UN faces $500m budget cut and 20% job losses after big drop in funding

Core budget to fall to $3.2bn next year and initial minimum 3,000 job cuts expected amid streamlining process

The UN will need to cut $500m (about £370m) from next year’s budget and lose 20% of its staff as it struggles to cope with a massive reduction in funding by the Trump administration.

The plan, in gestation since Donald Trump started cutting his foreign aid budget, is likely to involve an initial minimum 3,000 job cuts out of a 35,000-strong main workforce. The overall UN core or regular budget would be cut from $3.7bn to about $3.2bn next year. It means reductions of 15.1% in resources and 18.8% in posts in the regular budget compared with the 2025 budget.

The reductions to the UN core budget do not take account of the cuts to the UN’s peacekeeping, humanitarian and health agencies. Only last year the UN secretary general, António Guterres, set the UN on an ambitious new “pact for the future” ranging across artificial intelligence and a new push on sustainable development.

Guterres is trying to make a virtue of necessity by using the funding crisis to review how the bureaucracy has grown, leading to overlapping mandates and duplication. It requires an organisation containing more than 140 entities that has passed 40,000 resolutions, statements and presidential statements since its inception in 1946 to revert to first principles about its purpose and effectiveness.

Through a programme known as Mandates UN, all of the UN agencies have been asked to justify their existence, the origin of their mandate and their relationship to other UN entities.

The aim broadly is to try to streamline these agencies into three key pillars of the UN charter: peace and security, human rights and development. In the process, some agencies and staff will be blended with others and some will be shrunk.

Allison Lombardo, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs at the US state department, said at a Carnegie Endowment seminar: “These cuts are more extensive and more permanent than many people thought at first glance … The US pays 22% of the regular budget, 25% of the peacekeeping budget and 40% of the humanitarian budget.”

The impact on individual programmes is already apparent. The World Food Programme (WFP) relied on Washington to cover half of its $9bn budget in 2024, while the UNHCR got two-fifths of its funding from the US. The US has not only ended its funding for the UN’s Palestinian welfare agency Unrwa, it has tried to close it down.

At a stark briefing this week, Tom Fletcher, the head of the UN Office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs (Ocha), said he feared the world had entered a new “age of indifference”.

“We’ve only been funded 19% of what we need, which is a 40% drop on where we were last year,” he said, explaining that each of the UN agencies had a tale of woe. “Unicef – an extra 6 million kids are likely to be out of school. WFP are saying they can only reach 1 million of the 3 million Afghans who currently need food. UNHCR are saying that 11 million refugees may no longer get the help that they need.”