The World Health Organization is pausing hiring and reducing staff travel after President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the body on his first day back in office.
The U.S. is the WHO’s largest funder and Trump’s withdrawal is straining the group’s financial resources, prompting the recruitment freeze and strict limits on travel expenditures, Politico reported based on an internal memo.
“As you know, the United States of America has announced that it intends to withdraw from WHO. We regret this decision and hope the new administration will reconsider it,” WHO director general Tedros Adhanom said in the memo.
“This announcement has made our financial situation more acute, and we know it has created significant concern and uncertainty for the WHO workforce,” he added.
National Review has reached out to the WHO for comment.
The WHO is making all meetings virtual and limiting its technical support missions to countries to only essential circumstances. It will also be limiting IT upgrades, renegotiating contracts, and suspending investments unless they are necessary for security or cost-cutting. More cost-efficiency measures will likely be announced at a later date, the memo suggests.
The Trump administration pulled out of the WHO because of its mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic, softness towards China, and the disproportionate level of funding provided by the U.S. relative to other member countries.
Trump previously moved to withdraw from the WHO in 2020, a decision the Biden administration quickly overturned at the start of former president Biden’s term.
At the start of the pandemic, the WHO ignored warnings about Covid-19 and enabled China to slow-walk its early pandemic response, a move that likely contributed to untold numbers of Covid-19 deaths. China subsequently obstructed the WHO’s investigation into whether the pandemic originated from a lab in Wuhan where risky bat coronavirus research had taken place. All the while, Tedros praised China’s initial Covid-19 response and lambasted foreign governments, fueling Chinese propaganda and international confusion.
The WHO is in the middle of negotiating a global pandemic treaty to establish binding international guidelines for the next outbreak. Trump’s executive order directs Secretary of State Marco Rubio to cease negotiations for the pandemic treaty, which received scrutiny from House Republicans for language that would encourage online censorship.
The WHO has nearly 200 members from around the world and its 2024-25 budget was listed $6.83 billion before the Trump administration’s withdrawal. Besides dues-paying countries, the WHO has increasingly relied on outside investors to fund its mission of combatting diseases.