At 80, the UN struggles on

The United Nations is an institution that is having to take a crash diet. The world organisation is struggling with a severe financial crisis as the Trump administration has withheld almost all US funding for its activities. Secretary-General António Guterres, who is approaching the end of his ten-year term at the end of 2026, is having to make emergency budget cuts and propose options for rationalising international agencies and offices. The UN will be providing less food, less shelter and less medical assistance to vulnerable people around the world as its tries to adapt. It is not clear whether the Secretary-General’s efforts will be enough to stabilise the organisation he leads. While the impetus for reform is the UN’s financial crisis, debates about the organisation’s future are likely to evolve into a broader discussion of global governance. Budgets, as Martin Luther King allegedly said, are moral documents: They reflect the values of the communities that approve them. The UN budget – and reforms to the way the UN spends its money – should reflect the priorities of the so-called ‘international community’ that make up and pay for the institution. Different groups of UN members have divergent views over what the organisation should prioritise. While President Trump has said that the UN should return to its original focus on peace and security, many non-Western countries want it to concentrate on economic development and climate adaptation. Europeans fear that the UN is paying less attention to human rights than it did in the post-Cold War hey-day of liberalism. As states debate about how to allocate the UN’s reduced resources, they will promote clashing visions of the UN’s overriding international goals. The scale of the UN’s short-term crisis reflects its long-standing reliance on Washington for both political and financial assistance. Under UN rules, the US is supposed to pay 22% of the organisation’s main institutional budget and a quarter of its peacekeeping costs. These budget lines currently add up to a little over $2 billion a year. Trump, who has accused the UN of failing to live up to its potential in maintaining international peace and security, has not send the UN a cent of this money to date. The US has played an even greater role in funding the UN’s major humanitarian agencies, covering roughly a third of all humanitarian spending last year. This funding – which is voluntary rather than obligatory – has shrunk to a trickle since January. UN officials had hoped that other donors, such as the European Union and China, could help compensate for the resulting financial gaps. But the international response has been limited. European countries have emphasised that they cannot offer significant funds to the UN at a time when they are trying to meet new NATO spending targets. Beijing has offered small amounts of new money – and signalled that it wants its nominees to fill more top UN jobs – but has also made it clear that it does not intend to replace the US as a large-scale funder of multilateral activities. In New York, diplomats and international officials have concluded that the UN will simply have to shrink. Although some express regret, others say that they see this as a necessary reckoning for the organisation, arguing that it has become bloated and inefficient. As one senior international official told me this spring, President Trump has probably only accelerated a process of reforming and downsizing the UN that would have taken place in a few years anyway. There is a talk around diplomatic dinner tables of ‘doing less with less’ and the UN having to ‘get back to basics’. The effects of these budget cuts are meanwhile being felt by vulnerable civilians. A recent study of Afghanistan by my colleagues at the International Crisis Group found that hundreds of health centres and clean water facilities have been closed due to aid cuts. Globally, the UN has revised its humanitarian plan for 2025, shifting from offering aid to 180 million people to a narrower target of assisting 114 million in the most desperate situations, which will still be a challenge. While humanitarian officials look for cost-efficiencies, such as reducing overlaps between their programming and streamlining supply chains, Secretary-General Guterres has been trying to chart a pathway for the UN as a whole. In March he announced a reform process called ‘UN80’ – as 2025 is the eightieth anniversary of the UN Charter – involving three tracks of activity. The most urgent of these has been short-term cost-cutting. Guterres has announced that UN secretariat will shrink in size by 20% from the beginning of 2026. In addition to cutting staff the UN leadership has promoted measures such as moving staff from expensive bases like New York and Geneva to lower-cost centres like Nairobi. UN officials are furious about the sudden disruptions and firings. The second and third tracks of UN80 involve longer-term changes to the way that the UN works. The second addresses the range of mandates – taskings from inter-governmental bodies like the General Assembly and Security Council – that the UN is supposed to implement. After a hunt through UN documents using Artificial Intelligence, the Secretary-General’s team found that states have agreed 40,000 mandates since the 1940s. While many of these are now out-of-date, half-forgotten or overlap with other mandates, UN members are bad at canceling these directives. The net result is that the UN is, on paper, meant to achieve an impossibly large number of tasks. The Secretary-General’s report offers some telling data points to illustrate this process. In 2024, the UN secretariat supported a total of 27,000 multilateral meetings – still below the pre-COVID record of 37,000, but nonetheless. sucking up huge amounts of staff time. In parallel, the secretariat publishes over 1,000 reports a year. Most are downloaded fewer than 2,000 times. Guterres has suggested that UN member states could make the organisation more efficient by undertaking a review of all these mandates, and deciding which to drop and which to keep. The Secretary-General has emphasised that he does not have the authority to do this alone. While this sounds logical, diplomats are worried about the sheer workload, and also worry that attempting to cancel mandates could prove politically difficult. A similar