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Will Trump continue to fund the UN? [1]
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Date: 2025-04-28 05:23:00+02:00
As the United States reviews its support to all international organisations, its assessed contributions to the world body could also soon become a target.
Donald Trump’s foreign aid cuts have decimated the United Nations’ coffers. Voluntary contributions for specific programmes – from the International Organization for Migration to UNAids to the World Health Organization – have been drastically scaled back or wiped out altogether. But still looming is an ongoing review of all United States-funded international organisations, with UN officials on tenterhooks over what other financial support, including its as-yet untouched assessed contributions, could be heading to the chopping block. Geneva Solutions spoke to UN insiders and experts to look into some possible scenarios.
What we know so far
Donald Trump had barely warmed up his seat in the Oval office when he issued an executive order calling for a review of “all international governmental organisations of which the United States is a member” by 3 August, while largely freezing contributions across the UN system in the meantime. His disdain for the world body stems from a list of grievances, ranging from the size of its contributions to the treatment of Israel to the UN’s promotion of activities that it says run counter to US interests, including its current war on diversity, equity and inclusion programmes.
Read also: Surreal US questionnaire stuns international Geneva
The Trump administration has already taken decisive steps to extricate the US from some parts of the UN system it has traditionally disliked – quitting the World Health Organization on his first day in office while withdrawing from several UN bodies, including the Human Rights Council and the Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). It has also exited the ongoing UN Tax Convention negotiations.
Some of these moves were largely expected based on his first term. But the scale and breadth of the cuts to humanitarian funding, and the gutting of USAid, have left everyone guessing what his next moves will be. Steps to defund certain UN entities previously thought of as safe seem inevitable. “What has thrown everyone off balance is how cuts have hit not only parts of the UN that the US traditionally dislikes, but also parts of the UN that Washington has historically been favourable to,” says Richard Gowan, director of UN affairs at the International Crisis Group, citing cuts to the World Food Programme and Unicef, the UN’s children fund – both subsidiaries traditionally supported by Republicans and led by US nationals.
A leaked White House memo, revealed by the Washington Post earlier this month, proposes steep reductions to international organisations through the State Department, including eliminating funding to the UN altogether, showing that nothing is off the table. Reuters separately reported that cutting the US budget for UN peacekeeping operations was also included in the proposal by the White House Office of Management and Budget.
What are the possible scenarios?
The most drastic scenario, that Trump could pull the United States out of the UN altogether, is still viewed as unlikely, not least because of its permanent membership of the Security Council and the influence it exerts on global peace and security issues, says Eugene Chen, a senior fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation.
But the US could still bring UN operations to a stop, even if it remains in the UN, by wielding its veto in the Security Council and halting payments of its assessed contributions. “It’s a possibility that we cannot discount and it’s something that needs to be prepared for, not just by the UN secretariat, but by all other member states, because it would have such a huge impact,” he tells Geneva Solutions.
The US is the largest donor to the United Nations, contributing close to $13 billion in 2023 – or more than a quarter of its collective budget. The lion’s share of this funding was voluntary, while the rest – 24 per cent – was assessed. These are mandatory payments that all 193 members are required to make annually and are based on their gross national income, debt burden, population and other factors.
Assessed payments fund the UN’s regular budget as well as its peacekeeping operations. It keeps the UN’s main organs, such as the General Assembly, the Security Council and the Human Rights Council, running, as well as duty stations in New York, Geneva, Vienna and Nairobi. Some of the budget also goes to agencies, such as Unicef or the UN Refugee Agency, although these mainly rely on voluntary funding.
For 2025, the US is due to pay 22 per cent of the $3.72bn regular budget – the maximum a member state can pay – and 26.1 per cent of the $5.59bn peacekeeping budget for 2024-2025, although a cap placed by Congress in the 1990s prevents it from paying more than 25 per cent. The US, along with dozens of other member states, has traditionally paid very late in the year. But being the biggest contributor, its late payments have been a huge source of stress on the UN system, creating a long-running liquidity crisis. It currently owes, in arrears and for the current year, nearly $1.5bn for the regular UN budget and nearly $1.2bn for the peacekeeping budget.
Read also: Behind the UN liquidity crunch, a multilateral system in crisis?
