Everything Wrong with the American Red Cross
And What to Do About it
The oldest disaster relief institution in the country does some things very well. A lot of what follows will be easier to digest if we start there.
What They Get Right
The American Red Cross was founded by Clara Barton in 1881 and has been operating continuously for over 140 years. That alone is not nothing. Most organizations don’t last a decade. The Red Cross has survived wars, depressions, pandemics, congressional investigations, and several of its own CEOs. Some credit for institutional durability is warranted.
Here is what the organization does that is genuinely useful.
Blood supply. The Red Cross collects roughly 40 percent of the nation’s blood supply, serving approximately 2,500 hospitals and transfusion centers. Each year, the organization collects nearly 4.5 million blood donations and more than 1 million platelet donations from roughly 2.3 million volunteer donors. That is a logistical operation of real complexity, subject to Food and Drug Administration oversight and Good Manufacturing Practices. When you go into surgery and blood is on hand, there is a meaningful chance the Red Cross is part of why. That matters.
Volume of response. The Red Cross responds to roughly 65,000 disasters per year, most of them house fires rather than hurricanes. The majority of that work happens at the local level, is invisible to the national news cycle, and gets done correctly. A family loses everything in a fire at 2 a.m. and volunteers show up. This is not glamorous work. It is useful work, and it happens at scale.
Training. The organization trained approximately 5.9 million people in lifesaving skills in 2024 alone. Around 8,000 people receive Red Cross first aid, CPR, and AED training every day. The Red Cross is the nation’s leading provider of health and safety courses. CPR training demonstrably increases cardiac arrest survival rates, and immediate CPR can triple the chance of survival compared to no intervention. That outcome is concrete.
Military family services. The Red Cross provides more than 510,000 services annually to service members, veterans, and their families, including emergency communications, support for wounded warriors, and connection to community resources. Volunteers delivered emergency communications messages to more than 87,000 service members in 2023 alone. The Red Cross is the primary civilian organization authorized to deliver emergency notifications through official military channels.
Scale and reach. Through approximately 230 chapters and a volunteer force of more than 265,000 people, the Red Cross maintains a presence in communities across the country that no private organization of comparable scope can match. The infrastructure is real.
International humanitarian work. Through partnership with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the American Red Cross reaches roughly 120 million people outside the U.S. each year through disease prevention and disaster response activities. The organization’s mandate under the Geneva Conventions gives it access and protection in conflict zones where other organizations cannot operate.
None of this is filler. These functions are valuable, and many people who donate blood, receive disaster assistance, or learn CPR from the Red Cross come away better off for it. That needs to be on the record before anything else.
The organization is also not, as viral social media posts periodically allege, a scam. Charity Navigator and the BBB Wise Giving Alliance both give the Red Cross high ratings for financial accountability. CharityWatch rates it top-tier. The claim that only nine cents of every dollar goes to services is false; the actual program spending rate is closer to 90 percent.
That settled, let’s talk about the problems. Because there are serious ones.
The Problems
The American Red Cross is an organization that does enormous good while simultaneously managing to mislead its donors, underinvest in the people doing the actual work, treat its volunteers poorly, perform disastrously in its most visible moments, obstruct oversight, and spend years assuring the public that none of this is happening. That combination is worth examining closely, because the Red Cross is not going away. Americans send it hundreds of millions of dollars every time a major disaster strikes. The least we can do is understand what we’re actually funding.
Problem One: The Compensation Pyramid
The Red Cross had revenue of $3.2 billion in fiscal year 2023. That is a large organization by any measure, and some executive compensation is reasonable to expect. The question is not whether executives should be paid. The question is whether the pay structure reflects the organization’s stated values.
It does not.
According to IRS Form 990 filings, the 15 most highly compensated employees at the Red Cross received nearly $10 million in compensation in fiscal year 2023. CEO Gail McGovern, who has led the organization since 2008, had a base salary of $550,000, with total compensation reaching $694,000 in 2018 and in the range of approximately $700,000 in subsequent years. Over the seven-year period from 2017 to 2023, her total cumulative compensation was approximately $5 million.
