Historic Executive Order provides $50 million in aid for advancing global religious freedom

June 2, 2020, President Trump issued the Executive Order to Advance International Religious Freedom. While executive orders (EO’s) are a fairly common tool that allows the president to manage the operations of the federal government, this order is believed to be the first-ever to exclusively address the issue of international religious freedom. So what does it say?
Issuing the Executive Order (EQ) is great news for the many faith leaders, non-profits and others that help make the work of advancing religious freedom possible.
The EO creates some of the strongest improvements to United States policy on international religious freedom in the past several decades.
- The creation of a new plan by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to promote religious freedom in our foreign policy and foreign aid work
- $50 million a year (an unprecedented amount) in funding for advancing religious freedom, which includes programs “intended to anticipate, prevent and respond to attacks against individuals and groups on the basis of their religion”
- Ensure faith-based groups are not discriminated against in U.S. foreign assistance programs
- New “comprehensive” action plans to be developed by U.S. embassies in some of the most challenging countries for raising religious freedom
- Training on religious freedom promotion for all federal employees to be posted overseas
- The creation of new economic tools to incentivize countries to adopt religious freedom, including “increasing religious freedom programming, realigning foreign assistance to better reflect country circumstances, or restricting the issuance of visas…”
Soon after the order was issued, Open Doors USA met with officials in the State Department and got their take on it. One official pointed out that the order essentially creates a “whole of government” approach to international religious freedom, ensuring that all of the numerous agencies that deploy Americans overseas must, to some degree, be knowledgeable about religious freedom conditions in the countries where they work.