US President Donald Trump is expected to address the UN tomorrow. Photo / Getty Images
The United Nations holds its annual global summit of world leaders this week amid an unprecedented cash crunch, much of it because of the unprecedented refusal of the United States, its largest funder, to make any payments to its regular budget since the Trump Administration took office.
As the organisation struggles to stay afloat, UN officials are projecting even tighter times ahead.
A proposed 2026 budget still to be approved by member states would consolidate offices across many of its agencies, relocate a number of existing operations from New York City and Geneva to less costly places such as Nairobi, and cut thousands of staff.
US President Donald Trump has accused the UN of “not being well run” and early this year ordered a review of all US funding that has not yet been released by the White House.
Trump has withdrawn the US from several UN agencies, including the World Health Organisation and the Human Rights Council; refused to pay money still owed for 2024 assessed UN dues; rescinded about US$1 billion in congressionally appropriated funding for 2025 dues and peacekeeping operations; and slashed overall current and future humanitarian spending.
In July, the White House announced the US withdrawal from Unesco, which it said supports “woke, divisive cultural and social causes”, including Palestinian statehood, that were not aligned “with our national interests”.
Trump has strong party support for efforts to reorient US foreign policy away from soft-power priorities such as global aid programmes and towards what he says are US national security interests.
Although bipartisan support for the UN remains in the Senate - where some have argued that US withdrawal from international agencies has benefitted China - House Republicans have tried to end US funding for the UN regular budget in spending bills over the last two years.
Any elected official who asks constituents whether US dollars are being well spent overseas “would probably get booed off the stage”, a senior US official said.
Within the Administration, “there is a real question about the efficacy, the need, for multilateral diplomacy”, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak about internal discussions.
The US is not alone in cutting UN contributions, although most other countries have cited budgetary concerns over policy reasons.
Trump’s demands that Nato’s European members increase - in some cases more than double - their defence spending have taken a toll on humanitarian contributions, according to a senior UN official.
Trump will address what is expected to be a contentious assembly week tomorrow in a speech that will “lay out the successes” of his first eight months, along with “his vision of how the US is approaching the world”, said the US official.
He is also expected to advance proposals to address global migration and refugees, reportedly including a new system limiting asylum.
He will be joined by Michael Waltz, who was confirmed by the Senate last week as UN ambassador just in time to make the summit. In a social media post following the vote, Waltz vowed to “Make the UN Great Again”.
In an early indication of how the administration is building its own approach to humanitarian assistance, the State Department last week released its “America First” strategy for global health, favouring bilateral aid relationships over international agencies to detect and contain possible pandemics and reduce health “dependency” of low-income countries.
Much of the real business of the high-level week is conducted in bilateral and group meetings on the margins. In those gatherings this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio will push the need for the UN to “get back to basics” and stop operating as “a bloated bureaucracy that compromises national sovereignty and pushes destructive ideologies like DEI”, according to a State Department statement.
Strong statements are anticipated over the war in Gaza, where both Israel and Trump have accused UN agencies - particularly UNRWA, the primary UN body providing assistance to Palestinians living in territories occupied by Israel or refugees in nearby countries - of alignment with terrorist groups.
The UN has sharply denied the charge, while acknowledging that a small handful of UN workers had Hamas ties but noting that about 400 mostly Palestinian UN workers have been killed by Israeli strikes.
Trump’s speech will overlap with a side conference on Palestinian statehood hosted by France and Saudi Arabia, an initiative the State Department has dismissed as a “publicity stunt” and a “reward for terrorism.”
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to address the General Assembly on Friday, although his presentation will be via video after the US cancelled his US visa.
Money is not the only problem facing the UN, which this year celebrates the 80th anniversary of its founding in the wake of World War II. Wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and other intractable conflicts are only a few of the crises that have caused deepening divisions.
“We are gathering in turbulent - even uncharted - waters,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said as preliminary General Assembly meetings began last week.
“Geopolitical divides widening. Conflicts raging. Impunity escalating. Our planet overheating. New technologies racing ahead without guardrails. Inequalities widening by the hour.”
Few member states - or even the UN itself - disagree that the UN has become bloated and bureaucracy-heavy, with expenditures inevitably rising every year. Offices in different countries representing the same agency often have extensive overlap, with separate payroll, human resources and other administrative functions.
The streamlining exercise dubbed UN80, Guterres said, is “to equip the UN for a world that no longer looks like 1945 or even last year”.
Guterres laid much of the blame on the member states, saying they need to “get serious and deliver”.
“We cannot continue to do more with less,” a second senior UN official said. “We will be forced to do less with less.”
The main UN funding source for the general budget and peacekeeping operations is assessed mandatory annual contributions, determined by what’s known as “capacity to pay”, with amounts derived by a complex formula involving gross domestic product, population and external debt.
The US 2025 assessment is 22% of the regular UN budget, or about US$820 million, with China close behind at 20%. or US$680m. Japan is a distant third with a 6.9% assessment.
The regular or “core” budget covering administrative and some other costs runs for a calendar year, January to December, while peacekeeping - for which the US contributes about 26% - runs on a fiscal year.
Most countries are late by at least a few months paying assessments; some, including China, don’t pay their full dues until the end of the calendar year. The US has traditionally paid half at a time, based on its fiscal year.
In 2024, the Biden Administration paid half of the annual assessment last northern autumn, leaving the other half for Trump. It remains unpaid, along with the first half of 2025 and all peacekeeping assessments.
“At the moment, there’s a huge disconnect between policy and the purse,” said Peter Yeo, senior vice-president of the UN Foundation and head of the Better World Campaign, both of which try to improve relations between the US and the UN. If Trump’s final round of 2025 rescissions are approved by Congress, “it would mean the US would not pay its regular dues for the first time in history,” Yeo said.
UN officials have presented a 2026 budget of US$3.25 billion, down more than 15% from the 2025 total of $3.8b. The projected employment reduction is 2680 posts. There are similar reductions for peacekeeping.
Most US money to the UN, however, goes to an array of agencies, including development, food, children, refugee and counternarcotics programmes, which members fund voluntarily based on their priorities.
In the wake of US spending cuts earlier this year, many of these programmes and staff have already been severely reduced.
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