Photo courtesy of the United States House Committee on Appropriations.
The United Nations is facing insolvency. In a January 28, 2026 letter to all 193 member states, Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the organization faces “imminent financial collapse,” with cash reserves nearly exhausted and outstanding dues hitting a record $1.57 billion by the end of 2025, more than double the amount outstanding at the end of 2024. Unless collections improve, Guterres warned, the UN will run out of cash by July 2026.
The crisis is compounded by a structural rule requiring the UN to return unspent budget funds to member states even when those funds were never collected in the first place. In early 2026, the UN was forced to return $227 million it had never received, with an additional $72 million offset against arrears. Guterres described this as a “Kafkaesque cycle, expected to give back cash that does not exist.”
To address the shortfall, the UN cut its 2026 budget from $3.72 billion to $3.45 billion, abolishing approximately 2,900 staff positions, nearly a fifth of its workforce, and slashing special political mission allocations by 21 percent. Wide-scale non-payment by member states has accelerated the crisis. In 2025, 42 of 193 member states failed to pay their assessments in full, and by the February 8, 2026 due date, only 55 countries had paid.
The United States is the dominant factor. Historically the UN’s largest contributor at 22 percent of the regular and peacekeeping budgets, roughly $820 million per year, the U.S. paid no dues at all in 2025 and accounts for approximately 95 percent of all unpaid contributions currently owed. The total U.S. debt stands at $2.2 billion to the regular operating budget, $767 million for 2026 and the remainder from 2025, plus a separate $1.8 billion owed for peacekeeping operations and $528 million for past peacekeeping missions.
In August 2025, Trump cancelled roughly $800 million in peacekeeping funds previously appropriated for 2024 and 2025, and the White House budget office has since proposed eliminating all U.S. peacekeeping funding for 2026. Trump also withdrew the U.S. from at least 66 international organizations, including 31 within the UN system, among them the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UN Democracy Fund, UN Oceans, and UN Women.
In mid-February 2026, the U.S. made a first partial payment toward its debt, which a UN spokesperson confirmed goes toward past dues on the regular budget. As of early May 2026, the U.S. has paid approximately $160 million of the more than $4 billion it owes across regular and peacekeeping budgets combined. Guterres has stated that the outstanding assessed contributions are “non-negotiable,” a mandatory legal obligation of membership, and has stressed that non-payment and reform are two distinct issues. A UN spokesperson was blunter: “when it comes to paying, it’s now or never.”
The Trump administration frames its position as leverage. U.S. Ambassador Mike Waltz told Congress the UN has “drifted from its core mission of peacemaking” and confirmed the administration has conditioned payment on reform: “We’ve withheld this year. We haven’t paid any, and my first meeting with the Secretary-General was, ‘here are the reforms that we need to see before you start talking about taxpayer dollars.’” Waltz argued the organization needs to be “cut up” and reformed before U.S. money flows again, pointing out that seven separate UN agencies work on climate alone.
The administration has branded its approach “Make the UN Great Again,” MUNGA. In April 2026 Senate testimony, Waltz cited $570 million in UN budget cuts and the elimination of nearly 3,000 headquarters positions as evidence the pressure is producing results, while U.S. Ambassador for Management and Reform Jeff Bartos stated flatly: “The UN has to stop doing stupid things.”
The administration’s case for cutting or eliminating UN funding rests on documented institutional failures spanning decades. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated at the 2026 Munich Security Conference, the UN failed to stop the war in Gaza, failed to end the war in Ukraine, and failed to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
The failure in Ukraine is structural and chronic: when Russia moved to annex Crimea in 2014, the Security Council convened seven emergency sessions only to watch Russia veto the sole draft resolution, supported by 13 of 15 members, that would have declared the referendum invalid. The General Assembly passed a nonbinding resolution affirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity, which Russia ignored. Eight years later, Russia launched a full-scale invasion and the Security Council was paralyzed by the same veto.
Peacekeeping missions in Mali, Lebanon, and the DRC have been judged failures by the administration’s own ambassador. Waltz told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the UN budget has quadrupled over 25 years “yet we have not seen a quadrupling of peace.” Former UN Ambassador John Bolton, an outspoken Trump critic, told the Associated Press the UN is “probably in the worst shape it’s been in since it was founded.”
The UN has consistently failed to counter the Iranian regime or to intervene when the regime has, on several occasions, killed thousands of protesters. During the 2022 Woman Life Freedom uprising, Iranian security forces killed at least 551 verified protesters, including 68 children and 49 women, across 26 of Iran’s 31 provinces. The UN established a Fact-Finding Mission, which concluded the killings constituted crimes against humanity, including murder, torture, and rape, yet Iran faced no binding Security Council action.
When protests erupted again in late December 2025 following an economic collapse, the crackdown was far deadlier. Amnesty International documented massacres concentrated on January 8 and 9, 2026, with death toll estimates rising to over 30,000 based on hospital data. The United Nations issued statements and took no enforceable action.
Burma (Myanmar) presents the longest-running case. The conflict has spanned nearly eight decades, making it the world’s longest ongoing civil war. The military rejected a 1990 landslide election won by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy and kept Suu Kyi under house arrest. When the NLD won again by a large margin in 2020, the military staged a coup on February 1, 2021, detained the civilian government, and killed more than 600 protesters in the initial crackdown.
The UN’s own human rights expert told the Human Rights Council that the international response “has failed,” and a Special Advisory Council on Myanmar called the UN response “woefully inadequate.” The conflict has since displaced 3.6 million people and produced more than 95,000 deaths.
The institution has also been politically captured. The Human Rights Council routinely seats governments with records of systematic abuse in oversight roles. A UN Special Rapporteur praised Somalia’s human rights record before the Council while condemning U.S. counterterrorism as “naked aggression,” even as Human Rights Watch documented Somalia’s deteriorating conditions and al-Shabaab’s advance toward Mogadishu.
UNRWA acknowledged that nine of its staff members may have participated in the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Against this record, the UN’s response to Trump acting against despotic regimes has been swift condemnation. When Trump captured Nicolás Maduro and removed him from Venezuela in January 2026, Guterres declared he was “deeply alarmed” by the U.S. action and warned it set “a dangerous precedent.”
The Security Council convened an emergency session at the request of Colombia, backed by Russia and China, the same powers whose vetoes had shielded Maduro, the Iranian regime, and the Myanmar junta from accountability for years. The body that stood idle through decades of massacres, stolen elections, and civilian bombings found its voice the moment the United States acted against a narco-dictatorship.
Among Trump’s complaints about the UN is the disproportionate funding burden carried by the United States. The U.S. pays 22 percent of the regular budget and 25 percent of peacekeeping costs, while China, the world’s second-largest economy, is treated as a developing nation across UN agencies, receiving favorable status that reduces its assessed share. China has simultaneously nearly doubled its staffing at UN agencies over the past decade while U.S. representation has declined, placing its nationals at all levels to advance CCP interests.
In April 2026, China vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have forced Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Senator Jeanne Shaheen warned during Waltz’s confirmation hearing that U.S. disengagement risks allowing Beijing to “write the rules” on technology, AI, health, and human rights, an argument that cuts both ways, since the U.S. is currently subsidizing the institutional infrastructure China is methodically colonizing with its own personnel.
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