The State Department and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to revamp its humanitarian assistance.
The agreement, made in connection with the OCHA’s “Humanitarian Reset,” reaffirms the United States’ commitment to support humanitarian action, while also implementing reforms benefitting the taxpayer, the State Department explained.
“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. “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,” Lewin added.
As part of the agreement, the United States will provide a $2 billion commitment to fund life-saving measures in dozens of countries. Due to the new model based on efficiency and hyper-prioritizations, the system is expected to save taxpayers nearly $1.9 billion.
The agreement also requires the United Nations to consolidate functions in order to reduce bureaucratic overhead, demanding that individual agencies “adapt, shrink, or die.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced in July that the “era of government-sanctioned inefficiency has officially come to an end.”
“Americans should not pay taxes to fund failed governments in faraway lands,” Rubio added in a State Department Substack post. “Moving forward, our assistance will be targeted and time limited. We will favor those nations that have demonstrated both the ability and willingness to help themselves and will target our resources to areas where they can have a multiplier effect and catalyze durable private sector, including American companies, and global investment.”
