I recently made a list. It’s a list that has been in my head for dozens of years, but only recently I decided to commit to writing in order to see just how much it had grown.
It isn’t a list of things to buy, in fact it’s a list designed to save money. It’s a list of things that are good for me as an American, as a taxpayer, and as a sentient human with a conscience.
When I was in college, people who talked about global government and whispered conspiratorially about black helicopters were thought of as looneys. They had drunk too much conservative Kool-Aid and should be sidelined. Their sense that the United Nations had overstepped its mandate and was encroaching onto our daily lives could not possibly be correct.
I’m older now. Those looneys made some good points back in the day. Count me among the global government skeptics.
Back to my list. The list I made is full of acronyms, each one corresponds to an international organization. The alphabet soup of UN agencies is designed to obscure the nature of what those agencies’ mandates are. What I have learned over the decades is that the world of the United Nations and its web of agencies and affiliates is mobilized in ways that serve to enrich a small cadre of corrupt international bureaucrats and to deplete American coffers.
America is the most generous country in the history of the world. Full stop. We give willingly and graciously to those in need. We feel the pain of those who are ill, starving, and weak, and we rise, as one or individually, to help them. At around this time of year, we give thanks for the bounty we have received, and we reach out our helping hands to help others.
The United Nations, by contrast, reaches out its hand for more of your cash.
American taxpayers pay approximately one third of the $60 billion budget of the United Nations and dozens of additional agencies, the most of any country in the world. When members of Congress who have the power of the purse question any disbursements to, say, UN Women, they are immediately set upon by legions of global lobbyists who accuse them of misogyny, racism, transphobia, or other heresies. They demand that America fully fund UN agencies and imply that not doing so will diminish America’s standing in the world.
Really? This is how UN lobbyists shamelessly address global government’s biggest funder? Anyone heard of biting the hand that feeds you?
On to my list with a brief explanation for each entry. This list is not all-inclusive, but it's worthwhile to highlight the most egregious ingrates as President-elect Trump, with help from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, look for places to cut billions of dollars of federal spending. Yes, billions.
Top of the list is UNRWA, the UN Relief Works Agency for Palestinian refugees. UNRWA, since October 7, 2023, has been unmasked as deeply complicit with Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups both in the attacks on October 7 as well as for decades prior in cultivating a culture of terrorism in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Under President Biden, the U.S. rewarded the terrorism supporters with over $1 billion of emergency relief aid through the US Agency for International Development. Under President Trump, we cut all aid to UNRWA.
Let’s focus on women for a moment. Next up are UN Women and the UN Population Fund. UN Women’s Executive Director is a Jordanian woman who, despite forensic and video evidence filmed by the terrorists themselves as they proudly raped, murdered, and burned Israelis alive, took over 50 days to acknowledge that gender-based violence had occurred on October 7. As irrelevant as UN Women made itself by demonstrating that #MeToo applies only to women if they aren’t Jewish, equally disheartening is the work of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). For decades, UNFPA has been accused of being complicit with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a program of forced abortions and sterilizations in China. Successive Republican administrations have defunded UNFPA and that funding has consistently been re-funded, with interest, by Democrats when they have held the White House. Permanent defunding of an agency that is complicit with the CCP in carrying out its anti-choice, anti-woman policies is in order.
Speaking of human rights, next on the chopping block should be the UN Human Rights Council. This sham organization is people with representatives from bastions of human rights like China, Cuba, Qatar, South Africa, Somalia, and Sudan. Their regular order of business on any given day is to take action against Israel - not Russia, not Iran, not Venezuela. Israel. The fact that Biden saw fit to join the Council after Trump left it (along with American contributions) demonstrates the fallacy of Biden’s approach to human rights.
Rounding out my incomplete list is the World Health Organization (WHO). Remember the COVID mandates? Those didn’t come out of thin air - they were pushed and promulgated by the World Health Organization, the entity that sees fit to dictate how we live our lives while its Executive Director is in the pocket of the Chinese Communist Party. He refused to disclose information related to COVID as it would harm his relationships with Beijing, meanwhile, America pays more to WHO coffers than any other country, including China.
The list goes on. It’s an alphabet soup of agencies that most Americans have never heard of, and have no visibility into. That’s a problem. Our government should be a good steward of tax dollars and must be able to explain, audit, and quantify why expenditures are made. Wasteful spending that is harmful to America and our allies should be an easy place to start cutting.
Bonnie Glick was the Deputy Administrator and Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. Agency for International Development under President Donald Trump.