The next United Nations secretary-general must implement key reforms, Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told the House Appropriations Committee at a field hearing on Friday at the U.S. mission to the global body in Manhattan.
The U.S. envoy highlighted the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate waste and excess at the United Nations, including an unprecedented 15% cut to the regular budget, as well as reductions of peacekeeping mission troops and reforms to U.N. staff pay and pensions, which have grown significantly.
U.S.-led reforms have eliminated almost 3,000 positions at U.N. headquarters, resulting in $126 million in savings, according to Waltz.
“The U.N.’s budget in the last 25 years has quadrupled,” he testified before the committee. “We have not seen, arguably, a quadrupling of peace and security around the world commensurate with those hard-earned dollars.”
The global body is accepting applications for the next secretary-general, who is to be elected later this year, following the expiration of António Guterres’s term. Discussions with candidates are underway, and Washington is testing the degree to which they align with U.S. priorities, according to Waltz.
“This is a critical moment with senior leadership transitions approaching,” he said. “If we walked away tomorrow,” which he said neither he nor U.S. President Donald Trump was advocating, “it would be reinvented somewhere else.”
The United States contributes about 20% of the U.N. budget. Washington is behind hundreds of millions of dollars in paying dues to the global body.
“I will push hard and continuously to have it right here in the United States where it belongs,” Waltz said.
Waltz and John Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on China, testified about the need for sustained U.S. involvement at Turtle Bay, lest China gain the upper hand.
“We have seen the Chinese very aggressively leverage their funding in terms of positions,” Waltz said. “Where we’re most engaged are some of these other organizations that affect industry.”
“We are much more, I think, strategically and assertively inserting qualified Americans into key leadership positions,” he said.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, rebuked Waltz about the Trump administration’s move to defund the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA, permanently.
“UNRWA was set up to be a temporary mechanism to deliver not only food but health and education, and the elimination of our participation in that effort has destroyed a delivery system that is providing food,” DeLauro said. “If you don’t believe that there is a humanitarian hunger crisis in Gaza today, I don’t know what planet you are on, and it is not just a hyperbole or propaganda from Hamas.”
Israel and the United States have said that UNRWA employees have direct ties to Palestinian terror organizations and that some participated directly in the Hamas-led Oct. 7 terror attacks. Congress cut funding to UNRWA on a bipartisan basis.
Waltz defended the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private organization that the United States funded and that took over aid operations in Gaza. UNRWA replaced it in January, at Hamas’s and global organizations’ insistence, as part of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire between the Jewish state and the terror organization.
Waltz said on Friday that the number of aid trucks and the volume of food delivered to Gaza have “exceeded” prior amounts.
He also faced criticism during the hearing about the many international organizations and agreements, many tied to the United Nations, from which the Trump administration has withdrawn.
Waltz countered with a “trade over aid” approach.
“We’re reorienting, for example, to lower barriers to foreign direct investment, so that we can create jobs locally, and move these aid grants and organizations out of business over the long term,” he said.
He added that his “charge” from Trump is to help the United Nations realize its “tremendous potential.”
