As the global humanitarian sector grapples with the fallout from sweeping aid cuts imposed in 2025 by the United States administration of Donald Trump and other major donors, a United Nations plan to “reset” the system, unveiled a year ago, may be gliding away from its expectations, according to experts.

The so-called humanitarian reset was the talk of the town, in Geneva, at arguably the world’s biggest aid gathering, the Humanitarian Network and Partnership Weeks in late March, after aid funding to the UN plummeted to just over $20 billion this year for its more focused needs, from nearly $50 billion in 2023. The plan, part of the global body’s UN80 reform initiative, was aimed at making assistance more cost-effective by transferring relief governance to local actors, cutting duplication and focusing aid on the most urgent, lifesaving needs — rather than life-sustaining — dubbed “hyperprioritization.”

Since 2025, when the plan identified 115 million people to receive the assistance, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has since narrowed its priority focus to save 87 million lives in 2026.

Speaking to a full house, the reset’s architect, UN aid chief Tom Fletcher, assured attendees that a year in, as the sector comes under attack, the plan would defend the sector’s values and principles. “We won’t compromise,” Fletcher said. Stressing that local actors needed to be more involved in decision-making, he said a “shift in mindset” among donors was needed for that to happen. Last year, he set an ambition that 70 percent of aid funding to be directed to local organizations.

Earlier in the gathering, he told humanitarians that part of the strategy involved ensuring the transfer of “power genuinely to the local level, meaning much more resources and much more influence over what we do with the partners we rely on.” In Sudan, for example, 44 percent of funding to the country went to local partners, he said.

Trust deficit

Some humanitarians who traveled to Geneva for the event, including from Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Afghanistan, noted modest improvements, including a growing interest among international organizations to engage with them.

But they said donors have yet to fully grasp how limited funding may be used more effectively on the ground. Jonas Habimana, founder and executive director at Réseau BIFERD, an aid organization based in eastern Congo, told Geneva Solutions that multiple, complex due diligence processes imposed by donors continue to hinder the participation of smaller local NGOs in aid response.

“When we talk about localization and humanitarian aid decolonization, donors need to be more flexible in order to increase the number of local NGOs accessing partnerships and funding,” he said, noting that donor requirements, which had been defined decades ago for larger, often international, NGOs, now fail to reflect today’s context.

Anna Tazita Samuel, founder and executive director at the South Sudanese NGO Women for Change, emphasized that donors “refusing to trust local actors” remained the biggest challenge.

Over the past year, she said that instead of becoming more empowered as part of the reset, local women’s groups have experienced the opposite. Many groups were having to compete with large international NGOs to lead responses and losing out, in spite of being more familiar with local situations than their global peers. UN Women warned last year that 90 percent of all women’s organizations had been affected by aid cuts. Donor organizations would drop aid boxes in communities “but don’t hear them, when instead what we need is the system to be community lead,” Samuel said.

Hyperprioritizing or selectivity?

But amid ongoing donor cuts, Fletcher succeeded in bringing the US back to the UN’s humanitarian efforts.

In late December, as the American public’s eye was focused on the holidays, a deal was struck between the aid chief and Trump’s recently branded humanitarian affairs official, Jeremy Lewin, to channel $2 billion back into OCHA’s pooled funds — a fraction of the $17 billion the US contributed to UN-coordinated aid programs in 2022. However, the agreement subsequently raised attention for what it did not include by design.

Contrary to the pooled funds’ aim of gathering contributions from several donors for rapid distribution in crisis countries, the deal instead earmarked the funding to match US needs and policies. It excluded several of the world’s most neediest countries, including Afghanistan and Yemen (and the territory of Gaza) as well as climate-related relief from receiving its funds.

“It’s a US-devised UN fund,” said Maryam Deloffre, director of the Humanitarian Action Initiative, based George Washington University. “It’s not operating in any way that a pooled fund typically would operate.”

Recent UN data reveal that the bulk of the new US funding — some 98 per cent — is going to UN agencies and INGOs, with only two percent directed to local groups, compared with 55 percent of all funding across pooled funds going to local and national partners at the end of 2025. Deloffre said that the six-month timeline did not enable localization, making it difficult for small organizations to absorb and implement the funds that quickly.

Risks to aid response

While the US is no longer the world’s biggest aid donor — the European Union has taken that slot — aid workers express concern over the deal’s customized approach.

“We are very worried about the precedent that this type of agreement may create, with conditions and political agendas,” Claudio Rini, operations director at Terre des Hommes, told Geneva Solutions. “We are not naïve.”

He said that reducing US funding from $17 billion to a $2 billion deal created “resource scarcity,” allowing for organizations such as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to fill the void. Distribution sites in the enclave, operated by the opaque US- and Israeli-backed organization between May and October 2025, became flashpoints where more than 1,000 Palestinians were killed by Israeli military forces.

When questioned about concerns regarding the US deal, Fletcher underscored OCHA’s commitment to neutrality, independence and impartiality of aid.

“There is no way we’re going to transact away our principles and values,” Fletcher said, denying that any compromise has been made on aid with the US, but adding that it is not uncommon for donors to make demands on where funding may be spent. “If we compromise our principles here, we become just one more transactional actor.”

Deloffre rejected that other donors may try to condition aid to OCHA as overtly as the Trump administration has done. Instead, she worried that OCHA’s hyperprioritization plans “matches the language” in Washington, requiring that funding be restricted to lifesaving aid: immediate, urgent response in the form of food, medical assistance and shelter, to the expense of protection and food security.

“It’s not a reset, it’s a rollback,” the expert said. ”It’s the vision of the US administration of no strings attached aid: ‘We deliver lifesaving services and products and leave.’ This is an opportunity for the UN to push back against that, and they’re not. They are not challenging that vision.”

This story was originally published in Geneva Solutions. It was updated on April 16, 2026.