Report: Trump Administration to Slash United Nations Funding

A news report citing anonymous sources alleges that President Trump’s Department of State is seeking to cut funding for the United Nations by more than half.

State Department staffers have been instructed to seek cuts in excess of 50 percent in U.S. funding for U.N. programs, signaling an unprecedented retreat by President Donald Trump’s administration from international operations that keep the peace, provide vaccines for children, monitor rogue nuclear weapons programs, and promote peace talks from Syria to Yemen, according to three sources.

The first threat of UN cuts came after the United Nations sanctioned Israel at the behest of former President Obama. More recently, Trump has announced that he will refocus taxpayer funds away from international efforts in order to repair America’s crumbling infrastructure and restore her depleted military.

Cutting the United Nations budget will likely have no impact on the UN mission. The inefficient inter-governmental organization will simply have to rebalance the unfair payment calculation to force other member nations to pay an equitable share.

Over the years, the United Nations has increasingly raised the United States’ “fair share” of payments.

The U.N. system for calculating member nations’ “fair share” payment toward its regular and peacekeeping budgets has increasingly shifted the burden away from the vast majority of the 193 members and onto a relative handful of high-income nations, especially the U.S. Indeed some nations pay next to nothing.

Graft and corruption have riddled the U.N.’s history and organization publicly flouts efforts to reign in criminal actions by members.

The Procurement Task Force (PTF) , a special U.N. unit that went to work in 2006  to root out corruption.   It uncovered fraud, waste, and mismanagement involving contracts valued at more than $630 million. It led to misconduct findings and convictions of U.N. officials.

Unfortunately the PTF was eliminated in 2008—at the behest of countries angry about PTF actions against their nationals holding U.N. staff positions. The U.N. has not completed any major corruption cases since the PTF was eliminated.

By cutting funding, the United States may lose leadership roles on many humanitarian aid committees and perhaps its seat on the National Security Council which, without the United States’ veto could clear the way for the United Nations to impose sanctions on Israel.

The U.S. supplies 22% of the U.N.’s general budget, 28% of its peacekeeping budget and hundreds of millions of dollars for a plethora of individual humanitarian aid projects.

The United Nations biggest mistake may be having bet a quarter of its operations on one member’s payments.

With 193 member nations, America is paying many times its “fair share” and President Trump is demanding a change.