U.N. eyes budget and job cuts for 2026 as U.S. scales back aid
The directive, which asks staff to detail cuts by June 13, comes amid a financial crisis triggered in part by the United States, which annually funds nearly a quarter of the world body.
In addition to U.S. foreign aid cuts under U.S President Donald Trump that have gutted U.N. humanitarian agencies, the U.S. owes — for arrears and the current fiscal year — nearly $1.5 billion.
The memo's author, U.N. Controller Chandramouli Ramanathan, did not cite the U.S. failure to pay. He noted that the cuts are part of a review launched in March dubbed "UN80."
"It is an ambitious effort to ensure that the United Nations is fit for purpose to support 21st-century multilateralism, reduce human suffering and build better lives and futures for all," Ramanathan said. "I count on your cooperation for this collective effort whose aggressive timelines are recognized."
The cuts would take effect Jan. 1, the start of the next budget cycle.
In public briefings to U.N. diplomats this month, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he is considering a massive overhaul that would merge major departments and shift resources across the globe. He said the U.N. may consolidate some agencies, trim others, move staff to cheaper cities, cut duplication and eliminate redundant bureaucracy.
In public briefings to U.N. diplomats this month, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he is considering a massive overhaul that would merge major departments and shift resources across the globe. |
reuters
"These are times of peril, but they are also times of profound opportunity and obligation," Guterres said on May 12. "Make no mistake: uncomfortable and difficult decisions lie ahead. It may be easier and even tempting to ignore them or kick the can down the roads. But that road is a dead end."
The U.S. failure to pay its assessments has also created a liquidity crisis for the U.N., a problem exacerbated by China's repeated late payments. Together, the two nations account for more than 40% of U.N. funding.
In addition, the Trump administration has withdrawn hundreds of millions of dollars in discretionary funds, forcing the abrupt halt of dozens of humanitarian programs that U.N. officials have said will cost lives. The proposed U.S. budget for the coming year, which must be approved by Congress, has eliminated or drastically reduced funding for several U.N. programs, including peacekeeping.
A U.S. State Department spokesperson did not comment on the proposed U.N. cuts, but said a Trump-ordered study was due by early August. "Funding for the U.N., along with other international organizations, is currently under review,' the spokesperson said.
In April, Tom Fletcher, who leads the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told employees that U.S. funding cuts would force the agency to trim 20% of its staff to address a shortfall of $58 million.
Richard Gowan, U.N. director at the International Crisis Group, said it was unclear if the cuts will affect the Trump administration position.
"Diplomats think that Guterres hopes that if he shows he will make these cuts, then the administration will ease off on their threats to zero out funding for the U.N.,' Gowan said.
"That's possible. It's also possible that the administration will just pocket the cuts and not make any concessions.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Japan Times
4 hours ago
- Japan Times
China biotech's stunning advance is changing the world's drug pipeline
The biotechnology industry is experiencing a tectonic shift, driven by Chinese drugmakers who have come a long way from their copycat days to challenge Western dominance on innovation. The number of novel drugs in China — for cancer, weight-loss and more — entering into development ballooned to over 1,250 last year, far surpassing the European Union and nearly catching up to the U.S.'s count of about 1,440, an exclusive Bloomberg News analysis showed. And the drug candidates from the land once notorious for cheap knock-offs and quality issues are increasingly clearing high bars to win recognition from both drug regulators and Western pharmaceutical giants. The findings, gleaned from an analysis of a database maintained by pharma intelligence solutions provider Norstella, show a fundamental shift in medical innovation's center of gravity. With U.S. President Donald Trump already threatening tariffs on the pharmaceutical sector, China's biotech advances — the scale of which is slowly coming into view — risk becoming another realm of superpower rivalry like artificial intelligence and electric vehicles. "The scale itself is not something we've seen before,' said Helen Chen, managing partner at LEK Consulting in Shanghai, who has advised healthcare companies on their China strategy since 2003. "The products are here, they're attractive and they're fast.' This shift has occurred at an unprecedented pace. When China began to overhaul its drug regulatory system in 2015, the country had just 160 compounds to contribute to the global pipeline of innovative drugs, or less than 6% of the total, behind Japan and the U.K. The reforms helped streamline reviews, enforced data quality standards and improved