Deep dive: The UN — from big ideas to big cuts

Devex offices are closed this week for an August break. Instead of the regular Newswire, we’re taking deep dives into some of this year’s key development topics. Today, we dig into how Trump 2.0 is impacting the United Nations.

This time last year, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres had his eyes fixed on the future.

The former Portuguese prime minister’s legacy reform agenda — the Pact for the Future — was working its way through intergovernmental negotiations. Its adoption in September 2024 at the Summit of the Future marked a commitment by world leaders to end hunger, confront climate change, promote gender equality, reform the international financial system, contain the use of AI in warfare, and strengthen the United Nations.

Now, a year later, the U.N. is undertaking a very different kind of reform, one that is aimed primarily at cutting costs and shrinking the U.N. Secretariat and specialized agencies by up to 20% of its staff, a move it believes is critical to survival but that critics contend marks an abandonment of the ambitions to tackle the challenges of the future, and will make the U.N. weaker and less relevant.

“Guterres has gone from big ideas to big budget cuts in the space of a year,” Richard Gowan, director of U.N. and multilateral diplomacy at the International Crisis Group, told Devex by email. “The Summit of the Future now feels like it was the Summit of a Bygone Era.”

The U.N. retrenchment has been prodded by the reelection of U.S. President Donald Trump, who signed a blizzard of executive orders hitting hard at core U.N. values and goals, from combatting climate change, promoting gender equality, diversity, free trade, and pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals, a series of U.N. targets designed to end extreme poverty and a host of other social, economic, and environmental ills.

Read: UN chief outlines ‘painful’ survival plan for world body

Read more: UN chief outlines plans for thousands of new job cuts

Watch: Trump and the future of the UN (Pro)

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American deadbeats

But the U.N.’s financial struggles are not new.

Foreign assistance by key donors dropped by just over 7% during former U.S. President Joe Biden’s final year in office, while European governments are looking to shift development funding to defense. The two largest contributors to the U.N.’s peacekeeping and regular budgets — China and the United States — either pay late or pay only a portion of what they owe (the U.S.).

To be fair, the U.N.’s financial troubles began well before both Biden and Trump, though the latter’s first administration played a critical role in it.

In 1994, the Democrat-controlled U.S. Congress placed a 25% cap on U.S. spending, reflecting irritation over U.S. peacekeeping assessments that reached as high as 30% of the entire budget. As recent as May, the U.N. claimed the U.S. was over $1.5 billion in arrears, and that figure is likely to rise as the U.S. claws back hundreds of millions in funding to U.N. peacekeeping missions.

The increase in budget gridlock in recent years has resulted in delays in U.S. dues not being paid well over a year, forcing the U.N. to turn down the lights and air conditioning and ban marathon meetings into the wee hours.

In an effort to illustrate the severity of the crisis, the U.N. comptroller recently distributed a PowerPoint presentation to members of a budget advisory committee that outlined the financial outlook. It carried a picture of a skull and crossbones. “What are the problems (for the regular budget)?” it stated. “We do not have Adequate & Timely cash to execute the budget.”

Related reading: Inside the finances of the United Nations (Pro)

Still clinging to hope

In his first day back in office, Trump dropped a bombshell on the international foreign aid system, signing an executive order — titled “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid” — asserting that the U.S. foreign aid industry isn't aligned with American interests and values. On the same day, he issued another executive order titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”

The two executive orders didn’t single out the U.N. by name, but the impact on the world body would turn out to be staggering. The U.N. and its various agencies received somewhere about $13 billion in foreign assistance from the U.S., and the very concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion are central to the U.N.’s identity and the vision laid out in the U.N. Charter.

But many in the U.N. held out hope that they might avoid the American budget ax.

In his first term, Trump had seemed to enjoy his annual visits to the U.N., and invited the secretary-general and the Security Council to the White House — not once, but twice. Biden invited neither. Trump’s first cabinet pick, New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, was nominated to be U.S. ambassador to the U.N., apparently signaling the importance of the world body.

Sure, Trump issued an executive order in early February ordering an end to U.S. funding to several U.N. agencies, including the U.N. Human Rights Council and UNRWA — the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees — and called for a review of U.S. membership in the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — the U.S. has since withdrawn from UNESCO. But those agencies had long been targets of Republicans. Trump had also already withdrawn from the World Health Organization, a long-time target of Trump’s ire, on his first day back in office.

But surely, they wouldn't target agencies such as UNICEF and the World Food Programme, which had enjoyed bipartisan support for decades and were led by Americans? During the first Trump administration, WFP saw its U.S. contributions increase. And the administration’s focus on the U.N.’s work on peace and security, officials hoped, might spare its peacekeeping from draconian cuts.

But Trump 2 turned out to be nothing like Trump 1.

Read: Trump's executive order on WHO, explained (Pro)

Read more: US withdraws from UNESCO, stating it has an 'outsized focus' on SDGs

Hopes dashed

To start, the Republican-controlled House and Senate have proven far more compliant than the last time, ceding unprecedented power to the White House Office of Management and Budget, which had failed during Trump’s first term to wipe out foreign aid funding. Stefanik’s nomination was ultimately withdrawn, reflecting fears that a closely divided House could risk passage of key legislation, including Trump’s tax cuts. The new nominee, Trump’s former national security adviser, Mike Waltz, has yet to be confirmed.

