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The list of international challenges for President-elect Obama is lengthy, and humanitarian reform is nowhere near the top. Nonetheless, the advent of his administration presents an opportunity to rethink the way the United States approaches humanitarian response in a number of key areas. The advantage of the core humanitarian reform agenda is that many of the basic changes required do not necessarily involve huge commitments of additional resources, which will be scarce given the scale of the economic crisis that the U.S. is confronting.

The top priority is to recalibrate the balance between military and civilian efforts to respond to humanitarian crises. As the U.S. response to displacement in Georgia in August demonstrated, military involvement in emergency relief has become standard practice, even though it is more expensive and often involves no comparative advantage in terms of timeliness and the scale.

Under the current administration, civilian arms of the U.S. government, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and its Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, are bending over backwards, in name of “whole of government” approaches, to accommodate military encroachment into their realm. As Refugees International has documented, between 1998 and 2005, the percentage of Official Development Assistance controlled by the U.S. Department of Defense exploded from 3.5% to nearly 22%, while the percentage controlled by USAID shrunk from 65% to 40%.

Three changes are essential. First, the response of the U.S. government to international emergencies should be through civilian agencies that adhere to international humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, and independence, with the military used only as a last resort to fill logistical gaps or to operate in areas so insecure that civilian agencies cannot function.

Second, the humanitarian arms of the U.S. government need to be strengthened through the appointment of greater numbers of staff with an understanding of and commitment to humanitarian principles. The practice of appointing former military officers to manage key departments in the aid bureaucracy in the name of facilitating civil-military collaboration should end.

Finally, humanitarian and development funding by the Department of Defense needs to be drastically reduced, with the savings transferred to USAID and the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration in the State Department.

The other critical area for change relates to the global humanitarian reform process initiated by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland, now being carried forward by their successors Ban Ki-Moon and John Holmes. The United States has generally supported the reform agenda internationally, but has not developed a clear internal policy framework and set of procedures to move beyond verbal commitments to action.

Areas where greater clarity and real commitments are needed include:

• The UN Central Emergency Response Fund, to which actual U.S. contributions have been minimal;
• The Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative, under which the U.S. needs to do a much better job of allocating emergency funds based on vulnerability rather than political considerations. (Compare the response to displacement in Georgia to displacement in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.)
• The initiative to establish a dedicated international recovery fund to support returning displaced people and stabilize countries in transition from conflict. In this case, clearer internal policies are needed to delineate the responsibilities of the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) and the development bureaus of USAID in transition situations.
• The response to internal displacement, especially in light of the UN Refugee Agency playing a greater role. Improving this response requires differentiation of the responsibilities of ODFA and the State Department refugee bureau in supporting the cluster leadership approach.

As I noted at the outset, much of this agenda is revenue neutral, and therefore conducive to action by the new Obama administration. There will inevitably be bureaucratic hurdles to overcome and turf battles to be fought, but with a unified vision of humanitarian response, the new administration can initiate the necessary internal and external reforms to strengthen the overall effectiveness of the U.S. response to displacement crises.