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This Week in Global Development
Reform or be defunded: The Trump administration’s demands for the UN
00:33:52
In https://www.devex.com/news/exclusive-us-threatens-to-halt-un-funding-unless-conditions-met-112382, the Trump administration has threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to the...
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Foreign
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My name is David Ainsworth and you're listening to this Week in Global Development hosted by myself, Richard Khamber and Adva Saldian, joined this week by my, by my colleagues Colm lynch and Elissa Miele to talk about the various different ways in which the United States is throwing its weight around and trying to disrupt the international development order. Several different ways this week. Colm, let's start with you. The US has been off to the United nations this weekend in a couple of different ways. Well, this week and last week has attempted to really influence how the UN and its member states are kind of trying to do business. So I wondered if you might start off by sort of filling us in on the various different ways that the US Is trying to kind of exert its influence and how much success it's having.
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Okay, so we'll go back to last year for a second. The U.S. you know, in these negotiations over the 2026 budget of the UN, they were able to kind of declare some level of success because there were a number of cuts announced. 15% of the workforce or 15% of the budget, the regular budget, like some somewhere around 3,000 posts that were eliminated. So the Americans could come out of that saying, look, we did great. We've been putting pressure on the UN even though these were reforms that were initiated UN not by the US but now what they're saying is, well, first, the US has been signaling that as a result of that, as a gesture of good faith, we are going to cut a check for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars anytime soon. And everyone's very happy about that. And then they circulated a series of memos that Alyssa and I got our hands on, which made it clear that there were conditions that the UN was going to have to do things in order to get the Americans to pay their dues to the organization, which they are obliged by, you know, a treaty agreement to make. So they're saying that they a number of things. Most of them were cost cutting initiatives like they want, like they wanted. One of the things they would want to do is cut at staff benefits. So things like, you know, if you're on a long distance flight, you know, you get business class at the UN at certain levels. They want to take that away. The UN offers for, you know, for staffers that are abroad education subsidies in the US quite high for university education. The Americans are targeting both university subsidies and high school subsidies for workers. They're also going after the UN pension. The UN has one of these old style pensions where there are defined benefits, and you get a certain amount of money kind of related to what your salary was, you can maintain the same quality of life into retirement. They want to change it more to a market driven system and they also want to reduce the percentage that the, that the UN is able to give to match contributions to retirement. Right. So there's a number, I think there's a high number, about 15.8%, which for, you know, most of us would seem like an extremely generous offering. Some defenders of that would say, well, you know, you've got to balance that with the fact that these people don't get Social Security and other things. But any event, the Americans want to eliminate that as well. They want. Also I think one of the more controversial issues was an effort to go after the pension. And that, you know, as I mentioned, is kind of generated a lot of concern. There's one other issue which is not, it's not really on the cost saving, but it's really targeted at China. And China has been providing tens of millions dollars each year that they put into a fund that's housed in the UN Secretary General's office, which funds projects, projects in Africa, other parts of the developing world. It is run by a steering board which is led by a senior UN official, includes like four current and former Chinese government officials. The Americans feel like that's sort of a vehicle for projecting Chinese influence. They want that taken out of the Secretary General's office. That's one of the conditions. And we're going to see, we've already been seeing some pushback from the Chinese already.
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Okay. And I guess to either of you, how successful do we feel the United States is going to be in getting these measures passed? What do we think is the reception at the United Nations?
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So I mean, on the issue of the pensions, like there's a whole process for staff benefits. There's a sort of international commission that really makes decisions on what compensation is. It's usually aligned to a certain degree with, you know, US Civil servant salaries, benefits and that sort of thing. So they're going to be taking this up through the year. They might get some of it. I mean, I think that there's probably some broad support for the idea, particularly among large contributors to the UN, that they could find ways to cut funds. And I think everybody recognizes that less money is going to be coming into the un So I think they could get some of that stuff, the pension process, that's more on a more long term, it's under review. And I think that's not till like 20, 28, will they finally make a decision on that? But that's another area where you could see countries coming together, particularly countries that contribute a lot in terms of dues to the UN would like to see areas where they could see, you know, cost cuts. So I wouldn't. I wouldn't rule it out. I think the fact that the Americans are putting pressure on this stuff every year, I mean, they've been pushing on some of these issues for years. They're going to get some of what they want. They won't get everything.
