More Lives Saved for Fewer Taxpayer Dollars: Trump Administration Leads “Humanitarian Reset” in the United Nations

"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..."