State Department Must Stop Funding Radical U.N. “Humanitarian” Agency

The return in 2025 of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States heralded the historic end to the gross misuse of billions of dollars in foreign aid as a global tool of radical ideological indoctrination that undermined U.S. interests abroad and violated the country’s Judeo-Christian values at home. However, 2026 has seen a partial reversal of American foreign aid policy as the U.S. Department of State directs billions of aid dollars to the radical United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The decision departs from President Trump’s post-election foreign aid architecture and vision of how U.S. aid dollars can and cannot be spent. Defunding radical and hostile global elites remains essential to advancing America’s national security. As such, the State Department must cease its funding of this U.N. agency and strictly adhere to President Trump’s aid reform framework that ties U.S. foreign aid spending to U.S. national interests and values. President Trump Cracks Down on Woke Aid On his first day in office, President Trump paused all foreign aid programs in a historic turning point for this key tool of U.S. foreign policy.[REF] The Administration’s internal review process uncovered how this $50 billion annual international affairs appropriation from the U.S. Congress was misused by its predecessor as a global platform to impose on the world a radical progressive agenda that is politically divisive at home and caused resentment against the United States abroad.[REF] The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), established during the 1960s to counter international communism and the global influence of the Soviet Union, veered off course from its original mandate and was dismantled, its employees dismissed, and its functions absorbed by the U.S. Department of State.[REF] Scant public complaints greeted President Trump’s claim that USAID was “run by radical lunatics.”[REF] Last August, the White House eliminated billions in unspent aid dollars through a “pocket rescission package [to] eliminate woke, weaponized, and wasteful spending.”[REF] Last September, the State Department laid out a new and game-changing approach for its global health security strategy that ended financing to a left-wing global nexus of U.S. and foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), international organizations, and high-cost contractors.[REF] The State Department terminated thousands of ineffective programs, resulting in billions of dollars in savings to U.S. taxpayers.[REF] Furthermore, President Trump prohibited foreign aid spending on the Left’s radical agenda, including on abortion, gender ideology, and discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies. These prohibitions were published in the Federal Register as “Protecting Life in Foreign Assistance,” “Combating Gender Ideology in Foreign Assistance,” and “Combating Discriminatory Equity Ideology in Foreign Assistance Rules.”[REF] Together they form the policy framework of the Protecting Human Flourishing in Foreign Assistance (PHFFA) Policy. President Trump halted U.S. participation in additional global organizations,[REF] including the previously funded United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the pro-Hamas UNRWA. The President also ceased U.S. financing of global climate initiatives.[REF] By the end of 2025 the President had built a strong legal and policy edifice to restore foreign aid as a critical national security instrument of American global power and defund a significant portion of the radical Left’s global political programming. Ending Woke Foreign Aid? Transitioning large-scale portfolios from one government agency to another is complex and difficult, particularly on a short timeline amid ongoing global crises. USAID, now dismantled, had led U.S. government humanitarian and disaster responses for decades. The largest development agency in the world, it disbursed billions of dollars in emergency food and nonfood assistance, much of it in dangerous and difficult-to-reach war-torn areas of the world. That task now falls squarely on the State Department, which must also ensure that foreign aid is in service of U.S. diplomacy. As evidenced by the recent devastating earthquakes in Venezuela, humanitarian aid remains a critical national security tool to prevent politically destabilizing mass migrations to the United States and its allies while aligning with America’s Judeo-Christian values to save lives. The U.S. response to the earthquakes showed that USAID was not needed for effective U.S. crisis response.