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Yeah. And I think just to add to kind of in our reporting process for this when we first and kind of to have a sneak peek at the way this works. So, you know, we got a hold of one document and I think our initial reaction was like, you know, okay, a lot of this is not surprising. The folks that we were talking to were like, some are more kind of aggressive than others. Some just make a lot of sense. What made it more of a big deal was that conditionality that Colm was talking about in the beginning, that conditional funding. So I think I would just echo that. Some of these pieces might be much easier. Wins and gets, especially now that we know that it is conditional on this funding. But things like, for example, having more rigorous checkpoints for preventing child, child sexual abuse or sexual harassment, et cetera, et cetera, this business class flight restriction, things like that, where it's kind of, okay, that doesn't seem like a huge lift. Other things, for example, the dissolving or the movement of that fund that the Chinese government is linked to might be a little bit more challenging or difficult.
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Yeah.
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So the United nations really finds itself stuck between a rock and a hard place on this. It's extremely difficult for, for the UN officials, as I understand it, to, to agree to some of this because it's very difficult. It's internal processes. They have to negotiate with other governments. Obviously, the Chinese aren't going to think much of proposals to, to kind of downgrade these things that they've given a lot of money to. The staff are obviously going to object like nobody's business if you cut their pension benefits. But on the other hand, the United nations is really in a desperate position because it badly needs this United States cash, which the US Is legally obligated to give to them, but is showing relatively little signs of actually giving, as I understand. So this must create a real kind of quandary for the people who are looking at these demands, trying to think, how do we actually handle this? How do we Negotiate all of the different kind of people that we need to negotiate with here and find some sort of compromise.
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Yeah. So look, I mean, the Americans have been doing this for decades now. The notion of conditioning US Treaty obliged, contributions of the UN to certain conditions on reform. There was the Helms Biden legislation in Congress which required the UN to make all sorts of reforms in order to get the US to pay its arrears, which at that period were over $1 billion in arrears. Now it's actually even higher because of US withholding on peacekeeping costs where we don't agree to pay the percentage of dues that the UN requires us to pay. So in a sense, this is an old story for the un the numbers are getting bigger and more difficult to manage. And also, there was a very interesting. There was an interesting visit by a senior Chinese official to the UN Human Resources Department earlier in the month. And basically the message the Chinese were sending is, look, you know, they didn't mention the Americans by name, but it's pretty clear who they're talking about. But they're saying, you know, the UN is in a period of tumult. There is, you know, financial crisis, you know, countries not paying their dues. We are, are interested in stepping up our efforts to help the UN manage the situation. So whether that will mean more money. It's also kind of ironic. The US Is saying, let's pay less, let's pay less. The Chinese are paying tens of millions of dollars for some of these UN projects. And the Americans are saying, no, we don't want, we don't want Chinese money. Right. So I think that everybody has been waiting, really, since the beginning of the Trump administration to see how proactive the Chinese would be in trying to fill the gap that the US Kind of leaves open in terms of its financial retreat. And it's been slow, but we're starting to see signs. They've been making a big push to increase the number of Chinese nationals working at the un they invest a lot of effort and energy into that. And now, I mean, with this visit, I mean, I'd never heard the Chinese really talking in terms of playing a more, you know, a sort of deeper role in terms of management of affairs. But they also have a similar interest to the US in that front, and that now the Chinese are the second largest contributor to the U.N. so like the Americans, they want the U.N. to spend less money. So there's that.
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Aloh. So kind of you've been talking to people about these documents. What are you hearing? What are People saying to you about the, the general situation when we, when we look at it from, from the US Side, what, what, what are some of the perspectives on it?
