What’s Left of the UN
How to run an international institution with no cash, no direction and no morale.
JULY 8, 2025
Inside the guarded bubble of the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, there are signs of a problem. Next to the security carousels, a large sign, replicated all over the hallways, says: “In response to the ongoing UN budget crisis, we have had to reduce operating hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.” During the past two years, corridors and meeting rooms of the Palais des Nations have been occasionally kept in the dark, central heating and elevators cut to save on the very inflated Swiss electricity bills. Back in December 2023, the UN’s liquidity crisis got so dire that the Palais was shut down for three whole weeks. Ahead of a security meeting, a source told me a Russian delegate once joked in front of a dead elevator that they should turn the power off for Americans but not for him: His country had already paid its yearly contribution to the UN.
The much delayed, years-long renovation of the UN buildings, which has overrun its budget by as much as 118 million CHF ($144 million), adds a layer of uncertainty to the otherwise neatly sophisticated decor. Construction gear lies in the grass. A sign about Building E, the building where the main conference rooms are, states, nostalgically, that it was once the world’s largest glass window. (The world’s largest glass window is now in China, according to the Guinness Book of World Records). Behind the rain-soaked foliage of the gardens, a peacock wails. Peacocks were offered as a gift to the UN by India’s permanent mission in the 1980s and, as a result, the UN gardens are full of them. They are still being fed by Geneva’s municipal staff.
The UN has been knee-deep in a liquidity crisis since 2023, with more member states paying late each year and some of them not paying at all, leaving the organization’s cash reserves exhausted.
The World Health Assembly brings together the representatives of 194 states every year in May. It is one of the year’s highlights for the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN agency dedicated to health. Inside Building E, the atmosphere is busy, focused, even expectant. It is May 20, the second day of the assembly, and a much anticipated-session is taking place in Room XX — also known as the Human Rights and Alliance of Civilizations Room. Member states are discussing whether or not they will approve measures proposed by the WHO’s director, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, to shrink down its core budget for 2026-27 to $4.2 billion from $5.3 billion and to increase membership fees by 20 percent to try to fill the anticipated budget gap of more than $1.7 billion due in part to a lack of U.S. contributions. The fees vary from one country to another, proportional to GDP. In a drastic move aimed at showing member states the reforms will not spare anyone, the WHO would reduce the number of its departments from 76 to 34 and, in June 2025, the senior leadership team in Geneva from 12 to seven directors. “The hard truth is that we need to reduce salary expenditures by 25 percent,” Ghebreyesus said at a member state briefing in late April.
Under the colorful stalactites dripping from the round ceiling of Room XX, a sculpture by Spanish artist Miquel Barceló representing multiculturalism and tolerance, the room was full and attentive. First Qatar, then Senegal, Togo, Spain, Colombia, Brazil, China, Lebanon and the U.K. spoke for three minutes each, the time allotted to member states. Member states unanimously agreed on the budget cuts.
The UN has been knee-deep in a liquidity crisis since 2023, with more member states paying late each year and some of them not paying at all, leaving the organization’s cash reserves exhausted. China regularly pays late. Afghanistan, Bolivia and Venezuela are in arrears. In 2023 only 82.3 percent of the budget had been collected, leaving $859 million in unpaid contributions. So when the United States, which owes the UN approximately $1.5 billion in arrears for the regular UN budget and about $1.2 billion for the peacekeeping budget, announced in January that it was cutting nearly all its foreign aid, the effect was devastating. The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) scaled back its operations in nine countries. The World Food Program had to cut back food assistance for tens of millions of people. The UN’s Population Fund (UNFPA) terminated 48 grants, halting maternal health care, protection from violence and other lifesaving services for women and girls. In Afghanistan alone, the WHO closed 200 health facilities, meaning that 1.84 million people lost access to essential health care and vaccination programs. Twenty-seven countries in Africa and Asia face crippling breakdowns in tuberculosis diagnosis and treatment. The global network of 700 measles and rubella labs is at risk of collapse, malaria diagnoses and deliveries of bed nets and medicines have been delayed, the polio and mpox programs are unable to function as before.