The Red Cross has pushed back on criticism of executive pay, noting that compensation is paid from general operating funds rather than disaster donations, and that competitive pay attracts capable leadership. Both points are fair, to a degree. But they do not address the gap.
The average salary for disaster services roles at the Red Cross runs around $55,000 per year according to aggregated wage data. Entry-level positions run lower. Workers at Glassdoor report disaster specialist roles starting at $40,000 to $50,000, with one reviewer noting the salary “barely covers the basic cost of living.” The ethics office, which handles waste, fraud, and abuse complaints for an organization of roughly 20,000 employees, was composed of just three people as of 2016 Senate findings.
The front-line wage problem came to a head in 2022. A coalition of approximately 3,000 unionized Red Cross workers, represented by AFSCME and allied unions, fought through nearly a year of negotiations to win a 9 percent pay increase and a ratification bonus of up to $1,715 for full-time employees. That fight was necessary because, during the COVID-19 pandemic, these same workers had been sent to collect blood without proper personal protective equipment, were in some cases forced to stay home without pay when they were exposed to COVID on the job, and were facing demands from management to accept a high-deductible health plan that would have significantly raised their premiums and out-of-pocket costs. Workers reported that the conditions were driving trained personnel out of the organization and directly worsening the nation’s blood supply shortage.
That is the picture. Three thousand workers fight for a year to get paid adequately and to keep their health insurance, while fifteen executives divide $10 million.
The Red Cross’s defense, that nonprofit work requires market-rate talent at the top, is a real argument. It is less convincing when the organization simultaneously argues it cannot pay frontline workers a living wage. You can believe either that the mission requires premium compensation or that resources are tight. The organization uses both arguments depending on who is asking.
The diversity composition of this pay structure deserves mention as well. Internal Glassdoor reviews and Form 990 gender analysis from Paddock Post indicate that diversity in the Red Cross workforce is, in one former employee’s phrasing, “bottom heavy, meaning there are lots of employees of color in entry level or lower management roles, but beyond that there’s a steep drop off.” The pay pyramid, in short, concentrates money at the top and distributes the most physically demanding, least compensated work toward the bottom. This is not unique to the Red Cross. It is, however, worth naming.
Problem Two: The Volunteer Problem
The Red Cross depends on volunteers to function. It could not exist without them. By the organization’s own estimates, roughly 90 percent of its workforce is volunteer. There are approximately 265,000 active volunteers at any given time, and during major disasters the number climbs considerably. The organization’s entire delivery model is predicated on mobilizing and retaining these people.
The Red Cross is bad at managing them.
This is not a new observation. Academic analysis of Red Cross volunteer management dating back decades has identified a consistent problem: the organization operates on a “management sphere” model rather than a “volunteer sphere” model. In plain terms, paid staff hold decision-making authority, and volunteers are expected to execute rather than participate. Volunteers who push back, raise concerns, or try to participate in policy decisions have historically been sidelined or removed. One documented case from Northeast Georgia involved the dismissal of three long-term volunteers with a combined 41 years of unpaid service after they attempted to raise governance concerns. When they tried to appeal, Red Cross staff declined to even identify who the relevant volunteer policymakers were so the appeal could be directed appropriately.
More recent accounts from current and former volunteers, aggregated across Glassdoor, Indeed, and ProPublica reporting, paint a consistent picture:
Scheduling is disorganized. Volunteers report confusion about shifts, poor communication from coordinators, and a sense that their time is not respected. One high school volunteer working as a blood donor ambassador in the Greater Chesapeake area described scheduling as “a mess” and volunteer management staff as “very rude.”
Volunteers are not given meaningful authority or information. One former employee noted that the organization “preaches how they respect donors, but after seeing the blatant inefficiency and mismanagement, I’m extremely disappointed.” The same reviewer said the organization “uses nonprofit status as an excuse for serious issues they don’t want to deal with.”
