Recently the Council of Foreign Relations produced a report where they detailed the U.S. contribution to the United Nations and it’s endless entities, funds and programs.

The United States remains the largest donor to the United Nations, contributing more than $10 billion in 2017, roughly one fifth of the UN’s collective budget. This amount also represents roughly one-fifth of the $50 billion the United States allocates to Department of State and spends annually on foreign aid.

In 1994, Amb. John Bolton said that if the United Nations Secretariat building in New York “lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”

Anthony Banbury, an american and a former assistant U.N. secretary general, wrote an op-ed for NY Times explaining why he resigned his job. “I was unprepared for the blur of Orwellian admonitions and Carrollian logic that govern” U.N. headquarters, he recalled:

“If you locked a team of evil geniuses in a laboratory, they could not design a bureaucracy so maddeningly complex, requiring so much effort but in the end incapable of delivering the intended result. The system is a black hole into which disappear countless tax dollars and human aspirations, never to be seen again.”

Bret Stephens, a columnist at NY Times wrote that: “The U.N. adopted what were supposed to be landmark reforms more than a decade ago. Yet the mismanagement, corruption, abuses and moral perversities remain. Iran sits on the executive board of the Commission on the Status of Women. The Syrian regime is represented on the U.N.’s Special Committee on Decolonization, dedicated to “respect for self-determination of all peoples.” In October, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe was named a good-will ambassador by the World Health Organization, until an outcry forced the director general to think better of it.”

President Donald J. Trump, however, has raised questions about how much the United States will continue to contribute. In his 2018 budget proposal, President Trump requested cutting more than half of U.S. funding for UN programs, including all contributions to climate change programs. But Congress largely rejected Trump’s proposed cuts, instead it agreed to enforce a congressionally mandated cap on U.S. contributions to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) that had been waived since 2001. The measure reduced U.S. contributions from 28 to 25 percent of the DPKO’s budget, which could amount to a more than $200 million decrease in 2019. (as per CFR)

In his 2018 speech at the UN General Assembly, Trump said, “The United States is committed to making the United Nations more effective and accountable…Only when each of us does our part and contributes our share can we realize the U.N.’s highest aspirations.”

Maybe is time that John Bolton advises the President Trump to consider reducing the US contribution to UN by at least 50%.

What do you think ?