"Adapt or Die" - US Cuts Contribution to UN Humanitarian Budget from $17 billion to $2 billion for 2026 : Shared by Tom McDermott
US pledges $2B for UN humanitarian aid as Trump slashes funding and warns agencies to 'adapt or die'
Jamey Keaten and Matthew Lee,
Associated Press, December 28, 2025
Summary:
The United States announced a $2 billion pledge for U.N. humanitarian aid on December 28, representing a dramatic reduction from traditional U.S. humanitarian funding which has run as high as $17 billion annually in recent years.
The pledge establishes an umbrella fund administered through the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), led by Tom Fletcher, from which money will be distributed to individual agencies based on U.S. priorities. Under the arrangement, individual U.N. agencies "will need to adapt, shrink, or die" according to the State Department.
The funding will target 17 countries initially including Bangladesh, Congo, Haiti, Syria and Ukraine, but notably excludes Afghanistan and Palestinian territories.
The move caps a crisis year for U.N. organizations including refugee, migration and food aid agencies, which have slashed spending, projects and thousands of jobs following Trump administration cuts.
Other Western donors including Britain, France, Germany and Japan have also reduced aid allocations this year.
Fletcher's office will "control the spigot" on distribution, consolidating what previously were scattered U.S. contributions to individual appeals. The agreement requires the U.N. to "consolidate humanitarian functions to reduce bureaucratic overhead, unnecessary duplication, and ideological creep."
Quotes:
"This humanitarian reset at the United Nations should deliver more aid with fewer tax dollars — providing more focused, results-driven assistance aligned with U.S foreign policy." — U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz
"The agreement requires the U.N. to consolidate humanitarian functions to reduce bureaucratic overhead, unnecessary duplication, and ideological creep. Individual U.N. agencies will need to adapt, shrink, or die." — U.S. State Department statement
"At a moment of immense global strain, the United States is demonstrating that it is a humanitarian superpower, offering hope to people who have lost everything." — Tom Fletcher, U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator
Rob Carr here - officially retired. While I am against the US government cuts - I am not against holding UN to a higher standard and reducing waste. For starters why not drop OCHA and the UNRC system - this gobbles up a larger portion of grants and has not proven to add value in improving UN efficiency. By proven I don't mean a UN sanctioned evaluation that confirms we are doing well - but my experience of knocking heads with UN coordination does not indicate any impact - and the coordination layers scoops up huge amount of funds for no benefit. What happened to the good old days when a large Un agency was in charge of coordination - it can even be a rotational things. It is not rocket science. Look for darker days - as the UN will have to prove some relevance not only to USG - but to all our donors.
ReplyDeleteand for the second way to save - why not eliminate all UN agency (including UNICEF) regional offices. What a joke. Can anyone explain what is the role of a regional office? The most recent version of UNICEF ROs had a real budget of 1 BILLION USD for the last 4 year cycle - half from RR and half from OR - how could that have been a wise investment?
ReplyDeleteand my apologies to those staff who just left UNICEF regional offices - but it really was not a well thought out expansion of UNICEF - as HQ and ROs both ballooned over the past decade into a overlapping, expensive layer of oversight. It was horrible how the cuts over the last year decimated mostly junior staff in HQ and RO - but with some fore-thought this could have been avoided - with some careful planning to allow staff to retire, separate early and then not replace them in order to slowly tighten the belt. Over a decade we could have become more lean - and been better placed to weather the storm that hit us the past year. I even suggested this- about 8 years ago - only to be publicly humiliated by the DED for suggesting we become more efficient. She hard lessons being learned - with young UNICEF staff paying the price - for the most part.
ReplyDeleteWhat strikes me in this debate is how little attention is paid to the children who will now go without lifesaving assistance and how much attention is given to those staff who may lose their jobs. That imbalance is telling.
ReplyDeleteThe uncomfortable truth is that we have always tended to prioritise ourselves. We cultivated an identity as heroic aid workers while presiding over an organisational model that drifted away from the people it was meant to serve. When I left UNICEF in the early 2000s, approximately 1,200 staff members were based in the New York HQ out of a total workforce of around 7,000. It did not require management excellence insight to see that something was misaligned.
Since that time, matters have worsened rather than improved. The number of HQ staff increased, and regional office staff ballooned, overlapping layers multiplied, and coordination became an industry in itself. Large sums were absorbed by internal processes, reporting, strategic frameworks, and evaluations, often designed more to reassure donors than to demonstrate impact. Too often, the organisation focused on internal comfort, career progression, and post-retirement security rather than making a meaningful difference in Africa.
Much of what is now happening to UN agencies is therefore less an external injustice, but more of an internal reckoning. The donors are not irrational to ask whether development aid has delivered what it promised. Africa, after many decades of assistance, has not caught up; in many respects, it has fallen further behind. That failure cannot be blamed solely on geopolitics or donors. Aid agencies must own their share of responsibility.
This does not diminish sympathy for staff now paying the price for decades of poor strategic decisions. But it does mean we should be honest: the crisis is largely self-inflicted. Calls to “adapt or die” may sound brutal, but ignoring inefficiency, duplication, and drift for decades was cruel to both taxpayers and beneficiaries.
For UN agencies to be relevant, the focus must be on outcomes for those we claim to serve, not on preserving institutions, posts, or lifestyles. Anything else is a moral failure dressed up as concern.
Thanks Thomas - my view has always been that this ballooning of regional office and HQ takes funds away for implementation of programs for children at country level. And as you said, the people who pay the price disproportionately are young P2, P3 and P4s who are at mid career. It did not effect the D1s and D2s who were close the the DEDs that were architects of the Future Focus Initiative (FFI) that entail cutting junior staff by the 1000s and an obsession with musical chairs - moving all these senior staff from New York to Istanbul or Florence or Bangkok.
ReplyDeleteMy point was not to winge about staff - but the ballooning of staff to me always implied less funds reach children. Once UNICEF management became more obsessed with musical chairs of moving staff around and HQ locations - we lost site of children. But as Detlef always contemplates - the aid model is broken - has not delivered results and the trajectory or less developed countries has not budged for many many years - as those governments have failed to: collect revenue, regin in corruption, and channel their own revenue towards the social sectors that benefit children and build a future for them. Of course as cushy retirees who enjoyed unfettered careers in a UNICEF that never cut anything ever - we never experienced that.
To make matters worse - it is not like a person who has been sacked in UNICEF can just re-tool and apply for some other positions in Oxfam or DANIDA - all aid positions have had massive budget cuts. So there is no place to turn as a 45 year old nutritionist with specialization in stunting prevention. A person at mid career who had their post cut - and was given 6 month notice - cannot just go back "home" and move on (assuming they have kept some connection to home and domestic options to retool career and reintegrate the workforce. ).
This shift - the global massive cuts to almost all aid budgets that has deeply affected all organization who depend on it - is unprecedented. Therefore, the steps needed to re-tool careers are also unprecedented. Sitting in my arch chair waiting for my first pension payment to arrive - I offer pretty much NO actionable advice to all the 1000s of staff who have suddenly lost jobs.
I and some other UNICEF colleagues have always pushed host governments wherever I have worked as UNICEF - to shift their budget incrementally towards efforts to improve the lives of their children. for the most part this fell on deaf ears - as it did not really matter what we said so long as those counterparts were enjoying the land cruisers, international trips, meetings at 5 star hotels with limitless buffets (workshop topic was stunting).
Anyway, the debate will continue.