White House budget cuts harm UN programs it says it supports

The U.N.’s financial future just got worse. For weeks, the world body’s leadership has been plotting out plans for slashing funding and downsizing its workforce by at least 20%. But the recent passage of a law clawing back more than $1 billion in U.S. funding to the United Nations for everything from peacekeepers to human rights promotion and nutritional supplements for children in conflict zones has made it clear it will have to dig deeper. And it coincides with a State Department announcement on Tuesday that the U.S is withdrawing from UNESCO. The U.N. cuts are included in a $9 billion Rescission Act of 2025 that was recently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump, imposing sweeping cuts on congressionally appropriated U.S. foreign aid programs from fiscal years 2024 and 2025, and ending funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. The White House “rescissions” — provisions to cancel congressionally appropriated funds — would cut more than $361 million in funding for U.N. peacekeeping missions in Lebanon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, ballooning Washington’s already whopping peacekeeping arrears to about $1.8 billion, according to Better World Campaign. The U.N. maintains that the U.S. is legally obligated to pay its full share of peacekeeping costs. A proposed House budget for fiscal year 2026 that is making its way through the House appropriations committee envisions even deeper cuts, capping peacekeeping funding at about $560 million, a roughly 54% cut from 2025. The funding for international organizations would drop from about $1.54 billion to $310.2 million. It would also prohibit funding for several U.N. agencies that are unpopular among Republicans, including UN Human Rights and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. The rescissions package eliminates $202 million from the State Department's contributions to international organizations, or CIO, account, which funds U.S. assessments for more than 40 international organizations. It remains unclear which of those agencies will lose money, but the account funds some of the most prominent international organizations, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The package also targets another critical funding account, the international organizations and programs account, with over $450 million in voluntary U.S. funding for UNICEF ($142 million), the U.N. Development Programme ($81.5 million), UN Human Rights ($17.5 million) and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs ($3.5 million). “It is obviously left to the discretion of all Member States whether they want to make voluntary contributions to UN programmes, and the life-saving work of agencies like UNICEF have proven their value over decades,” Stéphane Dujarric, the chief spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, told Devex in writing. “We would remind all Member States that assessed contributions are treaty commitments, and building up arrears in those contributions greatly hinders our ability to carry out the tasks mandated by our Member States for the people around the world who rely on our services.” “The U.S. has been a leading contributor to the UN system for many years, for which we are immensely grateful, and we would hope they continue to see the value of working together with others at the UN,” he added. The Trump administration has already broken ranks with the U.N. and other international agencies on a range of fronts, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on climate change, pulling funding for the U.N. Population Fund, or UNFPA, and announcing the intent to pull out of the U.N. Human Rights Council. In announcing its decision to leave UNESCO, a State Department spokesperson said the Paris-based agency’s recognition of the “State of Palestine” ran “contrary to U.S. policy” and contributed to anti-Israel rhetoric. The spokesperson also accused UNESCO of advancing “divisive social and cultural causes” at odds with the “America First” foreign policy. In response, UNESCO’s Director-General Audrey Azoulay, said “I deeply regret” Trump’s decision, adding that it “contradicts the fundamental principles of multilateralism.” She also defended the agency’s role in the field of “Holocaust education and the fight against antisemitism.” She also noted that UNESCO has established a more diversified donor base since Trump first withdrew from UNESCO during his first term in office. “The decreasing trend in the financial contribution of the US has been offset, so that it now represents 8% of the Organization's total budget compared to 40% for some United Nations entities,” she said in a statement. “At this stage, the Organization is not considering any layoffs.” The rescissions bill does not constitute a formal U.S. break from the U.N., and leaves, at least for now, the administrative budget intact. Several agencies hit by the rescissions package, including UNICEF and UNDP, did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for the UN Refugees Agency, said: “It is too early to determine what impact the proposed rescission package may have on UNHCR. We remain in regular contact with the U.S. Government regarding our operations and funding.” Republican lawmakers have downplayed the impact of the funding cuts on UNICEF, which has enjoyed broad bipartisan support in Congress since its founding in 1946. “UNICEF’s mission, although admirable, is not immune from waste, fraud and abuse,” said Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri who took to the Senate floor to oppose an amendment by Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, that would have spared UNICEF from the cuts. “That is why this rescission package includes $142 million for UNICEF’s overhead.” But Peter Yeo, the president of the U.N. advocacy outfit the Better World Campaign, said that the rescission cuts “core flexible funding” for organizations such as UNICEF and UNDP, undermining their ability to react quickly when crises arrive. “That money is used to allow agencies to respond quickly to emergencies, to make sure the needs of children are being met when natural disaster hits or civil war breaks out,” Yeo said in a phone interview. “That money is now gone.” The cuts are being imposed before the U.S. has even concluded its own long-awaited 180-day review of U.S. contributions to international organizations, and before Mike Waltz, president Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. delegation at the U.N., has been confirmed by Congress and begins his work. The U.N., meanwhile, has pursued its own reform effort, titled UN80, with the goal of slashing some 20% of funding across all U.N. agencies. Officials had hoped its reform initiative — which Waltz praised during his Senate confirmation hearing — might stave off more draconian U.S. cuts. But the far-reaching rescission signaled that the White House and both houses of Congress would press ahead with cuts, even before a formal 180-day State Department review of U.N. programs had been completed. “I don’t think this will have an immediate impact as the U.N. had planned for this outcome in its spending allocations,” Ian Richards, the head of the U.N. staff union in Geneva, wrote to Devex. But he said it demonstrates that the U.N.’s “efforts to impose a 20 percent haircut across the whole secretariat … are not making inroads with the U.S.” He added that “the problem is that if the budget is reduced by 20 percent for next years and the U.S. still doesn’t pay, UN80 may have shot itself in the foot.” Critics of the rescissions bill say that it marks a historic rupture of the international aid system, and constitutes an egregious breach of solemn commitments the U.S. government has made. They note that the U.S. government has played a central role in ordering and authorizing the U.N. to take on missions and activities it no longer intends to fund. It also threatens to undercut the Trump administration’s own peace efforts, and sends mixed messages about where it stands on U.N. peace efforts. For instance, in May the White House budget office claimed that U.N. peacekeeping operations had been “fraught with waste and abuse” and singled out “ongoing sexual exploitation and abuse” in the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, known as MONUSCO. But the following month, Trump presided over the signing of a peace agreement by the foreign ministers of the DRC and Rwanda, a pact that relies on U.N. peacekeepers. In New York, meanwhile, U.S. diplomats have underscored the importance of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the DRC. On June 27, Dorothy Shea, the U.S. charge d’affaires at the U.N., said that “while we celebrate today’s diplomatic breakthrough between the DRC and Rwanda, we recall that the situation on the ground across eastern DRC remains highly volatile,” she told the U.N. Security Council. “Against this challenging backdrop, MONUSCO has remained a constant and constructive presence — one that continues to make lifesaving contributions to the security of eastern DRC through unparalleled expertise, analysis, and access.” “Now more than ever, to support implementation of the peace agreement, MONUSCO must be empowered and enabled to execute the tasks that we, the Security Council, have given it,” she said. Devex Senior Reporter Adva Saldinger contributed reporting to this article.