Press Release
Today, in Geneva, the U.S. Department of State and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) outlining a new paradigm for U.S. funding of UN humanitarian assistance. The landmark agreement, made in connection with OCHA’s “Humanitarian Reset,” reaffirms the United States’ ironclad commitment to supporting critical life-saving humanitarian action around the world, while implementing vital reforms to make that work more impactful, efficient, and accountable to the American taxpayer. U.S. financial commitments made today are expected to provide life-saving support to tens of millions of people in dire need around the world in 2026.
The United States helped found the United Nations and has been both the largest funder of the UN system, and the most generous humanitarian donor in history.
Yet, as President Trump has made clear, the UN has increasingly failed to live up to its promise. While annual U.S. contributions to the UN have skyrocketed in recent years – reaching $8-10 billion annually in voluntary contributions to the UN for humanitarian assistance – many UN bodies have abandoned their mission of promoting global peace and security – too often espousing radical social ideologies, acting to undermine American interests and values, and undermining peace, sovereignty, and shared prosperity. That is precisely why President Trump has led historic reforms to our wayward foreign assistance architecture and directed an exacting review of American participation and support for international organizations, with the aim of reforming the UN system and reorienting the organization back to its origins.
Nowhere is reform more important than in the humanitarian agencies, which perform some of the UN’s most critical work. The UN’s web of overlapping humanitarian mandates have long suffered from ideological creep, maddening duplication and bureaucratic inefficiencies, and poor coordination. Other humanitarian donors have joined President Trump in making clear that structural reform to bring the humanitarian system back to its life-saving mandate is long overdue.
Today’s agreement is a critical step in those reform efforts, balancing President Trump’s commitment to remaining the world’s most generous nation, with the imperative to use U.S. taxpayer dollars responsibly by reforming the way we fund, oversee, and integrate with UN humanitarian efforts.
It establishes a new paradigm whereby the United States will replace the current unaccountable morass of projectized grants with a set of consolidated and flexible pooled fund vehicles at the country or crisis level. These vehicles will be administered by OCHA pursuant to comprehensive country-level policy agreements that will govern the delivery of UN humanitarian assistance in specific countries of operation and ensure alignment with American interests and priorities. These agreements will focus funding on hyper-prioritized life-saving activities; provide for powerful new impact, accountability, and oversight mechanisms; enhance the efficiency and flexibility of humanitarian operations; and better share the burden of humanitarian work across major donors. This new model will allow the Department to manage humanitarian assistance more efficiently and to achieve nearly double the life-saving impact of each U.S. dollar spent on UN administered humanitarian aid.
As part of this new structure, the United States is pledging an initial $2 billion anchor commitment to fund life-saving assistance activities in dozens of countries. This historic contribution is expected to shield tens of millions of people from hunger, disease, and the devastation of war in 2026 alone. Because of significantly enhanced efficiency and hyper-prioritization on life-saving impacts, this new model is also expected to save U.S. taxpayers nearly $1.9 billion dollars compared to older, outdated grant funding models.
“I warmly thank the United States for this extraordinary commitment to humanitarian action – a powerful act of leadership and generosity that will help save millions of lives,” said UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher. “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.”
“Today’s agreement ushers in a new era of UN humanitarian action and U.S. leadership in the UN system,” said Jeremy Lewin, Senior Official for Foreign Assistance, Humanitarian Affairs and Religious Freedom (F). “It shifts U.S. funding of UN humanitarian work onto clearly defined, accountable, efficient, and hyper-prioritized funding mechanisms to ensure that every taxpayer dollar spent of humanitarian assistance both advances American national interests and achieves the greatest possible lifesaving impact. Over President Trump’s second term, this partnership will save tens of millions of lives all around the world, while also delivering billions in efficiency-oriented savings to American taxpayers.”
“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,” said Michael Waltz, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
Over time, the Department of State expects all U.S. funding of UN humanitarian work to be channeled through OCHA pooled fund vehicles. This new model has several key benefits for the United States and American taxpayers:
- Hyper-prioritized projects, efficiency-oriented incentives, and negative earmarks will maximize life-saving humanitarian impact per dollar. This means more lives saved for fewer taxpayer dollars, allowing the Trump Administration to reduce the burden of the UN system on the American taxpayer without compromising important life-saving work.
- Pooled vehicles will facilitate greater burden sharing among major humanitarian donors, allowing U.S. funds to be more easily matched by other humanitarian donors and private funding.
- Flexible funding vehicles will allow the Department of State to administer humanitarian funding more efficiently, materially reducing administrative burdens on the Department, and allowing diplomats to spend less time on bureaucratic grant management and more of their time on policy oversight, accountability, and impact analysis. Similar savings within the UN system will facilitate consolidation and allow UN agencies to dedicate more of their resources to frontline humanitarian delivery.
- Funds will be fully flexible across UN and non-UN implementing partners, allowing OCHA to more rapidly and effectively meet emerging needs and address evolving crises.
- OCHA is creating new Accountability and Impact Teams and instituting new reporting and oversight procedures that will give U.S. policymakers greater insight into humanitarian operations and ensure that funds are efficiently allocated and are never diverted to terrorist groups or American adversaries.
- The agreement requires the UN to consolidate humanitarian functions to reduce bureaucratic overhead, unnecessary duplication, and ideological creep. Individual UN agencies will need to adapt, shrink, or die.