transparency. The government's "Made in China 2025" plan to elevate manufacturing in 10 priority sectors also helped spur a flurry of investments in biotechnology. Altogether, they unleashed a boom led by foreign-educated and -trained scientists and entrepreneurs. "Not only is it now almost at parity with the U.S. but it has that growth trajectory,' said Daniel Chancellor, vice president of thought leadership at Norstella. "It wouldn't be sensationalist to suggest that China will overtake the U.S. in the next few years purely in terms of numbers of drugs that it's bringing through into its pipeline.' Bloomberg News' data analysis focuses on innovative drugs, excluding generic combinations, reformulations and biosimilars. Numbers aside, the more stunning leap is in the quality of Chinese biotech innovation. While there's constant debate in the pharmaceutical industry on whether Chinese firms are capable of producing not just effective but needle-shifting new therapies, there's growing recognition on multiple fronts. The world's strictest regulatory agencies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency, increasingly view Chinese drugs as generally promising enough to justify devoting extra resources to speed up their review, handing them coveted industry designations such as priority review, breakthrough therapy designation or fast track status. The country is now slightly ahead of the EU in earning such expedited reviews as of 2024, the data shows, a remarkable edge over a region that previously produced drugs like Wegovy. One of the early exemplars of Chinese innovation is a cell therapy that has shown promise to potentially cure a deadly blood cancer. First developed in China by Legend Biotech, it is now marketed by Johnson & Johnson — having won a few expedited review designations along the way — and considered superior to a competing U.S.-originated therapy. Still, the absolute number of China-originated drugs winning these designations trails their U.S. counterparts by a large margin. Risk aversion remains a factor holding back Chinese pharmaceutical innovation: So far, top companies tend to focus on making better versions of existing therapies or new iterations of older ideas, and few are pioneering novel treatment approaches that have never been tried before — an endeavor that comes with a high risk of failure and is still led by the U.S., Europe and, to a lesser extent, Japan. Nevertheless, the biggest Chinese breakthroughs are increasingly being snapped up by pharmaceutical giants for record sums, a sign that the perennial competition for the next blockbuster drug is also shifting East. A novel cancer drug from Akeso, which came out more effective than Merck & Co.'s Keytruda in a Chinese study last year, has been likened to China biotech's DeepSeek moment, spawning a new wave of global interest. The promise of topping Keytruda, the world's top-selling drug, also swelled the valuation of Summit Therapeutics, which in 2022 paid $500 million upfront for the development and marketing rights in the U.S. and other regions. Other multinational players like Merck, AstraZeneca and Roche Holding have also scooped up Chinese assets. In May, Pfizer set a new record as it announced a $1.2 billion upfront deal with 3SBio for a cancer drug similar to Akeso's. These deals are increasing in both value and frequency, according to biopharma deal database DealForma, signaling confidence that China-originated drugs are competitive internationally and can bring in substantial revenue. The volume of potential candidates coming out of China means multinational companies, which have a constant need to add new products to the mix, can "cast their net wider than ever before,' Norstella's Chancellor said. A key advantage that has fueled the rise of Chinese biotech firms is their ability to conduct research cheaper and faster at every step of the way, from lab experiments and animal testing to human trials. Technicians work inside a production laboratory for CAR-T cell therapies at an IASO Biotechnology facility in Nanjing on June 9. | Bloomberg Creating a new drug from scratch is notoriously time-consuming and expensive, and China's massive patient pool and centralized hospital network have become a significant accelerator. An analysis of the time taken for drugs to conduct various testing stages shows that doctors in China can recruit for trials much faster — for early trials for cancer and obesity drugs, they can complete patient enrollment in half the time compared to the U.S. The difference in costs means Chinese companies can afford to run multiple trials simultaneously to find a winner, or quickly launch new projects once a scientific idea is validated by other groups. Since 2021, China has become the top location for clinical research, initiating the largest number of new trials globally, according to GlobalData. "They can leapfrog competitors in other countries,' said Andy Liu, head of China at Novotech Health Holdings, which helps companies run clinical trials. To be sure, clinical data in China is just a start. U.S. regulators have made it clear that China-only trial results, no matter how positive, are not sufficient to support drug approvals. Chinese biotechs with ambition to