At age 77, it’s time to retire and give my business to someone else.”] And then you have Coach Kennedy in Washington, who kneeled down to pray, and they fired him because he prayed. There’s all kinds of examples of Christians that are being attacked by the gays and lesbians. And that’s who came after the business owners, the florists and the bakers and the coach. It was just the government out there in the Pacific Northwest that is so anti-Christian.

Your father died seven years ago today. What question would you like to ask him now?

Oh my. Well, I’d ask, “What’s heaven like?” [He laughs.] When I was young, I asked my father lots of questions. And as I got older I spent a lot of time with my father not so much asking questions, but just discussing work in ministry and those kinds of things. And then as he got older, he would ask me questions. It just seemed like the roles changed as I got older and he got older. He was fun to talk to. Always had great insights. What I appreciated about my father, if you asked him a question and he didn’t know, he would say, “Franklin I don’t know, and that’s something I think maybe we ought to pray about.”

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