OPINION—On Tuesday, the Trump administration cut $2 billion to nonprofits, some of them faith-based organizations, that deal with mental health and addiction recovery issues.
On Wednesday, the administration restored those grants.
It is not yet clear what impact the 48 hours of chaos will have. The cuts certainly did not save any taxpayer money, since all the funding was restored, and the burden of communicating to hundreds of agencies — twice — plus additional bureaucratic friction, cost that ecosystem millions in hard dollars and administrative costs.
Lost in the chaos is an important question: what is the role of government in mental health and addiction recovery efforts? Should the government be in this business in the first place?
Personal and Spiritual
On these and related questions, my go-to source is Marvin Olasky. Olasky wrote the classic book on the subject, “The Tragedy of American Compassion.” In that book and elsewhere, Olasky has set forth some principles that should guide the thoughts — and philanthropy — of Christian donors and Christian ministry leaders who want to provide help that actually…helps.
While Olasky has never (to my knowledge) issued a blanket statement saying Christian groups should never take government funds, he clearly prefers personal, private charity over impersonal government assistance. Olasky argues that government welfare programs and handouts, including large direct funding, tend to depersonalize aid and foster dependency rather than transformation. He maintains that personal involvement, spiritual engagement, and challenge from private and faith-based groups are more effective at helping people change their lives.
Further, he says that government funds can undercut the Christian mission of faith-based organizations. He wrote that government grants can “swing votes but don’t change lives.” If a condition for taking government money is not talking about the Gospel, that condition undermines a key reason Christian organizations are more successful at addiction recovery and mental health issues than secular organizations. In other words, when an organization loses the personal, spiritual, and relational components of its work, it waters down both its Christian mission and its practical effectiveness.
True Charity
Another of the “wise men” in this area is James Whitford. Whitford is co-founder of Watered Gardens Ministries in Joplin, Mo. Watered Gardens works with people who have addiction and mental health issues, people the Trump Administration’s $2 billion purports to help. However, Watered Gardens takes no government funds, and since making that decision about 20 years ago it has seen remarkable success not just in what practitioners call “harm reduction,” but in true transformation in the lives of people who come for help.
Whitford took his experience at Watered Gardens — and many of the ideas in Olasky’s books — and founded True Charity. True Charity is a nonprofit network promoting privately funded, relational Christian charity that prioritizes personal responsibility, dignity, and long-term transformation over government-dependent aid. True Charity now has nearly 300 member organizations in 34 states.
Whitford agrees with Olasky that Christian ministries should avoid relying on government funding for their charitable work.
Whitford reiterates Olasky’s contention that when ministries accept government money, even if they remain Christian in identity, they are often unable to bring the transformative power of the Gospel to their work. Instead, he says such ministries tend to treat symptoms rather than root causes like dependency and brokenness. This, he believes, prevents real change in people’s lives.
In an interview with MinistryWatch, Whitford said true freedom and dignity cannot flourish if people — whether struggling with poverty, addiction, or other life challenges — are conditioned to rely on government assistance. In his view, government support can inadvertently trap people in dependence rather than helping them become self-sufficient.
Whitford also asserts that when government steps in to provide for basic needs, it tends to reduce private, relational charity and weaken civil society. He believes this diminishes the role of individuals, families, churches, and local organizations in meeting needs through direct, personal involvement.
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Helping That Helps
If you have read this far, you recognize that the ideas of Olasky and Whitford are consistent with those in the book, “When Helping Hurts,” by Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett.
Fikkert and Corbett — with Olasky and Whitford and others, including Bob Lupton (“Toxic Charity”) and Amy Sherman (“Restorers of Hope”) — have shown us how to help in ways that actually help. They are ideas I explored in my book (co-written with John Stonestreet) “Restoring all Things.” In other words, this approach is not magic. We know what to do. We do not lack the money. We lack the will.
And that brings me back to the on-again, off-again government funding in the news this week. The $2 billion at stake here sounds like a lot of money, but — in the grand scheme of things — it is not. MinistryWatch tracks about 1,400 ministries in our database. These ministries combined earn more than $51 billion in annual revenue. In the United States, total charitable giving in 2024 was about $592.5 billion, according to the Giving USA Annual Report — a record high in current dollars and a roughly 6.3% increase over the prior year. If you do the math, that’s a $37 billion increase in a single year.
Again: we do not lack the money. We lack the will.
And we lack a coherent plan. The Trump Administration sometimes, almost by accident, does the right thing. These cuts, for example, were not a bad idea in the abstract. But the way the administration went about them caught everyone by surprise — including allies in Congress and in the faith-based nonprofit community who in principle agree with these cuts. The Administration had to reverse the cuts almost immediately when the outcry — even from political and philosophical allies — became too loud to ignore.
But the opportunity is not lost. Something good could come out of this governing debacle. It could ignite a national conversation about why governments and faith-based organizations exist. What can they do well, and what do they not do so well?
To put it another way: what kind of helping helps, and what kind of helping hurts?
Arriving at a consensus answer to that question — and taking unified steps to implement that answer — could have massive implications for the well-being of the church and the world.
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