United States Announces More Than $1 Billion in Assistance to UNICEF and World Food Program to Address Global Humanitarian Needs

Today, the United States announced more than $1 billion in humanitarian and disaster response assistance to UNICEF and the World Food Program (WFP) through new global macro awards, which cover life-saving support in more than 40 countries. This announcement builds directly on the tremendous success of the Trump Administration’s landmark December 2025 “Humanitarian Reset” memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). That MOU has already led to historic reforms to the bloated UN humanitarian bureaucracy, bringing activities under a single local Humanitarian/Resident coordinator, enhancing efficiency and delivering measurable impact, improving accountability and eliminating waste, fraud and abuse, and slashing bureaucracy to spend more on life-saving frontline work and less on overhead.

The more than $218 million in assistance to UNICEF and more than $800 million to WFP announced today are the second and third in a series of global State Department awards to trusted and vetted implementing organizations. These awards replace the previous model of fragmented, duplicative individual grants that generated excessive overhead, created unpredictability for implementers, and diluted impact across many competing priorities. These awards reflect a new model of humanitarian assistance built on speed, accountability, measurable impact, and the elimination of bureaucratic waste. Implementers can mobilize quickly, in some cases within 24 hours, ensuring that U.S. taxpayer dollars reach those in need without delay.

• Advancing UN Reform: This support to UNICEF and WFP further demonstrates the Administration’s commitment to advancing UN reform. By directing resources to organizations that meet rigorous performance standards and deliver measurable results, the United States is incentivizing the broader humanitarian system to adopt the efficiency, transparency, and accountability that American taxpayers expect. The streamlining of the UN’s nutrition supply chain, reducing duplication and lowering costs, is one concrete example of what reform-oriented partnership can achieve.

• Multi-Sectoral Assistance in Ongoing Crises: UNICEF and WFP will use this funding to provide multi-sectoral assistance in line with their mandates, across the food, nutrition, health, child protection, logistics, and water and sanitation sectors, in countries with ongoing significant levels of humanitarian need, including Ethiopia, Burma, and Ukraine. Assistance will be targeted using the same hyper-prioritization methodology that has already proven its effectiveness under the Humanitarian Reset, ensuring resources flow to the most acute needs first. This methodology, developed and stress-tested through OCHA’s dedicated Accountability and Impact Teams, ensures that every dollar is directed toward the highest-severity needs, eliminating the diffuse, low-impact spending patterns of the prior model.

• Rapid Response to Disasters and Shocks:
  • Building on OCHA’s demonstrated capacity to deliver assistance at unprecedented speed and scale, today’s announcement reflects the United States’ confidence in a partner that has already set a new standard for rapid humanitarian response. In just four months, OCHA disbursed 88 percent of available resources into the field, achieving a record seven-day average award disbursement time, several times faster than USAID’s historical average and twice as fast as OCHA’s own previous record. This performance was made possible by OCHA’s dedicated tracking and oversight infrastructure, which provides real-time monitoring of resource flows and outcomes, a level of transparency and rigor that the old, fragmented award model could not achieve.
  • This additional U.S. investment extends that momentum to UNICEF and WFP, enabling both organizations to deliver new assistance where it is needed most, whether responding to sudden-onset disasters or addressing surges in needs within ongoing complex emergencies. By consolidating funding into these awards, UNICEF and WFP gain the budget predictability needed to pre-position resources, maintain staffing, and respond immediately, bypassing lengthy procurement processes and sustaining the pace of a model that has proven it can move at the speed that crises demand.

• Complementarity with Other Assistance: State Department staff are working closely with Catholic Relief Services, UNICEF, WFP, and other implementers, including OCHA, to ensure that U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance is delivered in an efficient and accountable manner that saves lives around the world, while reducing administrative overhead and duplicative efforts.

The State Department looks forward to continuing our work with UNICEF, WFP, and other key implementers to achieve a faster, more accountable, efficient, impact-driven, locally driven and hyper-prioritized model of humanitarian assistance.