When it comes to the Trump administration’s determination to rein in out-of-control foreign aid expenditures, particularly those funneled through the embattled U.S. Agency for International Development, better known as USAID, the proper tool to apply is prudent discernment.

Based on the growing evidence that has come to light, it is obvious that USAID is long overdue for a major shakeup.

U.S. taxpayers are rightly outraged by many of USAID’s initiatives in recent years. Some of the more egregious examples cited in a Feb. 3 White House fact sheet include $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia, $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru; and a $2 million expenditure for transgender medical procedures and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala.

This is rank ideological colonialization, plain and simple — something that’s rampant in Western foreign aid policies toward the developing world and which Pope Francis has repeatedly condemned. And it needs to stop immediately. 

At the same time, it’s also apparent that the blunt, abrupt way the Trump administration has frozen government funding to USAID projects around the world, with scant guidance to the nonprofit groups and other contractors that administer those programs, is causing undue collateral damage to other more worthy initiatives, unnecessarily compounding the suffering of legitimately needy people around the world.

The aid freeze is directly and dramatically impacting the U.S. Catholic Church’s humanitarian outreach to scores of countries. That’s because Catholic Relief Services, the U.S. bishops’ foreign aid agency, is a leading recipient of USAID funding, which the organization relies on to serve some 200 million people across 121 countries on five continents. 

Another USAID beneficiary that’s been thrown into turmoil is the PEPFAR programs that assist women in developing countries who are HIV positive, providing health interventions that have saved the lives of millions of women as well as preventing their unborn babies from becoming infected with the virus too. A quartet of prominent pro-lifers took to the pages of The New York Times this week to argue persuasively against a blanket suspension of USAID funding that would interfere with this life-saving provision of care that was initiated during the presidency of George W. Bush.

A court-ordered pause may slow down the Trump administration’s foreign aid steamroller. On Friday, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered the administration to temporarily lift its funding freeze, citing the financial turmoil it has caused farmers and other suppliers and contractors who have complained of undelivered food aid rotting in ports and overdue federal payments for work that was completed in good faith before the freeze went into effect. The judge gave the administration five days to show that it is complying with the order. It’s by no means a guarantee that it will.

The point is, it’s necessary to discern between good and bad spending when it comes to foreign aid, just as in every other area of federal expenditures. As Cardinal Michael Czerny, the prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Development, commented to Associated Press, “If the government thinks that its programs have been distorted by ideology, well, then they should reform the programs. Many people would say that shutting down is not the best way to reform them.”

No one in Congress has been more forceful in denouncing the agency’s distorted priorities and demanding more accountability over its spending than Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, who authored a scathing Feb. 9 Wall Street Journal commentary titled “USAID is a Rogue Agency.”

But the U.S. senator qualified her criticisms. “Many other groups supported by USAID are doing great work, such as caring for orphans and people living with HIV,” she acknowledged. “Imagine how much more good work could be supported with the dollars that instead ended up enriching terrorists, sex traffickers, mad scientists and drug cartels.”

Trump has heralded a return to common sense as the rallying cry of his new administration. In this instance, the sensible approach would be to pull the plug on the most egregious programs while putting others that may raise red flags on notice that funding may be discontinued if they fail to meet certain benchmarks of accountability, by a reasonable deadline.

The reality is that separating the wheat from the chaff, while necessary, can’t happen overnight.