Labeled “strictly confidential,” one memo quoted by Reuters laid out “suggestions” and “options” targeting “overlapping mandates” and an “inefficient use of resources,” a lexicon strikingly reminiscent of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency.
On that same afternoon on May 20, stern faces were sitting across from a group of journalists in another room of the Palais des Nations. The UN unions were holding a press conference to sound the alarm about the looming, massive overhaul. In the wake of the U.S. cuts, the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, announced a new reform strategy in March called UN 80, which aims to deliver improvements in peace, development and humanitarian aid while ensuring that public funds are used wisely and transparently — in short, a plan to do more with less.
For weeks, the strategy was subject to speculation, a lack of transparency adding to the general feeling of confusion and anxiety among UN staff. Internal memos circulated among UN executives in late April asking them which of their department’s functions could be moved to a different location and to please reply by May 16. Some of these memos were leaked to the press. Labeled “strictly confidential,” one memo quoted by Reuters laid out “suggestions” and “options” targeting “overlapping mandates” and an “inefficient use of resources,” a lexicon strikingly reminiscent of the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency. Guterres’ spokesman would later describe the memo as an “exercise to generate ideas and thoughts from senior officials on how to achieve the Secretary-General’s vision.”
A recurring idea appears to be the merging of things, be it operational departments or entire agencies. One scenario mentioned in the memo suggests the merging of the department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs with the Peacekeeping Operations Secretariat, two closely linked but separate departments of the UN secretariat. While both work on peace and security, the first focuses on conflict prevention and peace building and the second on peacekeeping and post-conflict stabilization. Another scenario entails the merging of the UN AIDS agency with the WHO. There’s less funding for AIDS work: Even Switzerland announced in late January that it was ceasing its $3.3 million contributions to UN AIDS. Another “option” would consist of reorganizing the UN agencies — close to 20 — into four departments: peace and security, humanitarian affairs, sustainable development, and human rights. A 20 percent cut in jobs should be seen as a benchmark, Guterres remarked in May. Another leaked memo revealed that the UN was preparing to slash its $3.7 billion budget by 20 percent overall as well as 6,900 jobs.
In May, Qatar bid to become the UN’s new hub for humanitarian affairs. (Ninety-one percent of the country’s population are migrant workers who lack numerous protections.)
“We are concerned with the process, the speed of the process and what it means for Geneva,” said Laura Johnson, the executive secretary of the UN Office in Geneva staff union, right after the press conference. “We feel completely helpless,” Séverine Deboos, the president of the International Labor Organization (ILO) staff union, said on the phone two days later. “We don’t know how to do our jobs anymore. From one day to the next, colleagues are being notified their contract termination, projects are cut short. Some are very sensitive: In Myanmar, our colleagues who were working on freedom of association rights had to cease their activities.”
Another possible cost-saving measure: moving UN agencies to cities less expensive than New York and Geneva, the current locations of the UN’s headquarters. According to Deboos, up to 25 percent of staff at the ILO Geneva would be moved. In late April, the Swiss newspaper Le Temps revealed that Nairobi, Bonn and Vienna were at the top of the relocation list. These potential moves raise more questions than they offer answers. Massive relocations imply both finding swaths of affordable offices in a new place and letting go of the old ones. Would some of the UN’s historical buildings in Geneva be sold? Rented? UN staff I spoke to underlined the importance of preserving the ecosystem inherent to Geneva. Beyond international organizations, the city counts some 180 permanent missions and their flock of seasoned diplomats as well as hundreds of non-governmental organizations. The multiplication of UN hubs could also be a disadvantage for smaller nations unable to afford representation beyond New York and Geneva. It is unclear how cost-saving these relocations would actually be if they are executed hastily and involve hefty fees linked to thousands of contract terminations.
The uncertainty of the new locations has led to a bidding war among UN member states wanting to host a new form of decentralized multilateralism. In May, Qatar bid to become the UN’s new hub for humanitarian affairs. (Ninety-one percent of the country’s population are migrant workers who lack numerous protections.) Although Rwanda was explicitly asked by the UN, in early June, to call back its thousands of troops backing the ongoing war in Eastern Congo, the country has positioned itself as a competitive destination to host a long-term UN campus. An official letter addressed to Guterres and signed by Rwanda’s prime minister in mid-May touted Kigali’s political stability and air connectivity, offering few other specifics.