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I mean, I think it's not hugely surprising. And I think Colin can speak to a piece that he broke, what was it called, not last week, but the week before that, about kind of this, this push toward trade over aid. It's something that we're continuing to hear and see. This particular story of Colm and mine is more on budget cuts, reducing money. But again, it's a similar story that we've heard throughout the past 15 months now. So I think not a, you know, it's kind of a scramble to say, oh, what does this mean? But also, oh, it's not that surprising when you kind of look at it in the full spectrum of other things that are going on. I mean, we're seeing cuts coming and have seen cuts coming across the development space. That's something that we know. And the UN has been kind of at this weird, there's this weird state of play with the UN where I feel like on one hand, cuts, cuts, cuts, and on the other hand we see in the humanitarian space a lot of money kind of going into UN agencies. So there's this weird kind of split screen, I think, happening at the moment in terms of money that the UN is getting and money that the UN is not getting or rather having been taken away. And, you know, part of me just wonders what that means in terms of strategy. You know, do we want to be giving hundreds of millions of dollars, we being the US Government, to the World Food Program in one arm and then kind of taking it away? We have a colleague who's right now tracking the various kind of Senate bills that are going through or the, the congressional bills that are going through Capitol Hill right now. So stay tuned on devex.com for that later. But she just told me a quick note before we hopped on big cuts to the UN again in, in this latest bill. So you've kind of got a bunch of things going on at the same time.
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Yeah, it looks very much like the, the, the instinct of the US Government is to take funding away from the United nations wherever possible, but then it's finding itself in a position where there are forces pushing it to actually distribute cash internationally for development, for food, for humanitarian, for this sort of work. And it's looking around thinking, how are we going to do that? And given the number of people left at the State Department who have the skills in this field, it's very Difficult for them to find anybody internally who really has the capacity to do this work. And so they're looking around going, who else can we get to do it? And the only obvious people are the United Nations. And so they're kind of instinctively very keen not to fund the un but then occasionally finding that they have no obvious alternative.
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What's happening is that they're basically approaching the UN with a radically different philosophy. Well, not radically different because there are some elements of this that the Democrats agree to as well. But basically what they're saying is humanitarian aid. Yes, to a limit, much smaller levels than we provided in the past. We've written extensively about the initial tranche of $2 billion that they funneled through the UN Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. They're not giving as much money directly to the big US led agency, US national led agencies like wfp, unicef, but they're still getting money indirectly through this other channel. And so they're saying, you know, humanitarian aid, we still understand that, we're still going to contribute, but not as much. Development aid is something where they're really kind of taking a U turn on it and saying, you know, we feel that the development policies of the last several decades have not succeeded in sort of eliminating poverty, lifting up countries. And, you know, kind of the most interesting element is the sort of most powerful force in terms of raising people up from. In pop from poverty has been the experience of China over the last few decades. So hence they're not using that as the model, but they're basically saying that it doesn't work and we need to turn to a private sector. Low taxes, deregulation of international commerce, all of these things that allow businesses, particularly American businesses a much freer, much greater latitude to invest in these countries. And so, you know, there, you know, which is why earlier in the week, Ambassador Mike Waltz, the US Ambassador to the UN, hosted a meeting at the Stock Exchange, bringing together a couple of senior UN people, the head of undp, others as well as the head of the Development Finance Corporation of the US which is going to be the centerpiece of this US effort to kind of, you know, to increase investment in, you know, in emerging markets and in developing world. Ben Black. And so that's kind of their philosophy. We want to move away from aid. We don't trust it. You know, the one thing I always think is like the whole policy, this, this idea of framing it like trade over aid is sort of indicating that it's like you can have one or the other and not that you cannot sort of promote this sort of, you know, effort to increase investment, which I think everybody wants, and say that, you know, that aid somehow is an impediment to that. And there are certain things I think that UN officials would say or experts in their area would say where, you know, private companies are not going to invest in certain things, they're not going to invest in free elections, they're not going to invest in other things, that there's areas where aid is appropriate and areas where, you know, the free market makes a certain amount of sense.
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Yeah, completely. I mean, whether you want a large investment or a much smaller grant really depends on your current financial position, doesn't it? Like in some situations when we're funding education, when we're funding health, when we're funding humanitarian work, it's clear that trade is not going to help in these areas at all. But then in other situations where we're looking at infrastructure development, then in that situation it's much more appropriate to come in with a trade focused approach.
