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Critics worry a Trump pick will steer WFP along US ideological lines. But climate change and gender already seem to be disappearing from key planning documents.
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Today: WFP scrubs climate and gender, Luke Lindberg’s baseball analogies, and how US warships connect aid leaders.
Luke Lindberg-isms |
Luke Lindberg is set to be the new executive director at the World Food Programme. The move to put an “America First” pick at the heart of the humanitarian system is worrying many – critics see it as a drive to reshape aid along ideological lines.
Lindberg is mostly unknown in humanitarian circles, given his apparent lack of aid experience. He’s also a relative newcomer to national US politics, even though he’s plucked from the political elite through his father-in-law, US Senate majority leader John Thune.
That leaves observers to comb through social media feeds and public appearances for clues about Lindberg’s intentions. His personal Twitter feed has been well-examined by worried WFP staffers and the chattering class – sniper rifles, Israel, stars and stripes, South Dakota beef, and barely worn cowboy hats abound (Lindberg is from the northeast state of Vermont, which may be better known for progressive ice cream and Bernie Sanders).
A more circumspect Twitter feed created for his WFP bid adopts the generic language of most official aid accounts. Recent public appearances offer more hints and suggest a penchant for analogies as American as apple pie smushed by a stray foul ball launched into the cheap seats.
- FED: Lindberg is trying out mnemonics. In an appearance on right-wing US network Newsmax, Lindberg floated what he called a “FED initiative”. The F stands for feeding people, the E is excellence (in operations), and the D is for donors. If UN relief chief Tom Fletcher is running out of D and R words, perhaps the pair can brainstorm at the next IASC meeting.
- Let’s Get Folks Fed™: In case the past-tense acronym was too subtle, Lindberg summarises his plans for WFP as a “lets get folks fed initiative”. It’s at least a little clearer than “Flagship Initiative”, no?
- “Mission creep”: The Trump administration has used funding and policy to contort humanitarian and health aid, and to attack anything focused on equity, climate, or gender (more on how that’s going below). What does this look like when extended to plopping “America First” Lindberg at the apex of the global humanitarian system? Speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations briefing this month, Lindberg said his priority would be “focusing on the mission”, and ensuring WFP “doesn’t get pulled in too many different directions”. “I think there’s often times mission creep at the United Nations,” he said, “and WFP has a really clear mandate.”
- Gym and cookies: Lindberg is a believer in self-improvement. “If you think about the way in which I operate my life, or you might operate your life, you go to the gym… you want to get that extra rep in, or maybe you eat one fewer cookies in the week,” he said. “I think there’s all kinds of tools out there in the world today that can make even the best organisations a little bit better.”
- Baseball: Asked about working with other agencies, Lindberg pitched a baseball analogy: “When you knock a cover off a baseball, it’s usually because it has weak seams. It’s not because the cover itself breaks,” he said. “And that’s really how organisations interact… for example, the Rome-based agencies are often talked about together – which is IFAD, FAO, and World Food Programme. How can the three of those organisations work together more effectively? The seams are where we’re going to figure out… and I think we have to show we have strong seams.”
What Lindberg’s America First alum are up to: Lindberg’s old stomping grounds at the America First Policy Institute is in the news. WIRED reports that staff at the Trump-aligned think tank “have burrowed their way into the US Census Bureau, where they have access to sensitive data and have contributed to a public report that bolsters conspiracy theories undermining trust in elections ahead of the midterms”. Lindberg’s AFPI staff page seems to be offline, but the organisation previously described him as an “influential economist” joining an “all-star lineup”. Careful readers may note that WFP’s organisational strategy leverages massive amounts of people’s data (which is occasionally attacked and exposed), and that the agency recently renewed a controversial partnership with military contractor and analytics firm Palantir.
