Trump Gets the U.N. to Cut Spending The U.S. uses its leverage for once to force budget reforms.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-gets-the-u-n-to-cut-spending-1514839180
Here’s something more miraculous than Congress spending less money—the United Nations doing it. Yet that’s what happened at the end of 2017 as the 193-nation General Assembly agreed to a 5% spending cut in its new biennial budget after American prodding.
The General Assembly agreed by consensus to shrink the U.N. budget by $286 million, to $5.4 billion, down 5% from the prior budget. The U.N. will save about $50 million by trimming hiring and overhead costs, and another $18 million from cutting the U.N. Department of Management, better known as human resources. The peacekeeping operations budget, which was negotiated separately earlier in 2017, was reduced by $593 million to $7.3 billion, a 7.5% cut.
The General Assembly also agreed to spending reforms, including restrictions on construction projects and an audit of the U.N.’s $60 billion staff pension fund. Starting in 2020, the U.N. will move to annual budgeting, which Secretary-General spokesman Stéphane Dujarric called “one of the most significant shifts in the programme planning and budgeting process of the Organization since the 1970s,” which says a lot about the U.N.’s accounting systems.
These reductions are hardly draconian. They don’t include cuts to the U.N.’s elevator operators, who cost about $300,000 per year, or trim the budget of the International Court of Justice’s judges and spouses, who travel first class. Committee for Programme and Coordination members, a strategic planning group for bureaucrats, holds a five-week meeting every year in New York City, rather than meet in a cheaper location or via teleconference.
Secretary-General António Guterres has supported the reforms. But none of this would have happened without pressure from the United States. President Trump called out the U.N.’s bloated bureaucracy and “mismanagement” in September, and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley has pressed the case. The U.S. has leverage at the U.N. because it provides 22% of its budget, but credit the Trump Administration for finally using it.
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