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There's a good example of this, of sort of the have nots and how they kind of view this. In the meeting with Walz representative, Antigua and Barbuda sort of raised his hand and said, you know, we really want to be part of this process. We, you know, think this is great. But look, we don't have oil, we don't have critical minerals. How do we play in this game? So it shows that, you know, there is a sense of that there are barriers. Ben Black came back and said that, you know, that we have considered that and there are, you know, vehicles that, you know, there have been impediments on, you know, on giving certain sort of, you know, sort of beneficial financial instruments to, you know, middle income countries like, particularly in the Caribbean and that, you know, we're trying to remove the barriers to that. So that was kind of an interesting discussion.
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Hi everyone, I'm Kate Warren devex and we are taking a short break from our regular programming for a sponsored segment brought to you by the Fred Hollows Foundation. And in this conversation we're talking about an issue that is not often framed as a gender equity challenge, but really should be, and that is eye health. And as highlighted in a recently released report, Value of vision, more than 2 billion people globally live with vision impairment or blindness and women account for 55% of those and over 1 billion of those cases are avoidable or treatable. So if those cases were addressed, an estimated 304 million people, predominantly women, would be relieved of caregiving responsibilities and able to participate more fully in the workforce alongside broader gains in well being and social participation. So solving for this is not just a health opportunity, but also a gender equity and a development one. And so I'm really delighted to be joined by Dr. Caroline Casey, President of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, one of the partners behind this report, to dig into why and what needs to change. So, Caroline, thank you so much for joining me.
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E
Oh, thank you so much for having us. And I often say that this is an everyone issue. We all have eyes. So to be able to protect and value those eyes, imagine that 1.1 billion people have preventable sight loss. And not only is that important for them, but it's actually important for a whole global economy. And when we talk about the value of vision, Kate, what is extraordinary, this is an issue that we can solve in our lifetime. And the investment of $1 alone into eye health and eye care has a $28 return. So aside from the moral issue of ensuring that everybody reaches their potential by being able to see, there is a huge socioeconomic case for this. So I always say this is a head heart issue. It's the heart of the human beings. It's the economic of our planet and our economies.
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You know, in this Value Vision report, it highlights how women make up the majority of those living with vision impairment, also make up a significant share of unpaid caregivers for people with vision loss. Yet eye health really is treated as a health issue and not really as a gender one. So can you help us unpack this more and why this reframe is important?
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Well, when you put this into the position of women and you see that women do most of the caregiving, as you've said, predominantly. So not only is that taking the woman out of the market and her ability to educate and to contribute and to value, but it's also her ability to take care of that family and for children, for example, if she's a mother, she might need the help of keeping her children at home. But the idea that this isn't even conceivably a gender issue when it is predominantly affected. Like for example, I've just come back From P and G, 61% of women are affected by preventable sight loss. And if we release that potential, we release that value and ability to contribute into the economy.
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So you mentioned that $1 invested in iHealth can yield $28 return in low and middle income countries, which, you know, you would think that that would get people sitting up and listening, right? Given the clear economic returns. Why do you think it still remains under prioritized in development and gender strategies and financing? Is it just awareness? Is it silos between the systems? And what do you think can be, what steps can be taken to change that?
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The issue about eye health and preventable sight loss is it is not a health issue alone. I mean it is absolutely not a health issue. This is about education. This is about my ability to contribute to society. It is one of the most universal and cross cutting issues. And if we see that eye health is part of an integrated approach and actually really deeply affects our ability to end poverty to ensure that we have education for all and we have equal access to work, that is not going to be possible until we tackle eye health. So we do need to bang the drum and we do need leaders to speak about it.
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D
Well, Caroline, thank you so much for sharing these insights and really helping us think about eye health in new way and as you say, ultimately leads to more impact not only for women, but for all humans to realize their potential and their joy. So I love that framing. And thank you to the Fred Hollows foundation for sponsoring this conversation. If you do want to access the Value Vision report and all of its findings, you can head to iipb.org Again, thank you. And for our audience, thank you for tuning in and we'll get back to the regular program.
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B
Alongside this though, the US Is pushing hard on this stuff around human flourishing, which is kind of their way of referring to kind of some quite pro life approaches to ensuring that they're not funding abortions and that sort of thing. And that's putting some backs up. I think kind of both of you have written stories about the kind of human flourishing work and the barriers that it potentially creates for development organizations. So I wonder if maybe and we've made some progress understanding what's happening there as well in the last few days. Alyssa, maybe I'll turn to you. Can you sort of talk about the various things that the US has put in place to try and promote this kind of human flourishing agenda and kind of how that's gone down for sure.