Experienced disaster relief volunteers have been driven out by centralization. ProPublica’s multi-year investigation of the Red Cross found that veteran disaster responders, many with years of field experience, left the organization in significant numbers following management reorganizations that shifted decision-making authority to national headquarters. The result, documented in internal meeting minutes, was a workforce crisis. At a closed-door Red Cross meeting in December 2012, following Superstorm Sandy, officials acknowledged that nearly two-thirds of the volunteers responding had never before provided relief after a large disaster. One top official stated that the “caliber of the people is a major issue.” Another said the organization “didn’t have the kind of sophistication needed for this size job.”
To be clear about what produced that situation: experienced volunteers did not leave because they lost interest in helping people. They left because the organization reorganized them out of meaningful roles, centralized authority away from the field, and replaced institutional knowledge with whatever it could mobilize on short notice.
The volunteer management dysfunction has real consequences. It means the people showing up after disasters are, with some frequency, inexperienced. It means the coordination that experienced responders provide is absent. And it means the Red Cross is constantly rebuilding capability it already had and chose to eliminate.
Poor volunteer retention also creates a public relations incentive to prioritize optics over operations, because an organization that cannot adequately deliver relief has strong motivation to make it appear that it is delivering relief. That incentive, as the next section documents, has been acted on more than once.
Problem Three: The PR Problem and the Sandy Debacle
The most damaging documented episode in the Red Cross’s recent history is its response to Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Isaac in 2012. It is worth covering in detail because the organization’s internal documents, obtained through an investigation by ProPublica and NPR, describe the failure from the inside.
When Isaac hit the Gulf Coast, the Red Cross mobilized hundreds of volunteers and vehicles. Richard Rieckenberg, who oversaw aspects of food, shelter, and supply operations, arrived in Mississippi to find that an official had ordered 80 trucks and emergency response vehicles sent out empty, or carrying only a few snacks. Volunteers “were told to drive around and look like you’re giving disaster relief,” Rieckenberg said. The organization’s concern, he stated, was the “appearance of aid, not actually delivering it.”
After Sandy, volunteers wandered the streets of New York without GPS equipment, trying to find affected neighborhoods. Emergency response vehicles were reportedly diverted for photo opportunities. Internal reports obtained by ProPublica described “multiple systems failed” in logistics and stated that assets had been “diverted for public relations purposes.” In New Jersey’s Bergen County, the Red Cross was, in the words of emergency management officials, simply absent.
Two weeks after Sandy struck, CEO Gail McGovern declared the relief effort “near flawless.” The internal post-mortems conducted in the following weeks described it very differently.
One internal Red Cross document specifically noted that the organization “became focused on making ‘the numbers look good’ and in ‘showing a presence.’” Rieckenberg emailed a Red Cross vice president describing this dynamic in November 2012. When another disaster response chief complained about having emergency vehicles tied up and unavailable, a Red Cross executive from headquarters allegedly responded: “Stop right there. These are not your ERVs. They belong to Gail and she’s going to do whatever she wants with them.”
The Red Cross has disputed elements of this account. But the pattern documented is consistent with what a 2014 internal survey of more than 14,000 employees found: only 39 percent of respondents said they trusted senior leadership. About 40 percent doubted the organization’s commitment to ethical conduct. When other companies asked their employees the same question about organizational ethics, 78 percent on average responded favorably. The Red Cross scored 61 percent. McGovern, in a memo to employees, called that score a “strength.” She was not wrong that it could have been worse. She was wrong to call it strong.
The employee survey is worth pausing on. This was the organization’s own internal assessment, conducted by IBM, surveying more than half of the roughly 25,000 employees. Only 39 percent trusted senior leadership. Only 42 percent believed their ideas and suggestions were valued. Only 35 percent felt supported during organizational change. The Red Cross’s communications director responded to media coverage of the survey by calling it “regrettable” that the results were being used to criticize the organization. That response tells you something.
