💀 Austerity is a Death Sentence

The UN Just Abandoned Millions—and Called It “Hyper-Prioritization”

The United Nations has announced a near-catastrophic slash in its humanitarian operations. From a $44 billion appeal down to $29 billion—a 34% cut in the face of record global suffering. This isn’t a budget adjustment. It’s mass abandonment, rebranded as “hyper-prioritization.”

Only $5.6 billion—just 13% of the original request—has been raised. And so, in Gaza, in Sudan, in Congo, in Myanmar—where genocide, famine, and forced displacement surge—millions will be left to starve, to bleed, to drown in unburied grief while the “international community” runs cost-benefit equations on their survival.

This isn’t neutrality. It’s complicity.

“All we ask is 1 percent of what you spent last year on war.”

– Tom Fletcher, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator

Let that sink in. One percent.

Not even a full withdrawal from imperial warfare. Just a fingertip’s worth of the $2+ trillion dumped into bullets, bombs, and border militaries.

But even that’s too much to ask, apparently.

Who Cut the Lifeline?

• The United States, once the UN’s biggest donor, gutted foreign aid under Trump, again.

• Europe, hiding behind “economic uncertainty,” mirrors this cowardice as it bankrolls border regimes, surveillance states, and the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

• Multilateral donors, obsessed with “fiscal responsibility,” demand austerity from the hungry while subsidizing oil, weapons, and apartheid.

This is not a resource problem. This is a willful political choice to let the global poor die quietly.

What It Means on the Ground

• In Sudan, already facing ethnic cleansing and famine, UN agencies are rationing trauma kits and shutting down feeding centers.

• In the DRC, sexual violence survivors lose access to emergency care and witness programs vanish overnight.

• In Myanmar, Rohingya refugees—already discarded by the West—are now told they are too expensive to save.

They call it triage. We call it eugenics by spreadsheet.

“We have been forced into a triage of human survival. The math is cruel, and the consequences are heartbreaking.”

– Tom Fletcher

Translation: Some lives are now officially too inconvenient to preserve.

Volker Türk Was Right

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights warned, bluntly, that these cuts “offer comfort to dictators and authoritarians.” He’s right. Starving early warning systems, defunding genocide prevention, and silencing rights monitors doesn’t just neglect the most vulnerable—it empowers their killers.

No early warning means no legal accountability.

No aid means no lifeline.

No witnesses means no memory.

This is how genocide metastasizes.

✖️ Let’s Be Clear

This isn’t a humanitarian failure. This is necropolitics—the management of life and death by those who believe they have the right to decide who is disposable. It’s an imperialist austerity doctrine that turns human need into a commodity and determines who gets to live based on how geopolitically useful they are.

Sudan is bleeding. Gaza is burning. And the world’s answer is, “Sorry, it’s not in the budget.”

But there’s always money for war.

Always bullets. Always bombs. Always sanctions.

Just not bread. Not water. Not safety.

📣 What Now?

We build without them. We refuse to let institutions that fund genocide decide who is “prioritized.” We pour our rage into grassroots support, mutual aid, direct solidarity. We speak the names of those written off. We refuse to forget.

The UN isn’t broken. It’s functioning exactly as designed:

To cushion empire while placating the global conscience.

But we will not be placated.

We will bear witness, and we will resist.