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So the Promoting Human Flourishing and foreign assistance policy is a kind of a culmination of three separate policies that were put into one package. If you are curious and keen to learn more about this, we will be hosting a DevexPro briefing next week which will share kind of the implications for organizations, the cost behind them, et cetera, et cetera. But in a nutshell, it's a policy that has kind of restrictions against diversity, equity, inclusion, programming Anything related to what the administration refers to as gender identity and of course, promoting abortion. And there's many different details that kind of feed into how this looks for different organizations, whether you're a UN agency or a foreign nonprofit or a US Based ngo. And you can read all about it on our website. But there's a lot of complications, I think, to kind of sort through. And we're talking kind of tens of thousands of dollars for organizations to be able to figure out, like, are we really adhering to this policy? How or how not are we doing so? And how this plays into the discussion on the UN is because a lot of, kind of the, the worry about this policy comes to the humanitarian space. And that's, for example, let's say that an organization is in, you know, the Democratic Republic of Congo, they're delivering, delivering rape kits to women that are survivors of sexual abuse and assault. Can they really, on the spot in a conflict, verify all these checkpoints in rapid timing? So I think that's why a lot of folks, that's kind of the extreme example, but that's why a lot of folks are kind of curious about this and how it'll all play in. Now, Colm and I have both been kind of tracking how this will play into the larger, as we mentioned, the $2 billion funds going through and moving through the, the United nations ocha. But I think a lot of that remains to be seen. And I don't want to speak too, too quickly as we're kind of in the process of reporting on that, but I think this is something that we're keeping our eyes on very closely in terms of how this will play out, when perhaps there's a second tranche of funding. The first tranche we know is not applicable to this policy because of the timing, but the second tranche could theoretically be under this umbrella.
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So the way I look at this is that there's been a movement for decades to try and fundamentally alter the moral and the social, moral order on the international scene. And the UN is sort of the key battleground for that. So the UN has conferences where they come up with normative, you know, agreements on how governments should deal with issues, particularly involving sensitive issues like women's health and women's rights. And the UN traditionally has tended to be more on the progressive side of these issues, expanding rights. And so many conservative forces, particularly the United States, but globally, have been pushing back at that because they see it as a kind of gateway to allowing things like abortion, to changing the nature of the family, to Creating a notion that give broader rights to, you know, LGBTQT plus individuals. And, and, and there's been an effort to push that back, and it's been supercharged under the Trump administration. So one of the things they're trying to assess, well, if the U.S. and its, you know, conservative backers want to change the moral order, how successful are they at it? And so the way that I see it is that there's two fundamental ways to assess it. And one is that through kind of the brute force of financial cuts, they have been able to achieve a lot in terms of reducing the amount of programs that deal with these issues. I mean, you know, shutting down usaid, which was the largest contributor of funds for contraceptives for sexual reproductive health services, and that sort of thing has a big impact. Cutting off funding for the key UN agency that provides these services, the UN Population Fund, that has a big impact. Other issues, fighting to ensure that any money that the Americans give to humanitarian aid, as Alyssa mentioned, that there be some constraints on how that fund and money is used. And so in that sense, they're having a certain amount of success in terms of their own goals. But on the diplomatic side, I see much less. They do have a number of countries that tend to vote with them on some of these issues about restricting gender rights and sexual reproductive health and rights. But what you don't see is much of a shift in terms of the big negotiations, documents, controversies that they have when they have conferences on the status of women on population issues. There have been, you know, there have been log jams, there have been a failure to adopt new agreements, but they haven't really kind of lost ground on the basic assumptions about what constitutes women's rights in this day and age. So I think that, you know, they haven't been able to bring a lot of enough people along to convince the world, but they have been able to have a lot of impact through just, you know, the might of US Financial cuts.
