Aid groups crippled by foreign aid cuts plead for funds as Middle East humanitarian crisis grows

Humanitarian organizations under intense strain because of the United States’ steep cuts to foreign aid say they are scrambling to find the funds needed to respond to the war in the Middle East, where millions of people have already been displaced by the widening conflict.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision last year to dissolve the U.S. Agency for International Development — once the world’s leading donor of humanitarian assistance — forced aid groups around the world to fire tens of thousands of staffers and shutter lifesaving programs. Now, some of those same groups are struggling to mount a response in the Middle East. Already, the United Nations’ refugee agency, UNHCR, estimates 3.2 million people inside Iran and 1 million people in Lebanon have been displaced since the U.S. and Israel launched strikes against Iran on Feb. 28.

The UNHCR — which axed 30% of its staff last year due to the funding cuts — has issued an urgent appeal for donations, noting that in Lebanon alone, the agency needs an additional $61 million to support 600,000 people over just the next three months. Across the region, the agency said its operations are “dramatically underfunded,” particularly in Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan.

“The drop in global humanitarian funding is having a major impact on humanitarian actors at the very moment as needs are rising sharply,” the UNHCR said in an email to The Associated Press. “These reductions mean we are operating with far fewer people and resources at a time when displacement is growing.”

The aid groups’ mounting anxieties come as the U.N.’s World Food Program — which saw its funding cut by a third last year — warned last week that nearly 45 million more people could face acute hunger if the war doesn’t end by the middle of the year and if oil prices stay above $100 a barrel.

“If this conflict continues, it will send shockwaves across the globe, and families who already cannot afford their next meal will be hit the hardest,” WFP's deputy executive director and chief operating officer Carl Skau said in a statement. “Without an adequately funded humanitarian response, it could spell catastrophe for millions already on the edge.”

Though the U.S. only spent around 1% of its budget on foreign assistance, Trump’s now-shuttered Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, dismantled USAID after the president dubbed it a waste of money. Several other countries also cut humanitarian aid, in some cases saying they needed the funds to shore up defense.

The results have been devastating for the world’s most vulnerable; children have starved to death,young girls have been forced into underage marriage and impoverished HIV-positive patients have struggled in vain to find lifesaving medication.

In response to questions from the AP, the State Department said it was dedicating more than $40 million in additional emergency assistance to Lebanon, including to the WFP. The department also said it was working with the U.N. and other partners to address humanitarian needs, but urged other countries to step up. Last week, the agency announced it was setting up 12 regional hubs to coordinate disaster and emergency humanitarian responses worldwide under a new bureau overseeing some of the functions once handled by USAID.

“The U.S. remains the most generous country in the world, our reforms make our assistance more effective, and President Trump’s actions are making the world safer, including for the Iranian people who have been slaughtered by the regime," State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said in a statement to the AP. “Instead of funding terrorists, the regime should fund water, food, and energy infrastructure.”

Aid workers have criticized the amount of money being spent on the war, when the humanitarian response remains severely underfunded. The first week of the war alone cost $11.3 billion, according to the Pentagon.

“That is close to the total amount of all global humanitarian aid spending in the final year of the Biden administration,” said Refugees International president Jeremy Konyndyk, who served as the director of USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Obama administration. “This administration will have burned through that amount of money in a week. So it also puts a lie to the argument that what DOGE did was ever even remotely about the budget.”

The Pentagon, meanwhile, is seeking an additional $200 billion in funds for the war. When queried about the figure last week, Trump said, “This is a very volatile world.” In a separate exchange with reporters about the funding request, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said: “It takes money to kill bad guys.”

The U.N.’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, condemned the cost of the war amid the world’s cascading crises. The agency’s campaign to raise $23 billion to support 87 million people worldwide this year is only one-third funded.

“We're seeing staggering amounts of money — reportedly a billion dollars a day — spent on destruction, while some politicians boast of cutting aid to those in gravest danger globally,” Fletcher said in a March 11 briefing to the U.N. Security Council. “With a fraction of this money, we can save millions of lives globally.”

In January, the U.S. Congress appropriated $5.5 billion for humanitarian aid as part of its 2026 foreign aid package. Humanitarians say that money should be released to the aid groups trying to mitigate the crisis in the Middle East.

“They have the money, they have the staff, they have the information about what’s happening on the ground -- they’re deciding not to do anything about it,” said Sam Vigersky, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who worked at USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance from 2014 to 2019.

The State Department said it was inaccurate to suggest it was not actively using appropriated humanitarian resources and said it was spending the money across the world “as needed." The agency pointed to its plans to release $40 million in additional emergency funds to Lebanon, and said many regional responses were already “well-funded” by the U.S.'s recent $2 billion contribution to a U.N. umbrella fund for humanitarian aid.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly did not answer AP’s questions about whether the U.S. planned to allocate additional funding to the humanitarian response in the Middle East, instead saying the U.S. remained the world’s largest provider of aid and that Trump “will always stand on the side of the Iranian people and all innocent civilians.”

“There is nothing more humanitarian than eliminating the short- and long-term threats posed by the terrorist Iranian regime, which has targeted civilians throughout the region and long committed egregious human rights abuses against their own people,” Kelly said in a statement to the AP.

Compounding aid groups’ woes are surging food and fuel prices and delays to humanitarian deliveries due to the disruption of shipping routes through the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian strikes on commercial ships in and around the strait have effectively closed it.

That has caused a ripple effect for aid groups responding to humanitarian crises across the world, Vigersky said.

“They’re cut off from billions of dollars of funding, their costs to do these programs are going up and the markets that they’re working in have increased food prices for populations that are already starving,” Vigersky said.

The International Rescue Committee said last week that shipping delays caused by the war were disrupting supply chains for temperature-sensitive items used in health care, nutrition programs and vaccine delivery. In one case, the IRC said around $130,000 worth of urgently-needed pharmaceutical supplies intended for the group's humanitarian response in Sudan were stranded in Dubai.

The IRC urged governments to provide flexible, predictable funding.

“IRC’s Lebanon program was itself faced with funding cuts just as a major scale-up is needed,” the group's president, David Miliband, said in a statement. “The result is an overstretched humanitarian system forced into impossible trade-offs.”

Beyond aid groups, governments, too, have begun sounding the alarm about the war’s humanitarian toll. Last week, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement warning that a significant Israeli ground offensive in Lebanon would have “devastating humanitarian consequences” and must be averted.