Trump abandons dozens of global organizations amid further US withdrawal

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration will withdraw from dozens of international organizations, including the U.N. population agency and the U.N. treaty establishing international climate negotiations, as the United States further withdraws from global cooperation.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order suspending U.S. support for 66 organizations, agencies and commissions, following his administration’s review of the participation and funding of all international organizations, including those affiliated with the United Nations, according to a White House statement.

Many of the targets are U.N.-related agencies, commissions and advisory panels that focus on climate, labor, migration and other issues that the Trump administration has categorized as diversity and “woke” initiatives.

Other non-UN organizations on the list include the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance and the Global Counter-Terrorism Forum.

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“The Trump Administration has deemed these institutions to be redundant in scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, mismanaged, captured by the interests of actors who promote their own agendas contrary to ours, or a threat to the sovereignty, freedoms, and overall prosperity of our nation,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.

Trump’s decision to withdraw from organizations that foster cooperation between nations to address global challenges comes as his administration has launched military efforts or issued threats that have unnerved allies and adversaries alike, including capturing autocratic Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and signaling his intention to seize Greenland.

The US continues its pattern of departure from global agencies

“I think what we’re seeing is the crystallization of the American approach to multilateralism, which is ‘my way or the highway,'” said Daniel Forti, head of U.N. affairs at the International Crisis Group. “It’s a very clear vision of wanting international cooperation on Washington’s own terms.”

It has marked a major shift from the way previous administrations, both Republican and Democratic, have dealt with the UN, and has forced the world body, which was already undergoing its own internal reckoning, to respond with a series of staff and program cuts.

Many independent non-governmental agencies (some of which work with the United Nations) have cited the closure of many projects due to the US government’s decision last year to cut foreign assistance through the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Despite the massive shift, Trump administration officials say they see the potential of the UN and want instead to focus taxpayer dollars on expanding American influence in many of the UN’s standards-setting efforts where there is competition with China, such as the International Telecommunication Union, the International Maritime Organization and the International Labor Organization.

The latest global organizations the United States is abandoning

The withdrawal from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the latest effort by Trump and his allies to distance the United States from climate-focused international organizations addressing climate change.

The UNFCCC, the 1992 agreement between 198 countries to financially support climate change activities in developing countries, is the treaty underlying the landmark Paris climate agreement. Trump, who calls climate change a hoax, withdrew from that agreement shortly after regaining the White House.

Gina McCarthy, a former White House national climate adviser, said being the only country in the world not to be a party to the treaty is “a shortsighted, shameful and foolish decision.”

“This Administration is losing our country’s ability to influence trillions of dollars in investments, policies and decisions that would have advanced our economy and protected us from costly disasters wreaking havoc on our country,” McCarthy, who co-chairs America Is All In, a coalition of climate-conscious American states and cities, said in a statement.

The U.S. withdrawal could hamper global efforts to curb greenhouse gases because it “gives other nations the excuse to delay their own actions and commitments,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who chairs the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists that tracks countries’ carbon dioxide emissions.

It will also be difficult to make significant progress on climate change without the cooperation of the United States, one of the world’s largest emitters and economies, experts said.

The United Nations Population Fund, the agency that provides sexual and reproductive health around the world, has long been a lightning rod for Republican opposition, and Trump cut funding to it during his first term. He and other Republican officials have accused the agency of engaging in “coercive abortion practices” in countries such as China.

When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, he restored funding to the agency. A State Department review the following year found no evidence to support the GOP claims.

Other organizations and agencies that the United States will abandon include the Carbon-Free Energy Pact, the United Nations University, the International Cotton Advisory Committee, the International Tropical Timber Organization, the Association for Atlantic Cooperation, the Pan American Institute of Geography and History, the International Federation of Arts Councils and Cultural Agencies, and the International Study Group on Lead and Zinc.