R&P grant of $2,375 per refugee must cover 90 days of housing, food, and casework

The U.S. State Department's Reception and Placement (R&P) program gives resettlement agencies a one-time per-capita grant of $2,375 for each refugee. This single payment must cover the security deposit, first month's rent, basic furniture, food, clothing, and the caseworker's time for the first 90 days after arrival. In most U.S. cities, the security deposit and first month's rent alone consume $2,000-$3,000, meaning the grant is already exhausted before a single dollar goes to food, winter coats, or bus passes. So what? Agencies must fundraise privately or rely on volunteer labor for roughly 60% of core services like airport pickup, apartment setup, and job coaching. So what? This means service quality depends entirely on how wealthy and well-connected a given local agency's donor base is, creating a geographic lottery where a refugee placed in a city with a strong volunteer network gets adequate support and one placed elsewhere gets almost none. So what? Refugees in under-resourced offices miss critical 90-day milestones like enrolling in ESL, getting a Social Security card, and attending medical screening, which cascades into delayed employment and longer dependency. The structural reason this persists is that the R&P grant amount has not kept pace with inflation or housing costs, and Congress has no mechanism tying the grant to local cost-of-living indices.