On Thursday, February 11, 2010, InterAction's President and CEO, Samuel A. Worthington sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah regarding a recent announcement made by USAID's Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) that it would reduce funding across all regions to make room for its massive response in Haiti. In the letter, InterAction urged the administration and Congress to pass a supplemental funding measure as soon as possible to fund the U.S. response in Haiti and in the meantime find a stop-gap that neither reduces emergency response in other regions nor sacrifices long-term development programs.
The situation draws attention to the need for reform to the funding of U.S. emergency response: a majority of OFDA’s budget is dedicated from year-to-year to supporting ongoing humanitarian responses in long-term emergencies like those in Darfur, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Without a separate OFDA contingency account for unexpected emergencies, when a major crisis like that in Haiti demands a tremendous share of resources, immediate steps must be taken to pass new funding so that the U.S. response in these other protracted crises does not suffer.
In a paper released in December 2009 – Reform Priorities in Humanitarian Sector – InterAction recommended reforming USAID humanitarian accounts by creating separate funds that would allow OFDA to continue fully funding responses to long-term crises even when unexpected emergencies occur.
