Health WHO has to cut budget by 20 percent after US withdrawal
The World Health Organization has proposed cutting its budget by a fifth. This comes after its largest contributor, the USA, decided to withdraw. The organization must now reduce its tasks and staff, it said.
29.03.2025, 17:05
SDA
The World Health Organization (WHO) is facing a funding gap of almost 600 million US dollars in 2025 and has "no choice" but to start making cuts, explained the institution's Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, in an internal email obtained by the French news agency AFP. The letter was sent to employees of the UN health agency on Friday.
After entering the White House in January, US President Donald Trump decided to freeze almost all US foreign aid, including for important programs to improve health around the world.
Trump justified his decision to withdraw his country from the WHO in January with the discrepancy between the financial contributions of the USA and China and accused the organization of "ripping off" his country.
The US was by far the largest contributor to the WHO's budget: in the last two-year budget cycle for 2022 to 2023, it contributed 16.3 percent of the organization's total budget of USD 7.89 billion. The majority of US funding came from voluntary contributions for specific projects and not from a fixed contribution.
Ghebreyesus noted that the WHO was already struggling with financial constraints before the US withdrawal began and had started working on measures to increase its efficiency more than nine months ago. "Although we have achieved significant cost savings, the current economic and geopolitical conditions make the mobilization of resources particularly difficult," he wrote.