process initiated by Kofi Annan in 2005 faltered, as individual countries objected to culling specific mandates they liked. The final element of UN80 pivots on institutional reforms. In a paper released this September, Guterres outlined ideas for merging or coordinating UN entities to make the system as a whole more effective. There is little doubt that the UN system, which has grown organically and haphazardly over the decades, is a bit of a mess. Three different agencies deal with food-related issues in Rome while two of the largest humanitarian bodies – UNHCR and the International Organisation for Migration – often run overlapping programs to assist displaced populations. These different entities compete for funds and often coordinate poorly. Streamlining the system as a whole could hold the key to avoiding long-term budget problems and helping needy people. As part of the UN80 process, Guterres set up a series of working groups to look at potential institutional reforms in different thematic areas, such as development and peace and security. He is said to be unhappy with the results. Representatives of different UN agencies took a conservative approach to the process, defending their institutional turf and offering few big ideas about how to transform the system as a whole. The September reform does offer a few sensible ideas for reform, such as merging the UN agency dealing with AIDS and the World Health Organisation, but shies away from really decisive institutional changes. As diplomats note, it emphasises the need for more coordination mechanisms – creating more bureaucracy, not less. Overall, UN members are unconvinced that the UN80 proposals are sufficiently bold to help the UN navigate the challenges it faces. Some grumble that Guterres failed to lay out a clear vision for the process. Others complain that the Secretary-General did not involve them early enough in substantive consultations on what the process should aim to achieve (equally, if he had done wide-ranging consultations earlier this year, it could have slowed him down). Diplomats suspect that the Secretary-General also designed the process – and especially the downsizing of the secretariat – to impress the Trump administration, to show that he could make hard choices. If that is true, Guterres has only had mixed success. US officials have offered the UN80 process some praise, but in private they also tell other countries that Guterres should make deeper cuts. There is also a general recognition around the UN that Guterres, with just more of a year left in office, lacks the time and political capital to enact major institutional reforms. Lame-duck Secretaries-General rarely manage to achieve much in their final year in office. Guterres has reportedly admitted to some ambassadors in private that he knows that it will fall to his successor to carry through many of his reform ideas, if they agree with them. Candidates to replace Guterres – such as IAEA Director-General Rafeal Grossi and former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet – have recently confirmed their interest in the post. Other candidates, like senior UN trade official Rebeca Grynspan, are also expected to announce their candidacies soon. It is a given that they will face questions from member states about how they will control UN costs, and what sort of big institutional reforms they would invest their political capital in during their first years in office. The debate over what the next Secretary-General should prioritise (and what she or he should drop) could turn into a proxy argument over the UN’s global role. In recent years, prior to President Trump’s return to office, the different blocs of states in the UN system have been increasingly vocal about their grievances with the world organisation. After Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, Western countries lamented that Moscow was able to block Security Council actions penalising its behaviour. Developing countries – including many sympathetic to Kyiv – countered by asking why Western countries have not invested more in UN efforts to reduce poverty and help with climate adaptation. Both sides see the UN system as failing to address their national interests, but for divergent reasons. Many representatives of poorer countries have also interpreted calls for the UN to ‘do less with less’ in the context of UN80 as an implicit call for the organisation to focus less on development issues. All sides will watch the next Secretary-General’s reform priorities closely, to see if they seem to lean more towards the Global South or the West. To balance these competing interests, the next Secretary-General will need to perform a complex balancing act. She or he will need to sketch out ways to shrink the UN bureaucracy – for example by institutional mergers – while ensuring that it channels as many resources as possible to developing states. It will also be necessary to lay out ideas for improving the UN’s work on conflict prevention and peacemaking in a way that avoids irritating the vet powers in the Security Council. Ultimately, UN reform always involves making compromises between differing demands. The organisation has to satisfy multiple constituencies. Even if UN members were to whittle down the system’s thousands of overlapping mandates, they would still agree on a very mixed set of taskings for the world body. Even if the UN streamlined its various agencies with overlapping humanitarian mandates, they merged organisations would end up juggling multiple crises. The history of the UN also shows that reform is a never-ending process. As Manuel Fröhlich, an expert on the UN bureaucracy, noted twenty years ago, all UN reform processes begin ambitiously, then gradually go off track, and lead to eventual calls for the ‘reform of the reform’. Nonetheless, this year’s US budget cuts have performed an important function by forcing the UN leadership and UN members to acknowledge that the existing multilateral system is over-extended and unsustainable in its current form. The US may or may not eventually reconcile with the UN system (perhaps under a future president) and restore funding. For now, it falls to other UN members to debate what the organisation is for, and how it can meet their interests, in a period in which the world organisation is becoming smaller, poorer and less sure of its future.