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Today: Where are the UN cuts, what dependency looks like, and Gaza’s donkeys.
On the radar|
Move fast and break things: It wouldn’t be a week in 2025 without confusion and gaslighting, so here’s a bit more: After the Trump and Musk machinery moved to terminate some 90% of US foreign aid contracts last week, some aid groups reported that a few of those termination notices were rescinded. Then, some said their notices rescinding the termination notices were themselves rescinded. “One organisation got a stop work order, then a waiver, then a termination, then a termination reversal, then a note that the reversal was in error,” tweeted Tom Hart, boss of the US NGO network InterAction.
Where are the UN cuts? An observation: NGOs have been much faster to lay off staff than UN agencies. Significant layoffs or furloughs have started or are in the works across the NGO alphabet, from IRC to NRC to DRC, or Mercy Corps to Save the Children. That’s not yet the case at many big UN agencies – the agency for migration, IOM, which has lost significant numbers of staff working on cancelled resettlement programmes, is a big exception (the refugee agency, UNHCR, has also signalled 600 positions are at risk). NGOs seemed to read the writing on the wall early on after Trump re-took office. While NGOs were readying layoffs, UN agencies were talking of hiring freezes and limits on travel. Given the extensive vacancies at UN agencies, freezes still have a significant impact on staffing. But on the grand scale of management responses, they’re a bit closer to turning off the pizza ovens than they are to a five-alarm fire brigade.
Why? We polled a few aid types in or adjacent to the UN system for possible explanations. UN agencies may have more liquidity or institutional funding, while NGOs are more likely to be direct implementers and have more project-based programming and staff. That’s one reason cuts at IOM, which has chased project funding to such a degree that 97% of its funding is earmarked, have been so big. Another explanation: Big agencies like the World Food Programme and UNHCR already started cuts and restructuring before Trump 2.0 (and ahead of NGOs like IRC and Save the Children), so there’s less to cut. There’s also the sheer cost of layoffs: the UN’s ranks are swelled by a short-term workforce with little job security, but it’s also top-heavy with long-term continuing contracts that are costly to terminate. Another person noted that public disclosure or internal openness just isn’t part of the UN vibe. A less charitable but not uncommon take: UN agencies, one observer told us, had their “heads in the sand”, as their actions aren’t keeping pace with the existential severity of the funding crisis. Still, many saw last week’s blessed US termination notices as a pivot point.
Meanwhile: Cuts at Save the Children “impact upwards of 2,300 country office staff”, the organisation said, warning of “significant reductions to global teams” in the pipeline. It’s unclear if these are entirely related to the US cuts or to a divisive restructuring already underway. And World Vision may lay off some 3,000 workers, Devex reported.
What’s the humanitarian narrative, redux: There has been a surge in “negative discourse about aid” on social media since the US funding freeze, data analysts Insecurity Insight said in a new report focused on countries in the Sahel. It’s the latest report to detail what’s commonly (but sometimes problematically) labelled as misinformation and disinformation on aid. Tracking, countering, or reframing harmful information is one matter. Listening to and building trust with communities so that harmful information has a harder time taking root is another. Humanitarians struggle with both.
Acronymage|
CVA: US funding cuts would see a 42% reduction in global volumes of cash and voucher assistance this year, the CALP Network said in a new report. This would bring the use of cash as aid back to 2017 levels – a year after the Grand Bargain reforms pledged to boost cash.
ICVA: Two thirds of members have reduced or suspended programmes, the elaborately named NGO network, ICVA, reported. Local organisations have been the hardest hit.
SHADH: The UK-based Safe Haven for Donkeys in the Holy Land is raising money to help the working donkeys of Gaza. ”I don’t think there are animals anywhere on earth facing such unimaginable hardships as in Gaza,” a staff doctor was quoted as saying in a press release. The organisation is also selling these fetching but possibly impractical donkey bookmarks.
Data points|
The US aid cuts have laid bare the humanitarian system’s unhealthy donor concentration, and raised more questions about its independence.
Contributor Mike Pearson crunches the numbers to show how humanitarians got here:
Long-promised changes may now be forced. A takeaway for what comes next: More diverse funding means a more resilient system. Or put another way for people afraid of the D-word: Resilience means more funders, not more funding.
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