A crisis response or a structural reboot?
The recent Reuters report titled “Exclusive: UN eyes big overhaul amid funding crisis, internal memo shows” reveals that the United Nations is contemplating significant structural reforms in response to a severe financial crisis. An internal memo suggests consolidating various UN agencies into four primary departments: peace and security, humanitarian affairs, sustainable development, and human rights. This could involve merging operational functions of major bodies like the World Food Programme, UNICEF, WHO, and the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) into a single humanitarian entity, as well as integrating UNAIDS into the WHO. The memo also proposes relocating staff from high-cost cities and reducing redundancies, including translation services, to address systemic inefficiencies and overlapping mandates.
This proposal to consolidate various UN agencies into fewer departments may seem like a bold step toward streamlining operations and reducing overhead, especially amid persistent funding shortfalls. But while organizational efficiency is important, the real issues facing the UN system run deeper and require a more honest diagnosis.
It is also important to recognize that proposals for reform are not neutral technocratic exercises. They are shaped by a political economy in which powerful donors—often from the Global North—seek greater influence over the UN’s priorities and resource allocations. Consolidation may unintentionally tilt governance further toward donor preferences, sidelining the voices of smaller or less wealthy member states and weakening the multilateral legitimacy of the system.
Who holds the mandate?
First, it is essential to remember that the United Nations is not an NGO scrambling for donor support. Every UN agency was established by a resolution of the General Assembly, where all 193 member states are represented. These same member states conferred the original mandates—and while agencies do enjoy some flexibility in interpreting them, they remain under the authority of Executive Boards made up of member state representatives. These boards meet annually and have the power to halt mission creep or refine mandates as they see fit. If such interventions have been rare, it’s not due to agency overreach alone, but also because member states have often been complicit—tolerating or encouraging shifts in focus without providing the corresponding funding.
Additionally, much of the critique surrounding the UN’s supposed duplication of mandates is overstated. While overlaps exist, they often reflect complementary approaches rather than wasteful redundancy. Agencies like UNICEF and UNHCR may both engage in humanitarian contexts, but they operate under different legal frameworks and bring distinct expertise, networks, and institutional memory. Merging them could dilute specialization and responsiveness rather than enhance efficiency.
The ambition-funding gap, a chronic UN dilemma
Second, member states have frequently handed UN agencies sweeping, even global mandates—often without any realistic assessment of the financing or operational capacity required. As someone who worked for many years at the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), I witnessed this imbalance firsthand. UNCDF is mandated to provide capital support to the world’s 44 least developed countries, but in practice, it has never had the resources to operate even at that modest scale. In many cases, its presence on the ground has been reduced to small-scale operations, sometimes no more than a few hundred thousand dollars annually.
Furthermore, many UN agencies carry symbolic importance beyond their operational work. Bodies like UN Women or UNAIDS represent political recognition of marginalized issues and constituencies. Folding such entities into broader departments may be seen not as reform, but as downgrading political commitments—sending a signal that the UN is retreating from its role as a normative standard-bearer.
What is urgently needed is a sober reassessment of mandates, matched with appropriate financial commitments—applying the basic principle of “funds follow function.” If the international community expects an agency to fulfill a mandate, it must provide all the resources necessary to carry it out. Conversely, if a mandate is no longer relevant or has shrunk in scale, merging the agency or winding it down is a legitimate course of action.
Where the rubber hits the road: The misallocation of UN staffing
Lastly, while UN agencies are sometimes criticized for being bloated, the reality is more complex. Staffing is misallocated. A disproportionate number of permanent, senior positions remain in headquarters—New York, Geneva, and other central hubs—while field operations are woefully understaffed. Multimillion-dollar country programs are often run by just five or six people in vast, complex environments such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. This misalignment undermines the very purpose of the UN’s operational work.
Adding to the challenge is the human cost of continuous reform. UN staff—especially those on short-term contracts in the field—have endured years of restructuring without meaningful improvements in job security, working conditions, or support. Reform fatigue is real, and if not carefully managed, the proposed overhaul may further demoralize overstretched personnel rather than unleash new energy and effectiveness.
Over the course of my 25-year career with the UN, I lived through at least five major organizational reforms, not counting the more comprehensive UN development system reform launched in 2019. Each round of reform was introduced with promises of increased efficiency and improved delivery. Yet in practice, they almost always involved staff downsizing—couched in euphemisms like “rationalization” or “streamlining”—while the agencies were expected to maintain, or even expand, their existing mandates. The result was a growing mismatch between institutional ambition and available human resources, often borne by staff asked to do more with less in already challenging environments.
The case for real reform, not cosmetic restructuring
For one, it is far from certain that the proposed consolidation would actually reduce expenditure. Merging agencies into four super-departments could just as easily result in the creation of four new bureaucratic hierarchies—each led by a powerful “tsar” with their own support apparatus and administrative layers. More importantly, if these new super-departments merely absorb the existing mandates of their constituent agencies without receiving proportional funding, the result may not be greater efficiency but rather a dilution of effectiveness. Underfunded mega-structures risk being less agile, less focused, and ultimately less capable of delivering on their mandates.
The problem is not simply too many agencies, but rather mandates that are vague or overly ambitious, resources that are misaligned or insufficient, and a staffing structure that prioritizes central bureaucracy over field presence. Reform should start by clarifying what each agency is expected to deliver, ensuring adequate funding for those tasks, and reconfiguring staffing to support delivery where it matters most—in the field.