sell their drugs overseas must prove that their treatment benefits can be replicated in non-Chinese patients, through complex and slower-moving global studies. It may still be a few years before a critical mass of drugs sourced from China wins U.S. and EU approvals — the gold standard for high-quality treatments — and becomes widely used in the Western world, but many in the industry believe that's inevitable. China's innovators comprise both cutting-edge biotech startups founded by foreign-educated entrepreneurs, and old-guard Chinese pharmaceutical companies like Jiangsu Hengrui Pharmaceuticals, which used to be one of the country's biggest generic drugmakers. The company poured billions of dollars into shifting to innovative research and development after Beijing's campaign to lower generic drug prices made that sector less profitable. It's now the world's top-ranked pharmaceutical company for the number of new innovative drugs added to the research pipeline in the period of 2020-2024. Of the 50 companies that generated the highest number of innovative drug candidates between 2020 and 2024, 20 of them were Chinese, compared to five in the five years before. "As we move forward, the fact that there's high quality innovation in China in terms of biotech will no longer be a novelty,' said Ali Pashazadeh, founder and managing director of healthcare advisory firm Treehill Partners in London. "It'll just be an accepted part of the norm.' At a time when China and the U.S. are engaged in renewed geopolitical spats, the growth of China's biotech ecosystem is causing alarm among some American politicians and business leaders. A congressional commission warned that the U.S. risks losing its leadership position in yet another industry critical to national security. "Biotech is one of the forefronts of the U.S.-China tech rivalry,' said Jack Burnham, research analyst at the think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies. In addition to economic implications and possible military applications of biotech, China's leverage on innovative therapies may be weaponized in a future conflict, he said, if Americans become dependent on those medicines. The perception of threat has spurred calls for the U.S. government to stymie China's biotech growth — through restrictions such as export controls on scientific equipment and barriers to investment — and boost the domestic biotech sector, including by changing the regulatory environment to emulate countries where clinical trials are run more quickly. Robert F. Kennedy, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, recently pledged to "Make American Biotech Accelerate.' Despite the risks of the newly combative relationship between the world's two biggest economies, Chinese drugmakers like Akeso have set their sights on bringing their therapies to developed Western markets. "The pharma industry is the best industry in the world,' Akeso CEO Michelle Xia said in an April interview. "At the end of the day, what we do benefits patients in China, in the U.S. and all around the world.'
Japan Times
7 hours ago
- Japan Times
What will it take to end Iran's nuke program? An army.
In the weeks since the U.S. attacked the Iranian nuclear program with 30,000-pound "bunker busting' bombs and submarine-launched Tomahawk missiles, we've heard wide variation in how much damage has been done overall. American President Donald Trump's claim that the U.S. had "obliterated' the Iranian nuclear program was widely challenged and current assessments have broadly settled on "severe damage' that has set back the program 12 to 24 months. What is largely not disputed is that 800-plus pounds of enriched uranium remains somewhere in Iran; that some number of the critical enrichment machines (gas centrifuges, cascade structures, precision bearings) are likely still in Iranian hands; and, indisputably, that the scientific knowhow to produce an atomic bomb still exists in the minds of Iranian scientists, engineers and technologists who survived the strikes. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Trump met last week, they were in agreement: Iran can never be permitted to have a nuclear weapon. But from there, the beliefs diverge. Israel probably wants more strikes to find and destroy the uranium stockpile and machinery, and to assassinate leading scientists. Trump likely wants to avoid more strikes, seeking to find a diplomatic and economic solution that doesn't drag the U.S. further into another Middle East war. But the fact is, neither of these approaches would achieve that ultimate goal of ensuring the Tehran regime never produces a viable nuclear arsenal. So, what would it actually require? Certainly, more than the American people, their elected officials and the military would be eager to undertake any time soon. One way to think about this is to look at the 2003 invasion of in Iraq. Yes, we all know it turned out that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein didn't have a nuclear weapons program. But, paradoxically, the mission intended to find it must be considered a military success in terms of achieving its objective. That effort provides a blueprint for what it would take to truly obliterate a nation's weapons research