What Lindberg has in common with CARE USA’s CEO: Here’s a fun factoid: Lindberg’s sister-in-law, Larissa Thune Hargens, is a ship sponsor for the USS Pierre, a combat ship armed with missile launchers, naval guns that can fire 220 rounds per minute at a target kilometres away, and a drone-launching flight deck. As ship sponsor, Thune Hargens’ initials are welded into the ship’s keel plate (her grandfather was a US navy fighter pilot). Eagle-eyed readers may recall that Michelle Nunn, the CEO of CARE USA, has a similar honour: Her initials are etched into the future USS Sam Nunn, a guided-missile destroyer. That ship (named after her father, a former US senator) will join a fleet that spent a chunk of 2026 unloading so many Tomahawk missiles on Iran that it drained the US stockpile. Could humanitarian family connections to US warships become a key sector trend for 2027?
WFP’s changing climate |
Climate change and gender are mysteriously disappearing from WFP’s planning documents.
WFP’s executive board – its governing body led by member states – is in the middle of debating the agency’s management workplan for the upcoming year and beyond. Climate change fuels or worsens many of the crises WFP responds to, yet terms like “climate change” or “climate crisis” are missing from the current draft. Instead, there are a few blunted references to climate “events”, “risks”, “anomalies”, and “climate-related shocks”. There is one reference to “gender”, in the term gender-based violence. Compare that with the same management plan for 2025, approved just before the second Trump administration took power. There’s a liberal dusting of “climate change”, a whole section on the “climate crisis”, and 17 mentions of “gender”.
The differences are more stark when browsing through a dozen draft country-level strategic plans – many for countries that are among the world’s most impacted by climate change. The term “climate change” appears just a single time across all 12 plans – in a footnote referencing the title of a Tajikistan government strategy. The word “climate”, in any form, is missing in half the documents. The word “gender” does not appear anywhere.
Compare this to current strategic plans for the same countries. Mozambique’s 2022-2026 plan mentions “climate” 43 times; “gender” is used 53 times. Burkina Faso’s current strategic plan uses “climate” and “gender” 27 and 53 times, respectively. There are 40 mentions of “climate” and 68 mentions of “gender” in Sudan’s current plan. Climate is referenced 26 times in a current plan for Caribbean countries, and not at all in the future draft plan. Scientists say climate change enhanced the intensity of 2025’s deadly Hurricane Melissa, which tore across the region.
- Scrubbing: It’s not a new trend, of course, and it goes well beyond WFP. In July, The Independent examined how WFP and agencies like IOM, UNHCR, and UNDP also seemed to be stripping “climate change” from their strategic documents (notable exceptions: OCHA and UNICEF). Several humanitarian organisations were busy erasing climate change, gender, or diversity from their language as the Trump administration came to power. In the case of CARE, that scrubbing appears to have started within days of Trump’s re-election, before any policy threats were even uttered. The International Rescue Committee cut, then appeared to bring diversity back – but only outside the US.
- Does it matter: On one hand, not using the words “climate” or “gender” doesn’t stop organisations from continuing to do the work. “Resilience” is still a big part of WFP’s vibe. On the other hand, it’s hard to be a leader on climate or gender if you won’t use the word. It has a chilling effect on programming, grant-funding, and what gets prioritised on the ground, humanitarian officials at other organisations have told us.
- Co-opting: There’s understandable concern about Lindberg being part of an “America First” spear that captures and reshapes the humanitarian system. But in some humanitarian organisations, the ground work on erasing climate, gender, and diversity has already been done – at least on paper. And it didn’t take a Trump pick being named executive director.
Linklings |
Repurposing international organisations: This study, published in the journal Politics, examines how far-right governments steer funding to align with anti-immigration agendas. A key argument: Funding is shifting away from UNHCR, which is focused on asylum and rights, and toward IOM, seen as more geared to returns. Readers may recall that in the early days of the US aid cuts, the UN’s migration agency somewhat eagerly raised a hand amid a “rising demand for return assistance” and “US leadership in global humanitarian response”. At the time, US authorities were dismantling aid and launching widespread roundups of perceived migrants.
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