Trump Cut UN Funding and Now They’re Panicking About Going Broke

The Alarm Bell Nobody Asked For

António Guterres just sent a letter to 193 countries warning that the United Nations might run out of money by July. The UN Secretary-General called it an “imminent financial collapse.” His message was urgent, almost desperate. “We cannot execute budgets with uncollected funds, nor return funds we never received,” he wrote.

Here’s what he didn’t mention: maybe the problem isn’t the funding. Maybe it’s what they’ve been doing with it all these years.

President Trump pulled American support from UNESCO, the World Health Organization, and the UN Human Rights Council last month. The reasons? Waste, mismanagement, and the fact that other countries weren’t pulling their weight. You know, the usual suspects when you’re dealing with bloated international bureaucracies that have forgotten what accountability looks like.

When America Stops Paying the Tab

The United States used to be the UN’s biggest contributor. Past tense matters here. We were essentially bankrolling an organization that often worked against our interests, lectured us about human rights while giving platforms to tyrants, and burned through cash like it was Monopoly money.

Ambassador Mike Waltz laid it out pretty clearly back in December. “We walked away from WHO, the World Health Organization; UNRWA, the UN agency in Gaza that’s been completely infiltrated by Hamas. We walked out of it and defunded that, too. The so-called human rights councils that cater to countries like North Korea and Venezuela and Iran.”

Think about that for a second. We’ve been funding councils where North Korea gets to weigh in on human rights. It’s like hiring an arsonist to head your fire department.

The America First Calculation

Waltz continued: “It’s really about focusing our effort on the parts that align with an America First agenda and defunding and walking away from the rest of it, the nonsense.”

That’s not isolationism. That’s common sense dressed up in diplomatic language.

For decades, American taxpayers have subsidized international organizations that treat us like both the ATM and the villain. We pay the bills while countries that contribute a fraction of what we do get equal votes and often use those votes to condemn us. It’s a peculiar arrangement when you stop and examine it.

The free market works because there are consequences for bad decisions. Businesses that waste money go bankrupt. Organizations that don’t serve their customers lose them. But international bodies like the UN have operated in a consequence-free zone, insulated by the assumption that American money would always flow.

Well, assumptions have a shelf life.

What Collapse Actually Means

Here’s the thing about the UN’s threatened “financial collapse.” It won’t mean the end of international cooperation. It won’t spark global chaos. What it might mean is that an organization built for a different era finally has to reckon with its own relevance.

The UN was founded in 1945 with noble intentions. But intentions don’t excuse results, and the results have been mixed at best. Peacekeeping missions that failed to keep peace. Development programs that enriched bureaucrats more than the poor. And yes, human rights councils dominated by human rights abusers.

When Guterres warns about running out of money, he’s really warning about running out of American patience. That patience didn’t evaporate overnight. It eroded slowly, crisis by crisis, scandal by scandal, wasted dollar by wasted dollar.

The Other 192 Countries

If the UN is truly essential, then the other 192 member states should have no problem picking up the slack. They’ve spent years telling us how important multilateralism is, how we need global cooperation, how America should listen more and lead less.

Great. Here’s their chance to put money behind those words.

China loves to position itself as a global leader. Let Beijing write some checks. The European Union never misses an opportunity to lecture America about our obligations. Time to see if their commitment extends beyond rhetoric.

This isn’t about abandoning the world. It’s about forcing the world to stop abandoning its own responsibilities. American taxpayers aren’t a bottomless well of money for every international organization that asks nicely.

Limited government doesn’t stop at our borders. The principle that institutions should be lean, effective, and accountable applies whether we’re talking about the Department of Education or the United Nations. Maybe more so when it’s our money funding foreign bureaucrats.

What Comes Next

The UN will likely survive this. Organizations like this always do. They’ll find emergency funding, restructure, maybe even cut some waste. Crisis has a way of forcing efficiency that prosperity never does.

But the relationship has changed. America is done being the silent partner who pays the bills and gets blamed anyway. We’re done funding organizations that work against our values while claiming to represent universal ones.

Guterres can send all the urgent letters he wants. The real question isn’t whether America will rescue the UN from financial collapse. The real question is whether the UN can rescue itself from irrelevance.

That answer won’t be found in any budget. It’ll be found in whether they remember why they exist in the first place.

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