Problem Four: Haiti
In 2010, a catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti, killing an estimated 230,000 to 316,000 people and displacing 1.5 million. Americans responded generously. The Red Cross raised nearly half a billion dollars, more than any other nonprofit, and pledged to use the funds to help Haitians rebuild.
After five years, the organization’s primary tangible accomplishment in housing, the sector that received more than double the funds of any other area, was six permanent homes.
This finding, reported in a joint investigation by ProPublica and NPR in 2015, was the product of extensive document review and field reporting. What the investigation found was not simply a difficult operating environment, though Haiti is genuinely difficult. What it found was a pattern of self-inflicted failures: constant staff turnover, managers who could not speak French or Creole, a lack of project tracking systems, overhead costs that consumed a third of some project budgets, and an accounting system the organization’s own internal reports described as “complex, yet inaccurate.”
A 2011 internal memo written by the then-director of the Haiti program, Judith St. Fort, described senior managers making “very disturbing” remarks disparaging Haitian employees, including the statement “he is the only hard working one among them.” St. Fort, who is Haitian-American, wrote that the comments included language suggesting Haitian employees in general should not be taken seriously. The Red Cross disputes this characterization.
The organization raised far more money than it had programming to spend responsibly. When the earthquake struck, the Red Cross had a $100 million deficit. The Haiti disaster was described inside the organization as “a spectacular fundraising opportunity,” according to one former official. The Red Cross kept soliciting donations well after it had more than enough for emergency relief, which is its core competency. Doctors Without Borders, in contrast, stopped fundraising after determining it had sufficient funds. The Red Cross continued. The excess money went into programs the organization lacked the capacity to execute.
When congressional investigators from Senator Charles Grassley’s office sought to understand how the nearly $500 million had been spent, the Red Cross could not produce an accounting. The organization claimed that $70 million in “program expenses” had been spent on oversight and evaluation activities. When investigators asked for documentation, none could be provided. Grassley’s investigation found that a full 25 percent of donations, roughly $125 million, had gone to fundraising, management, a contingency fund, and a vague category called “program costs” for which no financial evidence of actual activities existed.
The Red Cross also tried to limit the scope of a Government Accountability Office investigation into its activities. In meetings and correspondence over several months, the Red Cross’s General Counsel questioned the GAO’s legal authority to review the organization’s internal decision-making and funding allocation. The GAO ultimately modified the scope of its inquiry, in part because the Red Cross’s “lack of cooperation led GAO to modify its scope,” according to the Grassley report. The Red Cross denies it refused to cooperate.
Senator Grassley introduced the American Red Cross Transparency Act in 2016 and again in 2019, with bipartisan support, to clarify the GAO’s authority to access Red Cross records and provide enforcement mechanisms. As of the time of writing, it has not passed.
The Red Cross’s response to all of this has been to argue that it has accounted for every dollar, that the critics misrepresent its work, that Haiti is a uniquely difficult operating environment, and that watchdog organizations rate it highly. Some of that is accurate. None of it is responsive to the core finding: the organization raised money it did not know how to spend, spent it in ways it could not track, and then spent years declining to explain the details to the people who donated or the legislators who asked.
Problem Five: Structural Oversight Deficits
The Red Cross occupies an unusual legal position. It operates under a congressional charter and is considered a federal instrumentality, which means it receives benefits unavailable to ordinary nonprofits: tax exemption, tax-deductible donations, federal coordination authority in disaster response, and a designated role under the National Response Framework as co-primary agency for mass care alongside FEMA. The president of the United States is the organization’s honorary chairman.
Given that relationship, the level of federal oversight is remarkably thin.
