USCCB to Trump: You can’t fire me; I quit

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 08, 2025

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 The federal government has withdrawn funding, and so the USCCB has decided not to run the programs that Uncle Sam had subsidized?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.”

So yesterday the USCCB announced that it was ending the “partnership” with the federal government—several weeks after the Trump administration had already pulled the plug. The truth is explicit in the announcement itself: “This difficult decision follows the suspension by the government of our cooperative agreements to resettle refugees.”

So the bishops “decided” to drop the programs, after the government dropped them. In theory the USCCB might seek to continue the programs—and break free of the red tape that always surrounds government contracts—by making a special appeal to the faithful to supply the money that Uncle Sam has withdrawn. But the USCCB is understandably reluctant to take that leap of faith, because a) the conference is already straining to meet its budget, and b) the faithful Catholics in the US might not be enthusiastic about the refugee-resettlement programs, for roughly the same reasons that prompted the Trump administration to end them. After all faithful Catholics by the hundreds of thousands had voted for Trump, even as the USCCB poured out expressions of concern about Trump’s plans to restrict immigration.

By suddenly withdrawing financial support from the USCCB programs, the Trump administration has forced the bishops—and all American Catholics—to face a pair of critical questions: If this work with refugees is truly an essential work of Christian charity, why don’t the bishops at least try to continue it without government support? And if it is not primarily motivated by Christian charity—if it is really just another government contract—why should the USCCB do it at all?