The U.N. member states, all 193 of them, approved a peacekeeping budget of about $5.1 billion for the coming fiscal year.
By Catholics for Catholics
The Trump administration is underscoring more than $1 billion in United Nations budget cuts over the past six months as part of its in-progress boost to reform the international organization.
According to a story by the Daily Wire, on June 30, the U.N. member states, all 193 of them, approved a peacekeeping budget of about $5.1 billion for the coming fiscal year. That amount is a cut of about $550 million, or 9.7 percent, from the prior year, Fox News reported.
Combined with a 15 percent reduction to the U.N.’s regular budget approved in December, U.S. officials say the agreements total more than $1 billion in savings on assessed budgets.
The Trump administration has made U.N. reform a critical part of its tactic, saying the organization has grown too overbearing and incompetent. The latest agreements come as the U.N. prepares for a leadership transition in 2027, with Secretary-General António Guterres scheduled to leave office at the end of his second term.
Guterres, who had backed the reform for almost a decade, welcomed the change after the vote. He described the old system as a “Kafkaesque cycle” in which the U.N. was expected “to give back cash that did not exist.” Dujarric said the update would help the organization manage resources “in a more predictable and responsible way.”
Assessed budgets are funded through obligatory contributions from member states, calculated largely based on the size of their economies.
U.S. Ambassador for U.N. Management and Reform Jeff Bartos described the results as significant. “On June 30th, with U.S. leadership, all 193 countries came together again for the second time in six months,” Bartos told Fox News Digital. “We’ve achieved over a billion dollars of savings in six months, which is unprecedented. Any one cut would be unprecedented. The totality of the reforms is monumental.”
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