The United States’ recent pattern of withdrawing from and withholding funds to international organisations has forced a reckoning over the practical costs of politicising multilateralism. Washington announced a formal withdrawal from the World Health Organization in an executive order signed on 20 January 2025, and later declared it would again leave UNESCO; yet U.S. non‑payment of assessed and voluntary contributions has continued, prompting blunt public reminders from agency officials that exit is conditional on settling arrears.
World Health Organization spokespeople have been blunt: the WHO’s rules permit a member to withdraw, but outstanding assessed contributions must be paid before the exit becomes effective. The organisation says the United States has not paid its assessed dues for 2024 and 2025, amounting to roughly $260 million, on top of regular voluntary funding that typically totals $200–$400 million a year for targeted programmes such as vaccination and disease surveillance.
Across the United Nations system, the numbers are larger and more consequential. Washington is the single largest assessed contributor to the UN regular and peacekeeping budgets, yet its unpaid balances have fluctuated into the billions. UN officials have repeatedly publicised arrears that range from more than $1 billion in a single year to cumulative shortfalls exceeding $3 billion, with separate figures cited for the regular budget, peacekeeping and specialised agencies such as UNESCO, where U.S. arrears have been reported at over $600 million.
The immediate impacts are tangible: agencies report cash shortfalls, curtailed services and the relocation of posts away from New York. The UN Development Programme has announced a reconfiguration that will move nearly 400 posts from its New York headquarters to Germany and Spain as part of a broader push to be closer to project sites and to adapt to constrained budgets. Smaller entrances and operational cutbacks at UN headquarters this year have been explained publicly by the secretary‑general as consequences of late or missing payments by member states.
Beyond balance‑sheet pains, the political signal is sharp. Analysts inside and outside China interpret U.S. withholding as a deliberate use of financial leverage to compel agencies to follow Washington’s priorities—or to step aside entirely. Chinese scholars and officials quoted by state outlets argue that the behaviour undermines the United States’ soft power and legitimacy as a “responsible great power,” while many Western diplomats privately worry that the approach is pushing multilateral institutions to rebalance governance and funding away from Washington.
The legal consequences are limited but symbolic: the UN Charter allows a member that is years in arrears to lose its vote in the General Assembly, though the bar is high and enforcement politically fraught. Practically, repeated non‑payment risks accelerating a long‑term shift in where institutions locate authority and staff, how they budget, and which donor coalitions call the shots—effectively weakening agencies at a time when global governance faces mounting collective challenges from pandemics to climate change.