The United Nations is in crisis. Secretary-General António Guterres has mandated 20 percent across-the-board spending cuts, amounting to more than $700 million. The proximate cause of the pinch is the United States’ clawback of around $1 billion in allocated funds, doubts over Washington’s future contributions, and, to a lesser extent, other nations’ retrenchments and practice of routinely paying dues late.
The crisis is not solely financial. Under President Donald Trump, the United States—which drove the U.N.’s founding—has turned its back on liberal internationalism. Washington has withdrawn from key U.N. agencies, suspended financial obligations to these bodies, and put the rest of its funding commitments to the organization under review. The U.N. has endured decades of U.S. pendulum swings, but this time is different: Trump is drastically reshaping Washington’s stance toward the world in ways that won’t easily be undone. The emergence of alternative multilateral bodies, great-power deadlocks, and global reductions in development assistance all threaten the U.N. in its current incarnation.
This wavering support comes as the U.N. faces considerable organizational challenges. In recent decades, the U.N. has taken on a dizzying array of tasks and projects, many of which are out-of-date, overlap, or fail to achieve much. Although the U.N. does irreplaceable and lifesaving work, it is saddled with ever-proliferating mandates that distract and detract from those essential endeavors. As part of a strategic review for the institution’s 80th birthday, Guterres commissioned an analysis of U.N. mandates, which was released in August. The study lays bare the organization’s inefficiency and mission creep, making the case for radical streamlining.
Reforming the U.N. is notoriously difficult, with each of its 193 members unavoidably having some say. But, as the saying goes, a crisis should never be wasted. The organization must seize the current cash crunch as a historic opportunity. Indeed, there are already sweeping proposals to remake the global body—including a leaked internal document that lays out an array of ideas to merge, eliminate, and relocate major U.N. functions.
Between the mandate review and the leaked memo, the U.N. has a compelling rationale for reform and a roadmap that sets out the breadth of the changes that should be on the table. Rather than muddling through the current crisis in its present form, the U.N. must use this momentum to remake itself as a body fit for purpose in the second quarter of the 21st century.
The new Report of the Mandate Implementation Review revealed an organization run amok. The U.N. has 22 distinct intergovernmental bodies; just the General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council, and Human Rights Council alone issue a total of more than 600 mandates per year, adding to a groaning total of more than 40,000 still-active mandates.
Mandates—which refer to U.N. bodies’ decisions, requests, and directives for action, such as creating a committee, conducting a study, or preparing a report—define the organization’s work. They can do everything from authorizing the deployment of thousands of peacekeepers, to requiring the preparation of a report on discrimination, to directing the work of a four-person accounting office, to adding to the existing list of more than 200 U.N. commemorative days (such as the International Day of Yoga). Regardless of its scope, each mandate demands effort from the U.N. Secretariat staff, who must carry out the mandate and report back to the entity that authorized it.
While the report did not appraise the value of individual mandates, it pulled no punches in exposing inefficiencies and waste. In fulfillment of these mandates, in 2024 alone, the U.N. held 27,000 meetings, incurring more than $360 million in direct costs associated with conference services and reports. Because there is no central registry of mandates, new ones are created without awareness of what is already being done. Since 1990, around 20 subjects have appeared every year in both General Assembly resolutions and ones adopted by either the Human Rights Council or the Economic and Social Council.
While mandates may emerge from the approval of U.N. secretary-general reports or the adoption of organizational budgets, most are established via resolutions in one of the U.N.’s many political bodies, such as the General Assembly and Human Rights Council. The average word count of such resolutions has nearly tripled over the past 30 years to more than 3,000 words. Last year, the number of U.N. Secretariat reports reached 1,100, with reports to the General Assembly, Security Council, and Economic and Social Council averaging around 11,300 words—a 40 percent increase in length over the past two decades. Relatively few people read these tomes: Last year, only around 35 percent of U.N. reports were downloaded more than 2,000 times.
Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of the General Assembly’s agenda items are discussed every year, and more than 30 percent of its resolution subjects have remained the same since 1990. Most General Assembly resolutions on recurring topics change little from year to year, indicating that many U.N. activities operate on autopilot. Just 14 percent of U.N. resolutions include sunset clauses. In justifying their proposed annual budgets, Secretariat departments cite more than 4,000 specific mandates, many of which date back years.
