It is in trouble with its donors, with the general public, and with Congress apparently, over it rebuilding efforts in Haiti. First Pro Publica and now the NY Times have covered the story. See: The Red Cross and the Mystery of Its Haiti Aid
Update: Please read the comments for additional information on this hot topic.
The Diva is sympathetic to the Red Cross and in this case is just re-reporting articles from other media sources.
Recovery Diva 
Having been deployed to Haiti prior to the earthquake and then after, I am amazed at how myopic and biased the reporting form NPR and ProR is. The concentration of wealth in Port-au-Prince is alarming, and the answer that many Haitian officials (the 1%) would prefer is to move already marginalized populations 2+ hours outside of Port-au-Prince, where there is no access to education health care, or other vital social services. If it were up to the few wealth land owners, NGOs would have bought overpriced lots and built. As Duke University affirms “the trend is forcing domestic non-profits, civic organizations, churches, schools, and even orphanages to work from makeshift shelters or tents; landlords know they can charge twice as much renting to NGOs, who “have the big money.” http://sites.duke.edu/lawandhousinginhaiti/haiti-today/property-law/
David Meltzer, General Counsel and Chief International Officer for Red Cross provides a perspective I ask folks to consider.
Did we help 132,000 Haitians obtain safe and improved housing? Yes. In the days following the earthquake, the Red Cross provided emergency shelter in the form of 860,000 tarps to people whose homes were damaged or destroyed. Of course, living underneath a tarp or tent is only a short term solution, so the American Red Cross developed plans to provide medium- and long-term housing.
Working with partners such as Habitat for Humanity, Handicap International and others, the American Red Cross provided more than 6,100 transitional homes for nearly 31,000 people and more than 25,000 people received upgraded and progressive shelters.
Prior to the quake, a large percentage of residents in Port-au-Prince rented their homes and camp residents who were renters before the quake asked for secure safe rental housing. With American Red Cross funding, more than 5,400 households, received rental subsidies which enabled them to move out of camps and into homes. Additionally, understanding the need for more safe rental properties, the American Red Cross helped homeowners add rooms to their houses to increase housing stock in the area. These owners provide these new spaces rent free for one year to a family living in a camp. To date, over 54,000 people have benefited from these repair, rental subsidy and retrofitting programs.
Finally, nearly 22,000 people to date are benefiting from major neighborhood redevelopment and owner-managed construction initiatives including safe construction training, allowing them to repair and expand their own homes and obtain high-demand job skills to help support themselves in the future.
Respectfully, this piece in no way constituted the NYT covering the Red Cross fiasco in Haiti – to a rather suspicious degree actually. It was a puff piece of a very short op-ed, largely consisting of other people’s content and comments. The real question is why? Why is this all the more coverage the NYT is giving this issue at the moment? This piece seemed to me to be much more about trying to somehow make it look like it was being covered, without actually doing anything of the kind. This is less and less surprising from a news organization that just recently offered up what many consider to be one of the worst examples of journalism to surface in quite a while with its piece on Edward Snowden the other day (from a sheer accuracy in reporting perspective, if nothing else).
And I completely disagree with the notion that the real problem is that the ARC made the wrong promises. That is hardly the issue here. Any organization that can’t make something decent happen and have far more to show for it than the ARC has in Haiti for the $500 million that the world donated to them to help the Haitians has no business being a disaster relief non-profit, period. Also, the ARC’s laundry list of excuses for why they didn’t seem to accomplish much of anything really is just a list of the issues that the ARC clearly had no idea and no plan for what to do about and how to deal with – which is just another way of demonstrating their lack of competence and preparedness. In particular, going to Haiti without the slightest strategy for dealing with the notorious land title issues there really is like not knowing that you should probably pack summer clothes (or alternately, like not being able to put together the slightest strategy over the span of, well, how many years now…..). Also, anyone who buys the “people didn’t want to move away from their families” obfuscation really doesn’t know much of anything about Haiti, or what’s been unfolding there for quite a while now – as well as how much the ARC is apparently willing to just plain lie to the donor public to cover its failings.
Very sadly, it seems like the ARC (and I do mean specifically the ARC, who has a much worse general reputation than many if not most other international chapters of the RC) did in Haiti what it increasingly seems like it always does with major disasters: it alternately pocketed and squandered the massive amounts of money so generously given to it to help disaster survivors, and dramatically misrepresented its work, and the figures and statistics surrounding them – all while adding new meaning to the phrase “lack of transparency.” I have a lot more I could say about all this, but as an ARC volunteer who’s deployed nationally a lot, no matter what I’ve felt or been concerned about privately in relation to the ARC, I have always refused to say anything negative or critical about the ARC publicly up until now. That commitment ended with these latest revelations. My blood is boiling about this story, in part because it so completely confirms the overwhelming bulk of my direct experience with the organization at the end of the day – and I know for a fact that I’m hardly alone within the ARC voluntary infrastructure to feel that way, or that they have just finally run out of excuses for the organization – and it all just makes me very, very sad.
The easy temptation is to blame the Red Cross for not building those 130,000 houses. The real problem, though, is that they made the wrong promise in the first place. The goal should have been, as the Red Cross now belatedly recognizes, to provide appropriate housing solutions for as many people as possible. Would we really have preferred for them to build 130,000 inappropriate houses in a distant rural location far from livelihoods and isolated from social networks, thereby fulfilling their numerical promise and getting a good photo op for their donors?