By Ben Johnson
The Washington Stand
Global governance institutions assume the right to issue orders to independent, national governments around the world — but since President Donald Trump began reasserting America’s autonomy, one international organization is finding it hard to pay its bills.
Despite slashing its budget by hundreds of millions of dollars, the World Health Organization (WHO) still has a $2.5 billion shortfall, its leaders revealed this week.
President Trump signed an executive order beginning the process of U.S. withdrawal from the global health body, a favorite of the Biden-Harris administration, and has already denied the agency hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
In response, WHO already cut $600 million from this year’s budget and another $1.1 billion in the 2026-2027 year, reducing outlays from $5.3 billion to $4.2 billion. The United States gave WHO $1.3 billion in 2022-2023 under President Joe Biden. But the U.S. cut off $260 million this fiscal year — $130 million of which the outgoing Biden-Harris administration uncharacteristically did not deliver.
But the WHO still lacks $2.5 billion, according to figures supplied at an agency-wide town hall meeting on Tuesday — leaving the body approximately 45% shy of the resources needed to fund its reduced budget.
“WHO proved itself to be a corrupt organization run by the Chinese Communist Party and global leftists,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Wednesday. “As in so many other areas, President Trump is acting boldly, swiftly, and decisively by really focusing on the waste, fraud, and abuse of borrowed taxpayer money that is mortgaging our children’s future. So, I’m very, very pleased with his swift action here.”
Speaking to WHO employees over Zoom this week, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus echoed the budget-tightening rhetoric of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). “The reduction will be done carefully and strategically based on a prioritization exercise that we are now conducting to ensure we focus on our core functions, leveraging our comparative advantage and delivering the greatest possible impact with our reduced resources,” the director-general, who has deep ties to the People’s Republic of China, told staffers. “Everything is on the table, including merging divisions, departments, and units, and relocating functions.”
Ghebreyesus also denied a report from Health Policy Watch documenting that the WHO spent $100 million funding its 215 directors. The publication stood by its reporting. “A complete mapping of WHO’s teams, departments and staffing has not been published since 2019, when Tedros led the WHO ‘transformation’ aimed at making the organization more responsive and fit for purpose,” it added, noting that Ghebreyesus presided over “an expansion in the number of WHO divisions, directors and senior leaders” and their salaries.
President Trump actually squeezed the global governance organization from multiple angles. “The United States’ announcement, combined with recent reductions in official development assistance by some countries to fund increased defence spending, has made our situation much more acute,” said a March 28 memo to WHO employees.
The WHO’s recent hardships are a marked change from just last year when the Biden-Harris administration hoped to pass the WHO Pandemic Agreement. During the Biden-Harris administration, Senator Johnson led strong Republican opposition to the agreement. At one point, he urged Christians to “pray for a Tower of Babel” inside WHO, creating confusion in its ranks.
WHO officials announced they would not complete the agreement by the end of the Biden administration.
The Senate GOP “cut off the amendments that were really going to threaten our individual sovereignty,” said Johnson on Wednesday. “We nipped that in the bud.”
“We don’t want to be governed by an international institution. We want our national sovereignty,” stated Johnson. “And the WHO is just part of the one world order, a group of institutions that would threaten that sovereignty” and America’s national self-determination.
WHO’s budget setback is the latest reversal by the coterie of global institutions which partisans refer to as the “international rules-based order” and which critics deride in conspiratorial tones as part of the “New World Order.” President Trump has announced the United States plans to end its membership to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and the climate change-focused Paris Accords.
The president did not withdraw the U.S. from the International Criminal Court (ICC), because our government never signed on. However, Trump sanctioned the controversial body after it issued an arrest warrant for Israeli figures it accuses of committing war crimes in their war against Hamas. “The ICC has, without a legitimate basis, asserted jurisdiction over and opened preliminary investigations concerning personnel of the United States and certain of its allies, including Israel, and has further abused its power by issuing baseless arrest warrants targeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant,” stated the president’s February 6 executive order titled “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court.”
Last month, the Trump administration announced it had withheld U.S. payments to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
The president’s leadership has encouraged others to follow suit. On Thursday, Hungary announced it, too, will exit the ICC.
Senator Johnson hoped the free nations of the world would one day form a successor to the World Health Organization, an international organization of liberty-respecting nations “that could manage health crises effectively.”
“But the WHO is not it,” he said.
Originally published at The Washington Stand!