[REF] A key challenge for the State Department, however, is to identify alternatives to USAID’s traditional partners to carry out its many global initiatives given the extent to which these partners—U.N. agencies, U.S. and foreign nongovernmental organizations, and contractors—are captured by radical progressives.[REF] Prior to the last presidential election, conservatives laid out aid delivery solutions focused on local, especially faith-based, entities that boast expertise, experience, capabilities, and cost savings to deliver aid where it is most needed.[REF] These groups form a natural bulwark against attempts by the global elite to leverage aid to impose secular ideologies on vulnerable communities that adhere to traditional norms and beliefs. The State Department, however, opted to partner with a U.N. aid agency that issues grants to a wide constellation of other woke U.N. agencies and global NGOs that include those specifically banned by the Administration, such as the UNFPA, UNRWA, and World Health Organization (WHO).[REF] Absent aid conditionality, directing billions of U.S. aid money via OCHA risks rejuvenating the global Left’s woke industry and harming American interests and values at home and abroad as many of OCHA’s grantees are U.S.-based NGOs that play partisan roles in American elections.[REF] Ceding Control of U.S. Taxpayer Funds In May 2026, the U.S. Department of State announced “$1.8 billion in life-saving humanitarian funding to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs,” adding to a previous $2 billion pledge, for a total of $3.8 billion.[REF] It averred that “all U.S. funding of UN humanitarian work [will] be channeled through OCHAs pooled fund vehicles.”[REF] The department praised OCHA for “setting a new standard for rapid delivery of assistance at scale to countries in crisis” and described its partnership as a result of a “Historic Memorandum of Understanding…to Advance UN Humanitarian Reforms.” The basis for such praise is not clear. A January 2025 report by USAID’s Office of Inspector General described “resistance from United Nations agencies and foreign-based nongovernmental organizations to sharing information with [the] OIG about potential misconduct.”[REF] It found international groups, including OCHA, to be failing in their “vetting of aid organizations for ties to designated terrorist organizations,” such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and that it was difficult to “obtain data about USAID-funded subawardees.” OCHA lacks an independent inspector general and counts on the U.N. system to conduct investigations. While OCHA boasts a website dashboard listing all its grants, the data provided are incomplete, especially on subawards issued by its grantees. As to “rapid delivery,” OCHA is not an on-the-ground implementer. The speed with which aid is delivered in the field lies with OCHA’s grantees and subgrantees. Moreover, by assigning OCHA the task of serving as the U.S. government’s aid disburser, OCHA, its grantee, and the grantee’s subgrantees each charge cumulative overhead costs eating up much of the funds in administrative costs. The State Department’s confidence in the effectiveness of OCHA’s pooled funds is strange. Pooled (or mixed) funds are “contributions collected into single, unearmarked funds.”[REF] Such funds take in contributions from multiple donors—government and nongovernment—many of which lack in-country capacity to manage their own aid programs and so are willing to cede control of these funds to the discretion of U.N. resident coordinators in beneficiary countries. Past U.S. Administrations avoided contributing to pooled funds—including the first Trump Administration—as doing so empowers U.N. bureaucrats to determine which third-party partners to fund, prohibits the earmarking of funds to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives, and waives donors’ ability to condition aid, such as prescribed by the Administration’s directives prohibiting abortion, gender ideology, DEI programs, and climate agendas.[REF] U.N. Wokeness Run Amok Of the $2.73 billion deposited in 2026 into OCHA’s pooled fund system as of June, more than $2 billion stem from one donor: the United States. Another 20 or so countries have made smaller contributions that are mixed into these country funding pots. Despite providing three-quarters of OCHA’s total pooled funds, the State Department did not condition its aid on the White House rules and is once again funding an ideologically radicalized web of U.N. agencies. According to foreign aid media platform Devex, the State Department issued OCHA waivers on the “expanded Mexico City Policy” and other presidential directives.[REF] Shortly after State’s first disbursement,[REF] OCHA’s head, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Tom Fletcher, pointedly rejected U.S. aid conditionality and affirmed his support for abortion “rights” and “diverse gender identities,” claiming he would not “take that money under those conditions…[even] knowing that it will save millions of lives.”