The United Nations has begun a series of cutbacks at its New York headquarters, starting with the heating being turned down, the diplomats’ bar shuttering early at 5pm and meetings canceled along with diminished first class global travel budgets.
The cause of the tightening purse strings is simple.
As Breitbart News reported, the globalist organization is running a deficit of $230 million. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres has warned it may run out of money by the end of October unless world governments and their taxpayers immediately lift financial contributions.
Until then, there will be a restriction in operations for an organization often criticized as a debating society for the elites incapable of reform. It is bloated, undemocratic – and very expensive, as any number of U.S. critics from President Donald Trump down have noted.
“We really have no choice,” said Catherine Pollard, a top official in the UN’s management department, in explaining the operational pause.
In a letter to 37,000 fulltime employees, a copy of which was seen by AFP, Guterres laid out the looming cutbacks he said would mean fewer flights and receptions, limits on hiring, fewer documents, reports and translations and even an end to water coolers.
Guterres called the crunch the “worst cash crisis facing the United Nations in nearly a decade.”
He warned the organization, “runs the risk of depleting its liquidity reserves by the end of the month and defaulting on payments to staff and vendors.”
The United States is by far the U.N.’s biggest financial contributor, stumping up 22 percent of its operating budget and funding 28 percent of peacekeeping missions, which currently cost $8 billion annually.
The UK and Germany are the next two major backers.
President Trump has long pushed its reform and just last week said the “future does not belong to globalists” in a warning to the organization’s leaders, adding, “the future belongs to patriots, the future belongs to sovereign and independent nations.”
Responding to reports of deep U.N. budget deficits, Trump showed little sympathy for its inability to manage its own budget.
“So make all Member Countries pay, not just the United States!” he wrote Wednesday.
So make all Member Countries pay, not just the United States! https://t.co/IVbE4MqBVl
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 9, 2019
In December 2017 Nikki Haley, the then United States Ambassador to the organization, announced the federal government had reduced its contribution to the U.N.’s annual budget by $285 million, as Breitbart News reported.
Haley’s statement came after the U.N. voted to condemn the United States for Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The resolution, backed by nations with long records of extreme human rights abuses, passed 128-9. Haley immediately responded by threatening to reduce America’s U.N. funding.
“The United States will remember this day in which it was singled out for attack in the General Assembly for the very act of exercising our right as a sovereign nation,” Haley told the assembly in New York City.
“We will remember it when we are called upon to once again make the world’s largest contribution to the United Nations and we will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit.”
Since taking office, Trump has seen the U.S. cut funding to UNESCO, the U.N. Population Fund, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency.
He has cited the U.N.’s numbing bureaucracy, its institutional cover-ups of corruption and the undemocratic politics of its security council as just a few examples of its manifest failures, so much of which has been funded by U.S. taxpayers.
“The United States is the world’s largest giver in the world, by far, of foreign aid. But few give anything to us,” Trump said in September last year.
“Moving forward, we are only going to give foreign aid to those who respect us and, frankly, are our friends. And we expect other countries to pay their fair share for the cost of their defense.”
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