In 2015, the GAO published a report titled “American Red Cross: Disaster Assistance Would Benefit from Oversight through Regular Federal Evaluation.” Its findings were straightforward: there is no systematic oversight of the Red Cross’s performance or efficiency. The IRS reviews its annual filings. FEMA monitors compliance with grant requirements. The GAO can review involvement in federal programs, though the Red Cross has contested that authority in practice. No agency measures whether the Red Cross’s disaster services meet their objectives. The Red Cross evaluates its own performance internally, through post-disaster “action reviews” that are sporadic, potentially biased, and typically not released to the public.
The GAO recommended that Congress establish a mechanism for regular, external, independent, and publicly disseminated evaluation of the Red Cross’s disaster assistance. Congress has not acted on this recommendation.
The consequence is that the organization most Americans trust to manage disaster donations is accountable primarily to itself. It conducts internal surveys and describes the results as strengths. It conducts internal disaster reviews and declares relief efforts near-flawless. When a Senate investigation finds that it cannot account for a quarter of the money raised for Haiti, it issues a press release saying it disagrees with the findings and provides no new documentation.
This is the structure the Red Cross’s congressional charter has created, and no one in Congress has felt sufficient urgency to fix it.
Problem Six: The PR-First Culture
The behavior documented during Sandy and Isaac was not aberrant. It reflects a culture that, over time, has come to prioritize institutional reputation over operational performance. This is a specific and identifiable failure mode, and it has been documented by people inside the organization.
The pattern has several components:
Self-congratulatory public communication disconnected from internal assessment. McGovern’s “near flawless” characterization of Sandy relief came two weeks after the disaster, while internal meetings were documenting system-wide logistics failures. The gap between what the organization says publicly and what it knows internally is not incidental; it is a management habit.
Fundraising campaigns timed to institutional need rather than donor intent. The Haiti earthquake was an opportunity to erase a $100 million deficit, and the organization took it. The Red Cross continued to raise money for Haiti after it had enough for emergency relief. Donors who gave $25 in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake to help people in tents had their money spent on overhead and programs the organization could not manage. The Red Cross has the legal right to allocate donations broadly. It is worth donors knowing that this is what happens.
Use of emergency assets for visibility rather than relief. The empty trucks in Mississippi. The photo backdrops in New York. The Spirit of America mobile kitchen sent to a donor demonstration when it could have been serving food. These are documented, not alleged. Red Cross officials were angry enough about them to memorialize their complaints in writing at the time.
Suppression of internal dissent. The people who raised concerns about Sandy operations were not thanked. The disaster response chief who complained about having vehicles diverted was told those vehicles “belong to Gail.” Experienced field volunteers who challenged centralization decisions were reorganized out of influence. The Red Cross’s ethics office, responsible for waste, fraud, and abuse at an organization of 20,000 employees, had three people in it.
Problem Seven: The Blood Supply Tension
The blood system deserves its own section because it sits at the center of a structural contradiction the Red Cross has never resolved.
The organization collects blood from voluntary donors, at no cost, then sells it to hospitals on a cost-recovery basis. In 2019, hospitals paid roughly $215 per unit of red blood cells. The Red Cross’s biomedical services division generated $2 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2023, constituting the majority of the organization’s total income. Blood, in short, is the business that funds everything else.
This creates an inherent tension. The Red Cross needs to maintain a sufficiently large and stable blood supply to serve its hospital contracts. It does this through a volunteer donor pool that it also must cultivate, maintain, and appeal to emotionally. When shortages occur, the organization declares emergencies and runs public campaigns. In January 2022, the Red Cross declared its first-ever national blood crisis, noting the supply had fallen due to a 10 percent decline in donations during the pandemic. In January 2026, it declared another severe shortage after supply fell 35 percent in a single month.
The recurring shortage problem raises reasonable questions. The donor pool is aging; roughly 60 percent of blood donations come from people 40 and older, and the Red Cross is not replacing those donors as quickly as it is losing them. The organization acknowledges this. What it has been slower to acknowledge is whether its own operational and compensation practices have contributed to the staffing instability that makes shortage management harder. The 2022 union contract fight occurred directly in the context of front-line workers leaving because of inadequate pay and poor working conditions. Those departures complicated blood collection operations. The Red Cross asked the public to donate more blood while simultaneously fighting its own workers over health insurance.