[REF] OCHA’s spokesman confirmed that “no conditions have been placed on these funds and the UN has not compromised on [its] humanitarian principles.” Days after the State Department’s second disbursement, Fletcher affirmed OCHA’s “solidarity with LGBTQI+ communities” and the U.N. Secretariat’s LGBTQI+ Strategy[REF] that “recognizes…gender identity of transgender persons” with a “zero tolerance policy in relation to [their] discrimination and harassment.” Given that local aid recipients in many developing countries are far more conservative than their Western benefactors, OCHA’s policy would disqualify local Christian entities from accessing U.S. funds. In fact, OCHA requires that all awardees and subawardees adopt OCHA’s policy to “strengthen partnerships with diverse representative organizations of LGBTQI+ persons.” Last year, for example, OCHA funded an Albanian LGBT advocacy NGO to combat the country’s “deeply conservative and patriarchal society that often fails to protect vulnerable populations.”[REF] OCHA’s operational requirements and funding preferences, in effect, restore the Biden Administration’s woke foreign aid model.[REF] OCHA actively promotes abortion and funds the UNFPA, the United Nations’ abortion advocacy arm.[REF] OCHA and the UNFPA coordinated their respective COVID-19 global responses in order to “address rights and needs of women and girls.”[REF] This included a $17 million grant to the UNFPA, funded through OCHA’s pooled funds.[REF] This year, OCHA amplified the UNFPA’s messaging, stating that “essential sexual and reproductive health services [including abortion] must be in place from day one.” In this $1 billion fundraising appeal, the UNFPA declared itself “fully aligned with the Global Humanitarian Overview led by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).”[REF] Combating climate change is another OCHA commitment. It manages the United Nations Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF). CERF publishes an annual Climate Action Plan that supports “climate-related humanitarian responses” via OCHA’s pooled funds. OCHA launched the CERF Climate Action Account in 2023 to help the U.N. system to respond to its assertion that humanitarian crises are made worse “by increasingly frequent and severe climate disasters,” an assertion that is under increasing scientific challenge.[REF] Anti-Israel OCHA’s leadership is actively biased against Israel, accusing it of committing genocide in Gaza. Last year, OCHA’s head briefed the U.N. Security Council on the humanitarian situation in Gaza and called on the “Security Council to act decisively to prevent genocide in Gaza.” He laid out the case for genocide citing “entire communities destroyed, refugee camps depopulated,” claiming that Israel is “making starvation a bargaining chip,” and that “Israel is deliberately and unashamedly imposing inhumane conditions on civilians in the occupied Palestinian Territory.” He spotlighted that “the International Court of Justice is considering whether a genocide is taking place in Gaza.”[REF] No word of Hamas’s obvious culpability. Last March, OCHA published a humanitarian situation report detailing purported systematic violence by Israeli forces and settlers against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza, a topic not germane to its core mission of delivering humanitarian aid.[REF] It cited the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza as a source of data to attack Israel. OCHA rarely mentions Hamas—and when it does, it refuses to condemn the terror group as such. Last year, President Trump cut off U.S. funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) for its years-long cozy relationship with Hamas terrorists.[REF] Nevertheless, a month following State’s multibillion-dollar top up, OCHA appointed a former official from the UNRWA as its Acting Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs. Last June at a pledging conference for the UNRWA, the U.S. Representative for U.N. Management and Reform pled with other donors to “stop underwriting an organization that has become a subsidiary of Hamas.”[REF] Yet, most of OCHA’s non-U.S. donors support funding to the UNRWA, including Germany, the world’s second-largest aid donor after the United States.[REF] The Officer-in-Charge of OCHA’s Humanitarian Sector Division overseeing decisions on which crises to fund also worked for UNRWA prior to joining OCHA in 2011. She later returned to Gaza in 2024 as OCHA’s team lead and became an international voice demonizing Israel: “I have never in my humanitarian career seen [this] level of suffering, desperation, and deprivation”[REF]—of course, avoiding blame of Hamas. During her tenure, OCHA was cited 47 times in the anti-Israel U.N. Human Rights Council’s legal analysis, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.