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U.S. diplomats say they have secured the deepest budget cuts in the history of the United Nations, reducing hundreds of millions of dollars from the organization’s operations as part of President Donald Trump’s push to overhaul what he has long described as an inefficient international body.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz and U.S. Ambassador for Management and Reform Jeffrey Bartos said the United States helped broker a $570 million reduction in the U.N.’s 2026 budget, a move that would lower the U.S. share of payments by about $126 million, according to an interview with the New York Post.
“The U.N. has agreed to the first real budget cuts, actual real cuts, for the first time in modern history, pretty much since the founding of the organization,” Waltz said. “They’ve never seen anything like it.”
The cuts represent a 15.2 percent reduction from the previous year’s budget and come amid a broader Trump administration effort to pressure international institutions to reduce spending, shrink bureaucracy and refocus on core missions such as conflict prevention and humanitarian assistance.
U.S. officials said the reductions include a $110 million cut from the U.N. Secretariat, which oversees day-to-day operations, a $160 million reduction in funding for field missions and roughly $300 million in broader spending cuts across multiple departments.
Waltz said the changes are intended to make the organization “smaller, less duplicative, more efficient, and cut the fat.”
The budget reductions also follow the elimination of about 2,900 U.N. positions, which officials said further reduced administrative overhead.
Because the United States funds about 22 percent of the U.N.’s annual budget, officials said the cuts would save American taxpayers $126 million.
Despite the cuts, Waltz and Bartos rejected calls from some conservatives for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations entirely, saying the organization still plays an important diplomatic role.
“There needs to be one place in the world where everyone can talk,” Waltz told the Post. “The president is a president of peace, puts diplomacy first. We want that one place in the world to be in the United States, not in Brussels or Beijing.”
