The State Department said its new OCHA partnership would bring “accountability” for taxpayer funds after President Donald Trump shrunk America’s foreign aid bureaucracy and paused programs. But the partnership creates no “legally binding obligations” and defers entirely to U.N. policy for managing internal issues, according to a signed “memorandum of understanding” the Washington Examiner obtained. OCHA’s security woes could hinder Trump’s ability to fulfill promises to his base, as conservative policy experts argue that outsourcing tasks to the U.N. agency was a risky idea.

A State Department spokesperson said “liberal critics” are driving the backlash.

“The Department’s partnership with OCHA does not cede control to the UN,” the spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. “It is the most accountable humanitarian framework the Department of State has ever built. What liberal critics are trying to allude to are not liabilities but tangible proof that our model is working.”

“For the first time, the United States sits on OCHA’s pooled fund advisory boards and has embedded Accountability and Impact Teams (AIT) reporting waste, fraud, abuse, and diversion directly back to the Department,” the spokesperson continued. “No previous administration secured that level of visibility or leverage inside UN humanitarian operations. That’s the opposite of ceding control: it’s the Department setting the terms, tying continued funding to measurable performance, and insisting that OCHA ‘adapt, shrink, or die’ rather than operate on autopilot with American taxpayer money.”

OCHA did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.

Where’s the money going?

The State Department’s memo required OCHA to create its Accountability and Impact Teams to “identify, assess, and mitigate” risks affecting U.S.-funded aid.

Securing the supplies is proving to be easier said than done for OCHA and its partnering groups, according to its quarterly report.

“On the night of 16 June, a critically ill and unconscious patient was brought to a primary health care center and died soon after,” the report said about an incident in Bangladesh. “The group that brought the patient became violent, attacking personnel on site and vandalizing the facilities including medical equipment. Some workers were reported trapped inside the facilities during the incident, and were later freed with the support of camp authorities who intervened.”

The encounter led to new security measures, and “an assessment of losses … will be shared with OCHA,” the agency wrote.

For the first $1.9 billion of the State Department funds, OCHA spent 2% of staffing costs on “security” and 7% on “protection,” according to the report. OCHA said it received feedback suggesting it reconsider its budgeting choices.

OCHA also allowed vetting of partnering groups to be “fast-tracked” to get its U.S.-funded programs up and running, the report said.

The agency also mentioned mixed feedback from partnering countries about whether its Accountability and Impact Teams were helping. “Some counterparts have also raised concerns that AITs may function too much in isolation, potentially missing opportunities to flag risks or concerns that could affect the wider response,” the report says.

OCHA’s accountability teams are still a win for transparency, the State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.

“In the high-risk environments where this aid operates, silence — not disclosure — is the real warning sign,” the spokesperson said. “This administration built the AITs specifically so problems would surface and get fixed, not stay buried the way they did under the prior administration. An organization reporting nothing would be far more alarming than one flagging issues and acting on them.”

“The results speak for themselves: 21.1 million people reached, 92 percent of aid reaching the highest-severity populations, 88 percent of resources disbursed within four months, and 13 percent of funding reached local responders — more than triple the historical rate,” the spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. “By any objective measure, this is the fastest, most transparent, and most locally driven humanitarian model the United States has ever funded through the UN.”

Rubio’s dilemma

Trump portrayed humanitarian aid systems as wasteful and mismanaged while he overhauled the bureaucracy throughout 2025. Republican lawmakers also repeatedly called out former President Joe Biden for failing to keep tax dollars in Afghanistan out of the Taliban’s hands.

Cutting staff left Secretary of State Marco Rubio‘s team responsible for numerous programs and dollars once handled by the now-defunct U.S. Agency for International Development. The State Department thus announced in December that OCHA would help drive a “Humanitarian Reset” through its signed memo, which officials did not make public.

“This [memo] reflects the good-faith intentions of the Partners and does not create any legally binding obligations, rights, or liabilities under international law, national law, or any other legal system,” the document said. It adds that “OCHA’s activities are subject to the regulations, rules, policies, and procedures of the United Nations.”

Despite the political appetite for foreign aid reform, conservatives expressed concern at the State Department’s announcement that it would trust OCHA with billions of dollars.

“For context, OCHA has never managed even half this amount of money — the U.S. contribution would double OCHA’s 2025 funding,” experts at the American Enterprise Institute wrote in February about the first $1.9 billion. “Nor does the new [agreement] improve oversight of assistance, leaving that to the UN’s Board of Auditors, Office of Internal Oversight Services and the Joint Inspection Unit — entities that the U.S. Mission to the UN has criticized as inadequate and lacking independence.”

“The State Department’s confidence in the effectiveness of OCHA’s pooled funds is strange,” a Heritage Foundation analyst wrote in July.

OCHA’s quarterly report went to U.S. officials just days after the State Department demanded it “fully investigate” Hamas‘s meddling in Gaza aid programs, activities the department said it is not funding. The United Nations already lost funds for its Palestinian refugee agency over reports that it employed people who participated in Hamas’s 2023 massacre in Israel.

STATE DEPARTMENT DEMANDS US-FUNDED UN AGENCY ‘FULLY INVESTIGATE’ HAMAS INVOLVEMENT IN AID PROGRAMS

Nonetheless, Rubio’s officials said in December that they plan to one day channel “all U.S. funding of UN humanitarian work” through OCHA.

“The Department of State will keep holding OCHA to these standards, using the very oversight tools this [memorandum] created, and will not apologize for a system that identifies problems instead of hiding them,” the State Department spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.