The price of humanitarian principles: 2 billion USD
The UN humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher has described the United States’ US $2 billion contribution to OCHA managed humanitarian funds as a “very very significant landmark.” Humanitarians, and the people who have been forced to rely on humanitarian aid, deserve a bit more honesty.
At a moment of historic humanitarian need, a 85% reduction in U.S contribution does not really represent renewed leadership. Rather, it reveals how little it now costs to exert leverage over the governance and direction of the humanitarian system.
For decades, the humanitarian compact rested on an implicit, unequal, bargain: donors would provide predictable, sufficient funding, and humanitarian actors would deliver assistance impartially, independently, and based on need.
NGOs, primarily local and community based units, delivered the vast majority of this aid. Over the past two decades, in one crisis after another, they absorbed systemic shocks, compensated for political failure, maintained access amid the collapse of diplomacy, and sustained long-term responses in the absence of durable political settlements.
Much of this work rested on a shared assumption: that the UN humanitarian system would continue to provide predictability, scale, convening authority, and a degree of insulation from overt politicisation.
That assumption no longer holds.
If the humanitarian system is now being asked to permanently contort what it funds, who it supports, and how assistance is delivered, the cost of Fletcher’s deal is a transactional model in which access, scale, and principles are at continuous risk of being renegotiated downward.
The enforced de-prioritisation of some of the most acute humanitarian crises — Afghanistan, Palestine, Yemen— is a signal that OCHA is not merely constrained by geopolitics; it is structurally entangled in them. This is a question of what is possible, but also what is institutionally permissible.
Through its emergency and country based funds, will OCHA be able to fund protection programming? Women’s health? Support to LGBTQ communities? In Syria, for example, who decides which partners get funding: Damascus, New York, or D.C? When it comes to allocating those funds: will decisions be shaped by political risk tolerance rather than by proximity to need? When aid needs to cross frontlines, will humanitarian funding be explicitly contingent on the political aims of the current U.S administration?
If the answer to any of the above questions is a “yes,” where does that leave OCHA — fund manager or gatekeeper? Where does that leave other, operational UN agencies? And most importantly, where does it leave the people who cannot be supported because the largest humanitarian donor in the world has written them out of a MoU?
In the days to come, a fundamental recalibration of what the UN system can realistically offer, and what NGOs can realistically absorb, might be required. It is time to ask questions, and it’s time for the UN humanitarian chief to answer them honestly.