Within days of taking office, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had issued a stop-work order on all U.S. foreign aid, including U.N. agencies, pending a State Department review to determine if programs were aligned with American interests.

The State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has since been folded into State, blasted out letters to U.N. agencies ordering them to freeze spending. U.N. agencies that rely on voluntary funding from the world body, including the International Organization for Migration and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, began laying off thousands of workers.

American delegates, meanwhile, were busily taking the administration's culture wars global.

In New York, the U.S. Mission to the U.N. pressed for the removal of any references to gender or DEI in U.N. documents or programs and declared open opposition to the U.N.’s principal development initiative, the SDGs.

“As Secretary Rubio made clear, we must eliminate our focus on political and cultural causes that are divisive at home and deeply unpopular abroad,” Jonathan Shrier, a U.S. representative, said at a UNICEF board meeting.

Read: The Trump administration takes war on DEI and gender global

Read more: UN Refugee Agency braces for thousands of job cuts

Related: UN migration agency cuts more jobs, shutters lifesaving programs

Demoralizing anniversary

Faced with mounting cuts and deepening arrears, Guterres unveiled his budget-busting reform initiative, dubbed the UN80 Initiative in recognition of the U.N.’s 80th birthday, which coincides with proposals to cut 15% to 20% of spending in the U.N. Secretariat in 2026 and eliminate 20% of U.N. posts. The U.N. Secretariat oversees a regular budget of some $3.7 billion a year and employs about 33,000 people. Many of the U.N.’s more than 20 autonomous specialized agencies and affiliates, including UNICEF and IOM, are undertaking similar cost-cutting efforts, while some, like the International Atomic Energy Agency, are likely to emerge relatively unscathed.

“Each agency is sovereign,” said Ian Richards, the head of the U.N. staff union in Geneva. “FAO [the Food and Agricultural Organization] has just passed a zero growth budget. ICAO [the International Civil Aviation Organization] doesn’t seem to have any issue right now and you can’t cut air safety by 20 percent.”

The reform proposal is broken down into three parts:

1. Cost savings the U.N. leader can achieve under his own authority by streamlining operations, freezing new hiring, cutting back on travel, and transferring staff from New York and Geneva to cheaper cities.

2. Conducting a review of about 4,000 mandates that U.N. member states have given to the U.N., to consolidate and eliminate duplication. U.N. member states would need to agree on such changes.

3. Finally, the initiative calls for consideration of wider structural reforms across the U.N. system, which consists of dozens of agencies that have grown increasingly irrelevant or carry out the same work as other agencies.

The reform effort has smothered staff morale across the U.N. system, and soured relations between the rank and file against their leadership.  

A survey by the Coordinating Committee for International Staff Unions and Associations of the United Nations System, or CCISUA, exposed “deep dissatisfaction with process, fairness, and leadership trust,” according to a summary of the survey.

For instance, it found that 72% of respondents do not believe the proposed cuts are based on “sound rationale,” while 60% don’t believe it will make the U.N. more relevant in the lives of its beneficiaries.

The reform will require the backing of the U.N.’s frequently quarrelsome 193 member states, and it cannot be taken for granted. In 2006, the U.N. conducted a comprehensive review of its many mandates, intending to root out inefficiencies and duplication. It fizzled out.

“We had a look at these bulky mandates back in 2006. It didn’t work very well,” said Guy Ryder, the under-secretary-general for policy and chair of the UN80 task force. This time around, Ryder said, the U.N. has access to better “data and analytical capacities. We’re applying artificial intelligence techniques to provide much more and better organised information to Member States.”

“The obstacles last time were not analytical,” Minh-thu Pham, cofounder of Project Starling and former U.N. staffer who led the effort back in 2006, told Devex in a telephone interview. “It collapsed from the sheer weight of the process.”

“I think there is a risk that in a world on fire and people looking to the U.N. for answers that the member states then turn this into a bookkeeping exercise,” she added.

The U.S., meanwhile, is not waiting for the U.N. to complete its reform before taking action to shrink the world body.

In July, Trump signed into law the Rescissions Act of 2025, which claws back more than $1 billion in congressionally appropriated funding from fiscal year 2024 and fiscal year 2025 for UNICEF, the U.N. Development Programme, U.N. peacekeeping operations, and other agencies. More cuts are likely coming down the pike in the 2026 budget.  

“I think this is a bit of a personal tragedy for Guterres,” Gowan said. “He wanted to use the Summit of the Future as a platform to escape the mundane realities of administering the U.N., which he has never really loved, and lay out a fresh agenda around cooperation on issues like artificial intelligence.”

“Now faced with Trump, he has to play the world’s Bean Counter in Chief,” he added.

Read: White House budget cuts harm UN programs it says it supports

Read more: US Congress clears Trump's $9 billion rescissions package

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