There is also the matter of the market structure itself. The United States blood system is fragmented between the Red Cross and independent blood centers, a division that dates to post-World War II turf conflicts and has never been resolved into a coherent national strategy. The Red Cross’s share of the market is large enough to make it essential but not large enough to constitute a unified supply chain. Blood shortages in some regions coexist with relative adequacy in others. Regional monopolies in blood banking create price opacity and limit competition in ways that probably do not serve hospitals or patients well. The Red Cross is not solely responsible for this structure, but it has been a beneficiary of it and has done little to advocate for reform.
Problem Eight: The Local-National Divide
The Red Cross operates through a chapter system, and the quality of service varies enormously from one chapter to another. This is both a strength and a weakness.
It is a strength because local chapters often develop genuine community ties, volunteer relationships, and operational knowledge that national headquarters does not have. The disaster responses that work well tend to be ones where experienced local volunteers have established relationships with local emergency management and know the geography.
It is a weakness because the national leadership’s tendency toward centralization has repeatedly undermined those local relationships. A series of reorganizations under McGovern moved decision-making authority to national headquarters, cutting chapters out of operational decisions that they were better positioned to make. Experienced volunteers who objected left. Communities that had built functional local response capacity found that capacity disrupted by national reorganizations designed to create “efficiencies” that the field did not experience as efficient.
The PBS report following Hurricane Katrina, which noted that the Red Cross “came apart within the first week to ten days after Katrina and the money started flowing in,” attributed the failure in part to the organization’s inability to manage at disaster scale. The underlying cause was “underinvestment in management systems, technology, and volunteer training” accumulated over years. The problems did not start with the storm. The storm just made them visible.
National leadership’s instinct to respond to these crises by centralizing further has made the problem worse. The chapter system is the Red Cross’s best mechanism for local effectiveness. It is also the thing that national headquarters has spent the most effort managing from a distance.
What to Do About It
The Red Cross is not going to be replaced. No alternative institution has the scale, the charter, the volunteer base, or the name recognition to substitute for it in the near term. The goal is to fix what can be fixed, and to be honest about what cannot.
Here are the specific changes that would materially improve the organization.
Congress should pass the American Red Cross Transparency Act. This bill has been introduced in 2016, 2017, and 2019 with bipartisan support. It has not passed. It should. The GAO needs clear, enforceable authority to access Red Cross records and evaluate disaster performance. An organization receiving federal coordination authority, federal tax benefits, and presidential imprimatur is not a private charity for purposes of accountability. It is a public-private hybrid that should answer to the public. The Red Cross’s existing resistance to oversight is itself an argument for the legislation.
Congress should mandate regular, independent performance evaluation of Red Cross disaster services. This was the GAO’s recommendation in 2015. It has not been implemented. The Red Cross self-evaluates and does not make most of its assessments public. An external evaluation framework, with measurable standards and public reporting, would create accountability the current system lacks. It would also give donors information they cannot currently get from IRS filings.
The Red Cross board should establish a transparent, tiered executive compensation policy tied to organizational performance and front-line wage parity. This is not a call to eliminate executive compensation. It is a call to make the relationship between the top of the pay scale and the bottom visible and defensible. Right now, executives earning in the hundreds of thousands of dollars oversee an organization where disaster workers report salaries barely covering living costs. That ratio should be publicly explained and publicly justified, not managed through boilerplate about market competitiveness.
The Red Cross should restore meaningful authority to experienced field volunteers and chapter-level staff. The centralization strategy has consistently produced worse outcomes than the decentralized model it replaced. Experienced disaster volunteers are the organization’s institutional memory. When they leave, capability leaves with them. Rebuilding that base requires giving experienced volunteers real roles, real input, and real respect, not assigning them to drive empty trucks. The management literature on volunteer retention is unambiguous: volunteers who participate in decision-making stay, and volunteers who are frozen out leave.
