Religious Leaders: Don't Sacrifice Vulnerable to Budget Cuts

["Lesley Crosson" <lcrosson@churchworldservice.org>]

For Immediate Release

Budgets: Can’t cut moral responsibility to save lives, say faith
leaders
 
WASHINGTON./NEW YORK, March 1, 2011 --. - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 -- As
the Senate moves towards compromise on massive cuts as outlined in House
bill H.R. 1, humanitarian agency Church World Service and leading faith
groups say that, even as lawmakers address current financial challenges,
the United States has a moral responsibility to maintain the nation’s
capacity to save lives in the United States and internationally.
 
In letters sent yesterday and today to members of Congress CWS and
other religious leaders are raising their voices “against the proposed
deep cuts in FY2011 discretionary domestic and poverty-focused foreign
aid spending.”
 
In a Monday letter to the Senate, Church World Service Executive
Director and CEO John McCullough urged lawmakers to oppose the House
cuts for fiscal year 2011 and enact funding for global disaster
assistance and poverty-focused development assistance “at least at the
level of the President’s request.” Such programs are “less than 1
percent of the U.S. budget,” McCullough noted, and cutting them will
“not help solve the nation’s fiscal problems,” but instead will
“harm American long-term interests.”
 
The House bill represents “a devastating blow for millions of
children and adults struggling to overcome hunger and poverty and to
rebuild from crises,” McCullough added.
 
CWS, faith coalition entreat Congress today
Today, CWS joined with heads of communions of major U.S. Christian
denomination and ecumenical agencies in a letter to Congress opposing
cuts to both domestic and international poverty programs. The religious
leaders pressed Congress to “find just solutions that will protect
future generations both from a legacy of debt and a legacy of poverty
and underinvestment.”

The faith coalition reminded lawmakers that “unchecked increases in
military spending combined with vast tax cuts helped create our
country’s financial difficulties and restoring financial soundness
requires addressing these root imbalances.”

The religious leaders say discretionary programs that serve the poor
and vulnerable “are a very small percentage of the budget, and they
are not the drivers of the deficits. Cutting discretionary programs will
devastate those living in poverty at home and around the world, cost
jobs, and in the long run will harm, not help, our fiscal situation.”

 “While ‘shared sacrifice’ can be an appropriate banner, those
who would be devastated by these cuts have nothing left to sacrifice,”
they said.

McCullough’s caution to the Senate on Monday reflected the vantage
point of a humanitarian agency that daily works with hunger, poverty and
people displaced by conflicts and climate migration. He said cuts to
bilateral and multilateral programs for clean technology, disaster risk
reduction and adaptation funding for communities suffering climate
change impacts “will cost us much more in the future when the U.S. may
be required to respond to once-preventable disasters threatening to
destabilize vulnerable countries.”

CWS states that only minimal savings would result from H.R. 1’s
proposed 67 percent cut in International Disaster Assistance (IDA) and
the proposed 45 percent cut in Migration and Refugee Assistance (MRA).
 
“These are not worth the loss of life, human suffering and
destabilizing impact of discontinuing programs that provide emergency
health, safe shelter, and clean water for millions of survivors of
conflicts, human rights abuses and natural disasters,” said
McCullough.
 
CWS similarly urges that the Office of Refugee Resettlement budget,
stagnant for decades, should not be additionally cut, to prevent
additional burdens on already-strapped state and local governments to
assist refugees.
 
CWS and McCullough also urge preserving a level of funding as outlined
by Presiden
t Obama’s FY2011 request for “sustainable, life-saving
global agriculture, nutrition and food aid programs [CR1].
 
Leaders of U.S. churches who signed today’s letter to Congress along
with CWS’s McCullough include:
 
Rev. Donald H. Ashmall, Council Minister, International Council of
Community Churches, Dr. Carroll A. Baltimore, Sr., President,
Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc., Rev. Geoffrey A. Black,
General Minister and President, United Church of Christ, Bishop Larry M.
Goodpaster, President, Council of Bishops, United Methodist Church, Rev.
Mark S. Hanson, Presiding Bishop, Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America, Rev. M. Linda Jaramillo, Executive Minister, United Church of
Christ Justice and Witness Ministries, The Most Reverend Katharine
Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop and Primate, The Episcopal Church,
Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary, National Council of
Churches USA,  Arthur M. Larrabee, General Secretary, Philadelphia
Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, Bishop Chuck Leigh,
President, Apostolic Catholic Church, Roy Medley, General Secretary,
American Baptist Churches USA, Stanley J. Noffsinger, General Secretary,
Church of the Brethren, Gradye Parsons, Stated Clerk of the General
Assembly,  Presbyterian Church USA, Stephen M. Veazey, President,
Community of Christ, Dr. Sharon E. Watkins, General Minister and
President, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in the United States
and Canada.
 
Media Contacts
Lesley Crosson, (212) 870-2676, media@churchworldservice.org 
Jan Dragin - 24/7 - (781) 925-1526, jdragin@gis.net 

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