programs. I remember the invasion of Iraq clearly. Immediately after 9/11, I was promoted to a one-star rear admiral's rank and head of the Navy's new tactical antiterrorist think tank, called "Deep Blue.' My mission was to come up with ways to defeat al-Qaida forces who had perpetrated the attack on the U.S. Given our focus on finding and eliminating terrorist groups in Afghanistan, I was surprised to hear more and more discussion in the Pentagon about invading Iraq. Operational plans were underway to remove Saddam's regime, on the presumption that he had a capable program for weapons of mass destruction. That intelligence turned out to be wrong. But at the time, the objective for the military was to destroy what we believed was an extensive Iraqi nuclear program. I remember reviewing those plans and they were far, far from a series of precision strikes. They included an initial force of more than 150,000 ground troops (U.S. and British); another 200,000 supporting troops; almost 2,000 combat aircraft for 24,000 sorties in the first six weeks, with 65,000 airmen supporting; and more than 100 naval warships 60,000 sailors. Several thousand highly trained special forces members were also to be engaged. Ultimately, nearly 40 nations participated in the operation that began in 2003, including a major NATO training mission which I would eventually command. The plan also envisioned that Shiite Muslim militias — opposed to Saddam's Sunni-led regime — would rise up and fight alongside our forces. I recall another rear admiral speaking in football parlance that "Shias go long,' like NFL wide receivers. Wishful thinking aside, here's the point: This was a massive undertaking that ultimately cost the U.S. trillions of dollars, thousands of combat deaths and tens of thousands of life-changing wounds and countless Iraqi civilian lives. It was costly, bloody and painful. Nonetheless, every government lab was inspected and neutralized; key scientific personnel were identified, interrogated and placed under surveillance. Machinery was destroyed and factories converted to other uses. But this required, above all, boots on the ground. It simply could not have been done in Iraq with a handful of airstrikes and clusters of Tomahawk missiles. Now let's look at Iran. It is nearly four times the size of Iraq, with a population roughly twice as large. Unlike the case in Baghdad, we know with absolute certainly — because of international inspectors — that Iran has an active and impressive program to build not only nuclear weapons but also ballistic missiles to deliver them. Thus, the challenge to obliterate that capability is immense, far greater than in Iraq. It would require invading Iran with hundreds of thousands of ground troops, occupying the country and systematically dismantling the state. Could we do that? Yes, but the costs would be enormous. Would the Iranian people greet us as liberators and turn their nation into a democratic beacon in a turbulent region? Uh, we heard exactly that about Iraq. Didn't work out well. If our leaders are going to call for obliterating the Iranian nuclear program, they need to be clear-eyed. Perhaps someday an overwhelming military option may be needed, but for now let's see what we can accomplish at the bargaining table. And tell the Israelis to cool their jets, literally. Any potential deal needs to include a guarantee of open inspections by international bodies anywhere, anytime; no uranium enrichment within Iran (if the regime truly wants low-enriched material for an energy program, it can come from a neutral third site); termination of long-range ballistic missile research and testing; and no further support to terrorist or proxy groups threatening the U.S., Arab states or Israel. In return, we can offer a graduated series of steps to relieve sanctions; cooperation on peaceful nuclear power; and economic incentives — for the Europeans, a peaceful Iran could be a very attractive investment opportunity. Over the long haul, we can always go back to the Pentagon and pull out the war plans to invade Iran — and the Tehran leadership knows it. But we shouldn't kid ourselves about what can be accomplished strictly with low-cost and low-risk airstrikes. To truly obliterate the Iranian nuclear plan would be shockingly costly and painful. Far better to try again diplomatically. The ghosts of Iraq demand no less. [Bio]James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a retired U.S. Navy admiral, former supreme allied commander of NATO and vice chairman of global affairs at the Carlyle Group.[/bio]
Japan Times
7 hours ago
- Japan Times
Nvidia CEO says China's military unlikely to use U.S. AI chips
Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said the U.S. government doesn't need to be concerned that the Chinese military will use his company's products to improve their capabilities. Addressing the largest concern Washington has cited in placing increasing restrictions on U.S. technology exports to the Asian nation, Huang said the Chinese military will avoid using U.S. technology because of the risks associated with doing so. "We don't have to worry about it,' he said in an interview on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" broadcast Sunday.
