OAN Staff Blake Wolf
9:26 AM – Tuesday, December 30, 2025
Following major cuts in foreign aid by the Trump administration, the United States pledged $2 billion to the United Nations’ humanitarian aid program on Monday.
The funds represent a small fraction of the humanitarian aid levels seen under previous administrations, which in recent years have ballooned to as much as $17 billion annually, while still preserving the United States’ status as the world’s leading humanitarian donor.
The newly pledged funds will be streamlined through the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, representing a new assistance model aimed at increasing efficiency and accountability, according to the State Department.
The new model shifts away from piecemeal U.S. contributions to individual aid requests, a move framed as a “humanitarian reset.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the pledge in an X post on Monday.
“The United States remains the most generous nation in the world for lifesaving humanitarian assistance—but under @POTUS’s leadership taxpayer dollars will never fund waste, anti-Americanism, or inefficiency,” Rubio wrote.
“Today, the @StateDept and United Nations signed an agreement that radically reforms the way the U.S. programs, funds, and oversees UN-administered humanitarian work, ensuring that more lives will be saved for fewer U.S. taxpayer dollars.”
“This new model will better share the burden of U.N. humanitarian work with other developed countries and will require the U.N. to cut bloat, remove duplication, and commit to powerful new impact, accountability and oversight mechanisms,” Rubio added.
Despite critics arguing that the cutbacks have driven millions toward hunger around the world, the State Department asserted its position that the United States will not revert to prior spending levels, noting that “individual U.N. agencies will need to adapt, shrink, or die.”
“The piggy bank is not open to organizations that just want to return to the old system,” stated Jeremy Lewin, the U.S. State Department official in charge of foreign assistance, on Monday. “President Trump has made clear that the system is dead.”
“No one wants to be an aid recipient. No one wants to be living in a UNHCR camp because they’ve been displaced by conflict,” Lewin added. “So the best thing that we can do to decrease costs, and President Trump recognizes this, and that’s why he’s the president of peace, is by ending armed conflict and allowing communities to get back to peace and prosperity.”
Along with the United States, other nations such as Britain, France, Germany, and Japan have also recently reduced funding for UN aid programs while requesting reforms.
“The agreement requires the U.N. to consolidate humanitarian functions to reduce bureaucratic overhead, unnecessary duplication, and ideological creep,” the State Department wrote in a statement.
“Nowhere is reform more important than the humanitarian agencies, which perform some of the U.N.’s most critical work,” the State Department continued.
“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 bring reform to the way we fund, oversee, and integrate with U.N. humanitarian efforts.”
The new program will allocate funds for ongoing crises or nations in need, initially including a total of 17 countries, such as Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Syria, and Ukraine.
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