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B
Yeah, and this is obviously something that we're going to continue to watch is this is an ongoing battle right now, and there's a lot of pressure is being brought to bear. The United nations on European allies. And it's not necessarily a situation where I think the United States has a lot of support from the other large Global north donors and kind of, it's, it's. I think there's been limited success trying to build a consensus. Europeans tend to be much more progressive on this. So, yeah, it's, it will be interesting to see which way we, we kind of Move next. Another story that you've been tracking right now is the fact that the United States has put aside roughly $19 billion for the closeout of USAID. And there's some controversy over where that money is going to come from, what that's going to go to. Do you want to sort of talk us through the details of that as well?
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C
Certainly. So, yeah, basically last week I got my hands on a congressional notification, which is essentially the word that an agency such as usaid, which is now kind of operating as a bit of a hollowed out shell of itself that's really focused on just closing out the agency. But a congressional notification comes from any such agency that to tell Congress their plans on what they're going to do next. So they sent this document over and it essentially had a grid and it laid out the ceiling of money that they had, as Dave said, put aside that could be spent on closeout costs. Now, they weren't necessarily saying this is what it costs to close out, but they were saying this is the money that we have to do this work. And what do I mean by that? It's things like paying settlements, it's unpaid invoices. It's a number of different things. For example, issues that we've tackled through our coverage of the lawsuits going on where implementing agencies and nonprofits have sued the Trump administration for payment for work that they were owed. So it's a number of different kind of elements that all go into this closing out process, which is, as we've learned, very expensive. It's also things like termination expenses, claims from other partners, asset disposition, et cetera, et cetera. The list goes on. This includes kind of money that spans several years. So it includes, you know, I think it was believe 2015 to 2025 and then also kind of prior year or no year obligated funds. So those are things that are kind of more standing. So the, the notification itself is a little complicated, but I think the main, the main headline is that this money is there. It was initially tagged for development aims. About 80% were spread through something called development objective agreements, which are these multi year development support structures that were created. For example, going to Kenya or going to Ghana or to another country that would have kind of fluid and varied development objectives. So that's an interesting piece of this puzzle. But that's not all. There was also, for example, global health assistance that was tagged and there was development aid. And we actually saw this right after this congressional notification kind of made the rounds. And after we published the story, there was Also a letter sent by Democratic lawmakers kind of raising the, raising the alarm on this and saying that this money was tagged for development, especially that latest round that I've just mentioned to health and development aid. And you know, the worry, or as Dave put it, controversy around the fact that these costs could be potentially going to closing out instead of its original aims. So, you know, it's, it's a notification, not a invoice, but it does kind of show a way forward. And now I think it's Congress, Congress will have to respond and, you know, we'll see what the reaction continues to be. But so far the early indication is that probably unsurprisingly, Democrats on Capitol Hill are not thrilled.
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B
Yeah, one person told you that it was like giving someone some money and then deciding to go around to their house, smash open their piggy bank and take it back again. How widespread is that point of view among kind of people on the Hill?
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C
You know, I think it depends on who you talk to. The one kind of portion of people or organizations that might be a little bit more optimistic about this are the implementing partners. Right? I mean, this means that they will get paid. This is something that we did not know would happen for a very long time despite, you know, what felt like countless lawsuits that were lodged last year about getting paid. So, I mean, in theory this means that cash is available for partners to kind of close out their bills. But I think that there's also, even among the folks that are acknowledging that like a little bit of sadness there too, in terms of like once this does happen, that hollowed out shell of U.S. aid, its ties are now cut. Right. It's the, the agency does not have any kind of connection to the old U.S. aid. And it really kind of solidifies and cements the way forward for not just the US Government, but for this agency that is decades old.
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B
We've been tracking for the last year, you've been tracking for the last year these lawsuits that have been taking place and there were still thousands of outstanding payments owed. Even a year later, money was kind of trickling out. So now we know, I guess what the final resolution of that will be. They will at least pay these, these implementers. That will not be necessarily very comforting to a lot of people who've already seen their business kind of pretty dismantled by the sudden cut. And yeah, it's, it's, I guess we can't be surprised that this is the final nail in the coffin of usaid, but it's a shame to see. We're probably going to have to wrap it up there. I guess it just remains for me to say thank you very much to my guests column and Alessia, and to all of you, our listeners, and thank you for listening to this week in Global Development.
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E
Thank you.