The Red Cross should establish a clear, public policy distinguishing disaster donations from operating funds. When Americans donate after a hurricane, they believe they are funding disaster relief. The Red Cross uses a general fund model that allows donations to flow to overhead, management, and deficit reduction. This is legal. It should be disclosed more clearly and more prominently, not buried in a FAQ. Donors have the right to know where their money goes before they give it.
The blood services division should be managed as a separate operational entity with its own accountability standards, labor practices, and public reporting. Biomedical services is a $2 billion revenue operation. It is not treated with the operational seriousness that scale demands. Workers in that division were fighting for basic compensation and PPE during a public health emergency while the division generated the majority of the Red Cross’s income. That is not a peripheral problem.
Expand and professionalize the ethics and compliance function. Three people handling ethics for 20,000 employees is not a compliance function. It is a gesture toward one. A serious ethics infrastructure requires adequate staffing, independence from operational leadership, and a clear reporting pathway that does not route whistleblower concerns through the people being complained about. The 40 percent of employees who doubted the organization’s commitment to ethical conduct in 2014 did not invent those doubts.
The Red Cross should end the practice of large-scale international fundraising for programs it does not have the technical capacity to execute. Haiti was the clearest demonstration of what happens when the organization raises money at a scale its programming cannot absorb. Raising $500 million and building six houses is not a Haiti problem. It is a Red Cross problem. The organization should either build the international program management capacity to match its fundraising, or it should raise only what it can responsibly spend and direct donors to better-positioned organizations for the rest. Doctors Without Borders made that choice in 2010. It was the right one.
A Final Word
Americans trust the Red Cross because it has been there through the worst things that have happened to them, with a familiar logo and a volunteer who showed up when someone needed to show up. That trust is real, and it is earned, at least in part. The blood supply runs. The trainers train. The disaster teams respond. Most of the time, in most places, the work gets done.
The problem is that the organization has used that trust as a shield against accountability rather than as a mandate to earn it continuously. When internal surveys reveal that 40 percent of employees doubt the leadership’s ethics, the correct response is not to describe a 61 percent favorable rating as a strength. When half a billion dollars goes to Haiti and the housing program produces six homes, the correct response is not to fight congressional investigators for years over what was spent. When empty trucks are sent to drive around New York to make disaster relief appear to be happening, the correct response is not to declare the effort near-flawless.
The American Red Cross does important work. It is also an organization that has made a habit of describing its performance as better than it is, paying its people less than they deserve, managing its volunteers worse than their commitment warrants, spending donor money with insufficient accountability, and resisting the oversight that its size, its charter, and its public role require.
Those are not the behaviors of an organization that trusts the people it serves. They are the behaviors of an organization that trusts its own press releases more than it should.
The fix is not to abolish the Red Cross or stop donating blood. The fix is to insist, legislatively and publicly, that an institution of this stature meet the standards its mission implies. That means independent oversight, fair wages, honest fundraising, competent volunteer management, and the willingness to say, clearly and on the record, what the money actually paid for.
That is not too much to ask of the most trusted name in American disaster relief. It may be the bare minimum.
Sources: IRS Form 990 filings (fiscal years 2021-2023); ProPublica/NPR Special Report on the American Red Cross (2014-2016); U.S. Senate Finance Committee investigation (Sen. Charles Grassley, 2016); GAO-15-565, “American Red Cross: Disaster Assistance Would Benefit from Oversight through Regular Federal Evaluation” (September 2015); American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), “Red Cross Workers Win 9% Pay Increase” (September 2022); American Red Cross Mission & Values page; PBS NewsHour, “American Red Cross Troubles” (2005); PayScale, Glassdoor, Salary.com, and ZipRecruiter compensation data for Red Cross roles; Paddock Post executive compensation analysis (2022-2024); The Week, “The Urgent American Blood Shortage, Explained” (May 2023); American Red Cross press releases and public statements; Congressional Record.