In the search to eliminate waste and unaccountable spending, a $20 billion annual savings plan is immediately available to incoming President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE): American taxpayer dollars flowing to the United Nations.
Each year the U.S. provides nearly a quarter of the U.N.’s total expenses, including assessed or mandatory “regular” funding of more than $3 billion and voluntary contributions that have vacillated between $10 and $15 billion in each of the past two years. Taking into account in-kind support services, the total is likely even higher. U.N. demands and U.S. subsidies have ballooned, with U.S. payouts almost doubling over the last decade.
Alarm bells ought to ring out for Americans both because of how the money gets spent and where it is going.
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Here are a few of the rabbit holes where your money ends up. U.S. taxpayers pay for U.N. tax-free salaries; for U.N. lounges set up for watching sports games with bargain prices for food and drink; for media campaigns and other festivities to celebrate the “International Day of Neutrality” invented by Russia, Afghanistan and friends, and the “International Day of Banks.”
U.S. dollars for peacekeepers include the blue helmets in southern Lebanon (UNIFIL) who have kept busy observing Hezbollah rearm, build terror tunnels, take up positions among Lebanese civilians, and fire at Israelis.
The surging expenses of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights – from your wallets – have included staffing and support for a Chinese “Independent Expert” on “international financial obligations of states on the full enjoyment of all human rights,” an “expert” on “a democratic and equitable international order” who advocated that the International Criminal Court tackle American crimes against humanity, and an “expert” on “International Solidarity” created at the behest of Cuba.
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Congress has long been skeptical about U.N. uses of American money, so much so that they have insisted upon an annual report on “United States Participation in the United Nations.” The most recent report during the Biden administration was published in March 2024 and covered the year 2022. Here is its astonishing conclusion:
“It is increasingly challenging for the United States to identify cost savings at the U.N. given the growing demands that U.N. member states place on the organization.”
DOGE can respond to this apparent brain-freeze with the proper course of deserved financial oversight. The U.N. budget, which covers everything from well over 100,000 long-term employees, administrative costs, peacekeeping, and a broad range of agencies and subsidiary bodies, deliberately lacks the transparency necessary to end misuse and corruption.
The General Assembly, for instance, is nonplussed about breaking its own elementary rule that no new activity will be approved without the cost being calculated and presented before the vote.
Sign now and squeeze member states later is familiar practice, as is tapping unused resources in one corner to satisfy unfilled appetites in another.
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At the heart of the U.N. financial structure lies the bad idea that the United States must pay for whatever abomination it votes against. Fans call it burden-sharing. We pay for what we don’t like, and other countries help pay for our priorities. The truth is that the end product doesn’t shake out on the plus side either for American national interests or taxpayer pocketbooks.
A 2005 Task Force on the United Nations, initiated during the George W. Bush administration and headed by Newt Gingrich and George Mitchell, voiced concern about insufficient supervision and talked a lot about reform. As it turns out, the watchword of “reform” in U.N. circles has been a euphemism for “keep on keeping on” until somebody notices, again.
Congress has also come up with other formulas for withholding money from the U.N., like refusing to fund a tiny list of U.N. projects dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel. However, the U.N. has invented more such projects and Congress has taken years, if at all, to add to the withholding list and to confront the fundamental moral rot epitomized by the U.N.’s systemic demonization of Israel.
DOGE creates an opportunity to clean house.
They can anticipate at least two rejectionist camps. Democrats who flog the erroneous idea that multilateralism begins and ends with the U.N. And New Yorkers who figure they benefit from U.N. diplomats wining, dining, and hanging out in their neighborhood, whether or not they are hosting entourages of terrorists and criminal masterminds. Not only should the material and spiritual benefits of otherwise developing the prime real estate of midtown Manhattan be factored in for the sake of the locals, but the rest of the country also deserves a voice.
A long overdue tally of American U.N. expenditures versus American needs is not a call to end American generosity or compassion beyond our borders. It is a call to protect the American goose laying the golden eggs from an avaricious and dangerous United Nations.
The Biden administration thought that finding savings for U.S. money filling U.N. coffers was a challenge. To which DOGE can be all set to reply: challenge accepted.
Anne Herzberg is legal adviser and U.N. representative of NGO monitor.