Amid all the talk about relocations, mergers and staff reductions some say the UN had it coming with its constantly expanding budget even in the face of a changing and more uncertain global landscape.
In the past few years, several scandals of corruption, dubious loans and funds misused in certain UN agencies have pointed to deep structural weaknesses in financial oversight and ethics enforcement. In 2024, staff at the UN Development Program (UNDP), which was running a $1.5 billion funding program in Iraq, were accused of running an organized racket within the agency, asking for bribes in exchange of contracts. Two years before that, the UN Office for Project Services (UNOPS) gave nearly $60 million to a single private firm under a plan to build 1 million low-income homes in India and Nigeria. No houses were built, and the agency’s executive director was forced to resign. These scandals can’t overshadow how many hundreds of millions of people the UN helps directly every year with access to health, food, water, rights and education and more. In 2025, the UN expects 305 million people will need life-saving help globally. Because of the scale of the cuts being made, aid will only reach 190 million. One UN aid official has called this situation “triage of human survival.”
In the midst of such unprecedented levels of disruption inside the UN, the U.S.’s refusal to pay its contribution is leaving an empty chair for other players.
In under six months, U.S. foreign aid cuts have had cruel, cascading effects on millions of UN beneficiaries around the world: 250,000 children are out of school in Sudan because of missing funds; in Congo, rape survivors no longer have access to emergency kits and life-saving medication; response efforts to a cholera pandemic in Haiti are on the brink of collapse. So are many HIV/AIDS programs, making the UN goal of ending the pandemic by 2030 improbable at best. In Gaza, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Mozambique, in the blink of an eye, midwives, shrinks, programs for survivors and essential services in refugee camps were gone.
In the midst of such unprecedented levels of disruption inside the UN, the U.S.’s refusal to pay its contribution is leaving an empty chair for other players. “China has already started to take more and more room inside the UN and its specialized agencies such as UNESCO by financing bigger parts of their budget,” said Chloé Maurel, a historian and specialist of the UN. “UNESCO’s magazine, called Le Courrier de l’Unesco, has been funded by China since 2017. This has had a very important impact on its editorial line and the way China is presented in it.” The paper regularly publishes positive stories about the country, such as the beneficial use of computers at schools in rural China or an exhibition dedicated to the 5,000-year history of China’s gastronomy. These attempts to reshape the narrative around China’s actions go way beyond cultural soft power. There are also reports of intimidation and threats against representatives of the Chinese diaspora. Ten years ago, Cao Shunli, a prominent Chinese human rights activist, disappeared while on her way to board a flight from Beijing to Geneva. In March 2024, Uyghur activists were meeting in the Geneva offices of an independent association that specializes in training activists to do advocacy work at the UN. They were interrupted by two women claiming they belonged to an unknown human rights association and insisting they stay for the duration of the meeting. Later, photographs of the Uyghur activists were taken from a van with tinted windows; they feared they were being monitored by the Chinese government. China has also developed the habit of flooding the UN Human Rights Council, which meets three times a year inside the Palais des Nations, with government-backed groups masquerading as NGOs, making it harder for pro-democracy activists and members of minority groups to speak freely. But although China’s contribution to the UN has never been higher, it tends to pay late. In 2024, China paid on December 27 making it impossible to distribute it all before the end of the year.
For now, the UN celebrates the wins where it can. Back in Room XX of Building E at the Palais des Nations, a group of representatives signed a pandemic agreement, an international instrument designed to help prevent and address future pandemics more swiftly and collectively than in the past by obliging member states to share their health data in real time. The applause was loud, and forceful. “We have a tendency to think that it is not the right time for multilateralism,” said Ambassador Amr Ramadan, from Egypt, one of the six members of the bureau who supervised the treaty negotiations. “But it worked!” What will happen next time?
PHOTO: “View of Room XIX of Building E of the Palais des Nations” by David Holt (public domain via Wikimedia/US EPA)
✺ Published in “Issue 30: Fever” of The Dial