If it decides to keep its UN membership but puts its payments on hold indefinitely, this could ironically be more catastrophic from a financial perspective than if it left altogether, notes Chen, because it would leave a gaping hole in the budget. “Of course, from a larger question of multilateralism, it would be much worse and we would have a bit of a repeat of the League of Nations situation,” he says.
Where does the UN go from here?
The UN has no tools to compel member states to pay. However, countries can lose their vote in the General Assembly if arrears surpass two years’ worth of contributions, which the US could reach next year if it decides to stop paying. “It’s not clear to me that the US will necessarily care about losing its General Assembly vote, but we’re in the realm of speculation with that,” says Louis Charbonneau, UN director at Human Rights Watch.
The bigger question, he points out, will be how the UN survives without its financial support, what other member states can do to ensure there isn’t some large-scale financial collapse, and whether the US can be appeased into continuing to pay. Previous administrations have traditionally withheld some of their assessed contributions, sometimes on political grounds, for example, where it concerns support for Palestinian causes, but other times as a means of winning concessions and driving reforms – a tool that it could most likely try to use again. It tried this, for example, in the late 1980s, when Congress passed an amendment bill cutting back on payments to the UN unless it adopted weighted voting on budgetary matters, on concerns that the organisation’s burgeoning membership was diluting US influence. It eventually conceded after the General Assembly adopted consensus-based decision-making on budgets.
“The current administration is operating from a very different playbook from previous Republican administrations, including the first Trump presidency, and it’s not entirely clear what the guiding principle that they are operating from will be,” Chen continues. One of the factors adding to this uncertainty is the absence of a US ambassador to the UN, after Trump decided to keep previous nominee Elise Stefanik in Congress. He has yet to name a replacement for the high-profile role, much to the frustration of diplomats and UN officials in New York.
“It’s been very difficult to operate in a situation where they haven’t really had any sort of serious representative of the Trump team to talk to,” says Gowan. Though Stefanik was expected to play tough with the UN on issues such as its perceived anti-Israel bias, “there was a feeling she was someone that ambassadors could do business with and who would give them a credible political steer about how far Trump really wants to go in terms of weakening the institution,” he adds.
How far the US is willing to go in withdrawing from the UN and other multilateral institutions will also be decided by who wins the ideological “civil war” being fought between two camps in the Republican Party – those that favour a transactional approach to foreign policy or the other with a more nationalistic agenda focused on culture war issues, says Chen.
The UN expert explains: “If it’s the former, then it’s possible that withholding assessed contributions can be used in order to create leverage to drive reforms at the UN.” US treasury secretary Scott Bessent’s recent calls for the IMF and World Bank – two multilateral institutions heavily funded by the US – to steer their focus away from climate action show these tactics already at play. “But if it’s the latter, my worry is that there is no amount of cutting or reforms that will be enough to satisfy them, because they likely see the UN and other multilateral institutions as somehow being fundamentally anti-American,” Chen continues.
This has already seeped through in some of the stances taken by the US at the UN, such as Trump’s public rejection of the Sustainable Development Goals, which he sees as infringing on US sovereignty. The US administration’s separate 90-day review into Unesco, which is due to complete before 3 May, will provide some clues as to which of these two camps is going to have more say, Chen says, and what the results of the wider 180-day review could look like.
Peacekeeping budget negotiations in June will also be another important moment when the question of the US’s next steps will come into focus. “That is really where you would be looking for the US to make big savings” and could serve as a prelude to some reforms it could demand of the UN system, says Gowan, just as former UN ambassador Nikki Haley did during Trump’s first term. That said, Trump has signalled that he wants the organisation to focus on preserving peace and may therefore look more favourably on the peacekeeping budget, he adds.
In the meantime, as agencies across the UN system plan deep cuts to their programmes after major drops in funding, not just from the US but also from other donors prioritising defence spending, the UN secretariat has also accelerated efforts to future-proof the troubled organisation. Secretary general António Guterres launched a plan, dubbed the UN80 initiative, in March to improve efficiency and cut costs. It will be presented to the General Assembly by July. Whether this will be enough to bring the US back on board is uncertain.
“There are two schools of thought in New York. One that thinks we can manage this if we somehow engage Washington seriously about reform and rationalisation. Eventually, they will be pragmatic and come around,” says Gowan. “Then there’s another school of thought, which is that the disruption is never going to end.”
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