There are serious risks to this kind of bureaucratic bloat; it is a silent killer that can breed contempt and indifference, leaving institutions vulnerable to those who would pervert or destroy them. It’s not hard to imagine an Elon Musk-like figure waving a copy of the mandate report as grounds to wipe out U.N. bodies and functions wholesale, leaving those who depend on the organization’s food, medicine, and peacekeeping to suffer.
But the U.N. itself recognizes its own calamitous state, and the report spelled out promising reforms, including some that the Secretariat can enact on its own, such as expanding the use of artificial intelligence to uncover duplication and help formulate new mandates, as well as shortening and streamlining reports. The document also proposes more sweeping measures—such as consolidating and eliminating mandates and including mandatory expiration clauses—that would require authorization by member states.
A separate document prepared by Secretariat officials and leaked to Reuters in May goes even further. It proposed a comprehensive consolidation that would distill an alphabet soup of U.N. agencies into a few coherent directorates. This includes merging the U.N.’s AIDS agency with the World Health Organization, U.N. Women with the Population Fund, and the U.N. refugee agency with the International Organization for Migration.
The document’s analysis considered what the U.N. does well and where its work is most needed. It proposed that the organization focus on just four areas: peace and security, humanitarian assistance, socio-economic development, and human rights. Ideas along these lines could help ensure that, rather than imposing death by 1,000 budget cuts, the new austerity plan empowers fewer and smaller departments to prioritize an aggressively culled set of priorities.
There is some recent precedent for consolidation at the U.N. In 2010, U.N. Women was established to merge four separate entities dealing with gender issues and women’s empowerment. By appointing a strong new leader—former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet—and setting a clear purpose for the new agency, the U.N. was able to position the integration as a step forward. The leaked May document acknowledged the importance of this kind of positioning for garnering support for radical changes, pointing to the potential to build stronger and more focused new bodies rather than simply mothballing the old.
These roadmaps could shape a leaner, more focused body that better serves member states and rises to fulfill its human rights and rule-of-law missions. The question is whether individual member states can overcome their parochial interests to get behind compromise proposals for sweeping change. This would mean that countries cede individual preferences in the name of collective responsibility—not an easy task with 193 member states angling to preserve their own priorities, protect nationals serving in U.N. positions, and vie for political advantage. The U.N.’s various departments, directorates, and technical agencies are also bent on self-preservation.
Any time the topic of U.N. reform comes up, eyes turn to the Security Council, the most egregious example of ossification. Its composition has not changed since China took over Taiwan’s seat in 1971. Countless Security Council reform proposals have been floated, but none has surmounted the catch-22 of needing approval from all five permanent members who have little incentive to yield power. Yet the stasis of the Security Council, while a blight on the international body, is not an excuse to sink the U.N. as a whole. And there’s a chance that reforming the rest of the U.N. could put more pressure on the Security Council, eventually forcing change.
Leaders are those who can turn a crisis into an opportunity. Guterres, who has 16 months left in his term, should marshal his political clout to leave reform as his major legacy and set the stage for a successor who will follow through. A cross-regional group of influential and reform-minded member states should devise an implementation package that enacts the recommendations from the mandate report and mirrors the boldness of the leaked memo, creating a blueprint for a lean and efficient organization.
Countries including Chile, Japan, South Africa, Sweden, and Thailand have historically been advocates for good governance and management at the U.N., and now they have an opportunity to renew those roles. Even China could be persuaded to support these efforts, since driving an agenda to update the U.N. and put it on sound financial footing could fortify Beijing’s efforts to expand its leadership role in the organization.
A recent conference on the U.N.’s development work in Seville, Spain, demonstrated that broad consensus on U.N. reform remains possible. While the United States bowed out of the talks, the rest of the world persevered and arrived at an agreement that seeks to enact important changes to the management of sovereign debt and the raising of private capital for development. Now, the key is to ensure that these new mandates replace, rather than pile on top of, those that came before.
The current fiscal crisis has forced the U.N. to own up to its structural vulnerabilities and confess that the current system of governance by 193 member states sprawled across hundreds of bodies and functions has yielded chaos and waste. Dramatic reinvention would allow the U.N.—known for being a collective action problem in institutional form—to prove that it is still relevant amid a rapidly changing geopolitical order. Moreover, the U.N.’s reinvention would breathe life into the rules-based system at a time when its future has been cast into doubt.
The U.N. Secretariat has done vital work in diagnosing the organization’s malady and figuring out how to heal it. The member states who comprise the U.N. just need to let the surgeons get to work.