[REF] OCHA and the UNRWA publish a joint newsletter on the status of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.[REF] As it is part of the U.N. system, OCHA routinely funds the UNRWA through its country-based pooled funds.[REF] This clearly violates President Trump’s executive action to end U.S. funding for the corrupt UNRWA. Lacking Transparency OCHA provides a public online database to track disbursements of its funds; however, the portal’s transparency lists direct awards but no subawards per USAID’s Office of Inspector General report, which specifically noted “challenges to accountability and transparency…[and] limitations on obtaining data about…subawardees.”[REF] So far this year, OCHA’s pooled funds have issued grants for numerous U.N. agencies and international NGOs, including the WHO, UNFPA, and Plan International, which are expressly prohibited by statute[REF] and White House policy from receiving U.S. funds due to their active promotion of abortion. Other grantees advocate open borders, transgender rights, climate financing, and other progressive agendas. Five Recommendations for the Administration The Trump Administration has made historic reforms to America’s foreign aid apparatus to the benefit of U.S. taxpayers. However, the decision to infuse billions of dollars into a politically hostile U.N. system, absent the required adherence to White House directives governing the use of such aid, needs an urgent reversal. The Administration should: 1. Pause Financial Support. Funding to OCHA should be immediately paused until the U.N. agency, its grantees, and subgrantees agree to expend U.S. funds in line with all White House directives and laws set by the U.S. Congress. Should OCHA refuse U.S. funding on these terms, the ensuing negative consequences will be the fault of these global elites, not the American people. Foreign bureaucrats should have no veto power over how U.S. aid is spent. 2. Require More Transparency on Awards. While the OCHA website provides a detailed list of entities being funded through pooled funding, subawards are not listed. In order to ensure accountability to the U.S. taxpayer, information about subawards should also be provided. Relatedly, OCHA should provide data on the accumulated overhead charges from the layers of awards to include OCHA, awardees, and subawardees. Congressional investigations have shown that up to half of foreign aid disbursements are eaten up by administrative costs.[REF] 3. Engage Faith-Based Partners to Replace Woke Global Entities. Most aid-recipient countries are traditionally conservative and boast local faith-based groups able to provide critical social services in response to disasters. The State Department should direct U.S. embassies to identify local partners with the capacity to directly manage U.S.-funded aid programs. This may require the State Department to hire more contracting officials with some placed within U.S. embassy missions and others within the department’s regional bureaus. State should rely on fixed-amount awards rather than a cost-reimbursement model to facilitate aid localization. 4. Place U.S. Officials in Leadership Positions at OCHA and Other Global Entities that Receive U.S. Contributions. Placing trusted U.S. officials in leadership roles can help to ensure that U.S. funds are disbursed in line with U.S. laws and policies. Recipients of U.S. aid must be required to ensure a politically balanced workforce in contrast to the current left-wing groupthink that dominates them. 5. Mandate Stricter Vetting. All recipients of U.S. foreign assistance must submit themselves to stricter vetting processes to ensure that taxpayer monies are not diverted to terror groups, corrupt government officials, or support for extremist ideologies.[REF] Conclusion OCHA’s policies and practices willfully violate President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting U.S. foreign aid from supporting abortion, gender ideology, the climate agenda, and radical international entities—even though the United States is OCHA’s largest donor. The infusion of billions of dollars of unconditioned U.S. foreign aid into the U.N. universe and its radical networks is a major funding boost to global radical left-wing causes. As a portion of these funds is awarded to progressive NGOs based in the United States, aid dollars help to keep radicals afloat at home during a time when communist ideology has once again taken root. The recommendations provided here will help the State Department to realign its funding with President Trump’s historic foreign aid architecture. Max Primorac is Senior Research Fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation.