A letter shared within humanitarian circles also confirms Lindberg as the pick. News of Lindberg’s pending appointment was first reported by Devex.

Is the World Food Programme getting Luke Lindberg, “America First” Trump appointee, or Luke Lindberg, rookie international civil servant and impartial humanitarian leader?

It follows months-long delays in choosing a new executive director at WFP – and for some, worry over what putting a Trump-aligned pick at the heart of the emergency aid system will mean.

WFP has been without an official executive director since Cindy McCain announced her departure earlier this year, citing health concerns.

Lindberg’s selection would continue a long history of opaque UN appointments and American dominance at the helm of WFP. The executive director role has been held by an American since 1992, under the UN’s practice of backroom horse-trading key roles.

It’s also another example of top leadership jobs going to the politically connected, whether at UN agencies or big NGOs. Lindberg is the son-in-law of US Senate majority leader John Thune, and currently undersecretary for trade and foreign agricultural affairs in the US Department of Agriculture.

No emergency response experience

Lindberg appears to have no experience in emergency response, but he will join a UN agency that is often seen as the lynchpin of the international humanitarian system.

His public record so far contrasts sharply with the neutrality and impartiality principles that the humanitarian sector often foregrounds. Lindberg has voiced support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who has an active arrest warrant for war crimes accusations), and touted weapons exports amid the Israeli military’s onslaught on Gaza.

Critics say the US is increasingly co-opting the humanitarian system along ideological lines – using funding and policy to align aid with geopolitical interests, and to sideline reproductive health and equity, for example.

Lindberg will lead a key agency at a time of deep budget cuts, severe hunger, and spiralling emergencies – in some cases in crises provoked by US military actions and US government policies. Some 151.6 million people face crisis levels of hunger or worse, according to famine analysts.

Crises are spiralling, deepened by conflict, climate change, and the flouting of international laws. At the same time, donor funding cuts have left the global emergency response system at a breaking point, triaging budgets to target only a fraction of the more than 239 million people said to need emergency aid. WFP’s projected funding this year sits at around $6.4 billion – less than half of what it was in 2022, and its lowest in about a decade. The US funds about 30% of the agency’s budget.

Here are four key questions:

1. Who does Lindberg answer to?

Is the World Food Programme getting Luke Lindberg, “America First” Trump appointee, or Luke Lindberg, rookie international civil servant and impartial humanitarian leader?

The Trump administration has used foreign aid funding as a hammer: It steers its humanitarian and health money to align with geopolitical interests instead of needs; and sharpened its discriminatory global gag rule to sideline reproductive health and equity programmes funded by other donors.

This has put an extra spotlight on the delayed search for a new WFP chief. Will they be beholden to Washington, or to the organisation’s humanitarian mandate?

“We never really had to ask this question before for a UN appointee quite so explicitly,” said Sam Vigersky, a former US humanitarian adviser and now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank. “That to me in itself is a concerning development in our field.”

Before the Trump administration backed Lindberg for the UN role, other rumoured candidates had pushed to make US support to WFP conditional on aligning with foreign policy interests, Vigersky said. Lindberg hasn’t outlined such plans, and should be judged based on what he does when he starts at WFP, he said.

“Is Lindberg able to unlock sums of money from the Congress and the Trump administration that otherwise would be sidelined because there wasn’t an insider at the helm… or does this end up being an appointment to a multilateral agency that ends up running a political operation for the Trump administration to potentially be punitive towards NGOs they think are critical of the administration,” Vigersky said.

“A lot of the aid coming out of [the] State Department has directly framed how they are making decisions. So I’m going to be looking for the firewall between the two.”

Many of the issues at the heart of WFP’s work may contradict the current US administration’s interests – from climate change as a cause of crises, to famine declarations that are politically inconvenient for allies like Israel, to pushing back on aid cuts.

Still a US government official for now, Lindberg’s recent public comments have defended the cuts as a sort of “level-setting”.

”This idea that we’re retreating is an unfair characterisation of the pause that was taken to re-evaluate and re-design some of the structures and the way in which we do business,” Lindberg said during a CFR briefing this month. A study in The Lancet estimated that donor cuts could lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030.

In his short time in the agriculture department, Lindberg has been open about using US aid for US interests.

The USDA-managed Food for Peace programme, which sends US commodities as food assistance, now targets only a handful of countries, after a restructuring overseen by Lindberg. It notably leaves out several countries facing severe levels of hunger – such as Mali, Somalia, Sudan, or Yemen – while including some that are not. These choices balanced hunger needs, the availability of distribution partners, and “the geopolitical interests of the United States”, Lindberg said.

2. How do other humanitarian agencies see Lindberg?

Lindberg is mostly unknown in humanitarian circles, but his social media feed has done most of the talking so far.

His personal accounts have been peppered with pro-Israel posts, pics of Lindberg grinning and gripping a rifle to be exported to the Israeli military, and plenty of cowboy hats.

A newer Twitter account created for his WFP bid presents a milder image, tinted with shades of UN blue, frequent retweets of WFP posts, and inoffensive statements about resilience and ending hunger.

Lindberg is “obviously MAGA” and the gun pics are concerning, but he appears to be less risky than other names floated for key positions, one aid official told The New Humanitarian.

“Basically, I think he’s someone we can work with,” said the official, who compared Lindberg’s potential to that of David Beasley, the former South Carolina governor appointed as WFP executive director during Trump’s first term. Beasley’s reputation is that of a prolific fundraiser; his time as WFP head overlapped with a years-long surge in donor government support for the humanitarian system as a whole.

3. How do staff see Lindberg, and how will people in crisis now see WFP?

But Lindberg’s politics are a deep concern for many, and an agency’s leader reflects on the entire organisation.

WFP’s staff of 20,000 stretches across the globe, from Central America to the Pacific Islands, or from Afghanistan to Sudan and Gaza. Like many humanitarian organisations, most are local staff, often from the communities they’re trying to help.

Some staff have expressed outrage about leadership positions on Gaza, or WFP’s choice of partners like Boston Consulting Group or Palantir. In conversations with The New Humanitarian, they have also expressed unease about US influence on the organisation, and about Lindberg.

Then there’s whether a WFP led by Lindberg changes how communities in crisis see a humanitarian organisation that often says it relies on its perceived neutrality to operate.

The agency’s likely new leader is an enthusiastic supporter of Netanyahu, whose government and military has inflicted harm in crises where WFP is asked to alleviate hunger.

“We are exporting freedom and prosperity to our friends,” Lindberg wrote in a social media post while clutching a South Dakota-made sniper rifle – one of several pics that have been widely shared among WFP staff and other humanitarians. At the time, Lindberg was a trade official for the US state.

The world’s leading genocide scholars say Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity against Palestinians.

4. Where does Lindberg push WFP on data, tech, and partnerships?

WFP faces growing criticism for its relationship with Palantir, the data analytics firm and military contractor.

Its private sector partnerships, and its ambitions around harnessing sensitive data of deeply vulnerable populations, are especially under the microscope as Big Tech and artificial intelligence corporations grow to dominate economies, culture, and power – and as WFP forms the backbone of international humanitarian logistics.

WFP’s envelope-pushing experimentation and data strategy have been encouraged by multiple leadership teams, and by several different donors.

Lindberg’s recent comments suggest the agency will continue full speed ahead on the same path.

“In a resource-constrained environment, you have to do more with less,” Lindberg said during the CFR briefing, mirroring existing WFP leadership talking points on tech partnerships and AI.

“I think there’s all kinds of tools out there in the world today that can make even the best organisations a little bit better,” he added.

The USDA signed a $300 million deal with Palantir earlier this year.

The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world.