By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
The new Republican majority in the House Foreign Affairs committee is targeting the massive funding enjoyed by the United Nations, an organization plagued by corruption that is heavily involved in promoting radical population control and environmental programs around the world.
CNS News is reporting that committee chairwoman Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) is holding a hearing today, entitled “The United Nations: Urgent Problems that Need Congressional Action” which could lead to making UN contributions from the U.S. contingent upon the completion of much needed reforms.
“I’d like to make sure that we once and for all kill all U.S. funding for that beast,” Ros-Lehtinen said last month. “Because I don’t think that it advances U.S. interests, I don’t think that that’s a pro-democracy group, it’s a rogues’ gallery, pariah states, they belong there because they don’t want to be sanctioned.”
Ros-Lehtinen said she wants to use “U.S. contributions to international organizations as leverage to press for real reform of those organizations.”
The U.S. currently provides 22 percent of the U.N.’s regular operating budget, which finances the Security Council, General Assembly, Economic and Social Council and several other bodies, as well as more than 25 percent of the peacekeeping budget. In FY 2009, U.S. contributions totaled $6.347 billion, an all-time high.
Japan is the next highest contributor at 16 percent. Member states’ contributions are assessed according to their relative “capacity to pay.”
In spite of the fact that the U.S. foots almost a quarter of the U.N.’s operating budget, budgetary decisions are made by the General Assembly where the vote of the U.S. holds no more weight than those of Venezuela which contributes 0.2 percent, Syria at 0.016 percent and Zimbabwe at 0.008 percent.
Speakers at today’s hearing will include Brett Schaefer, Heritage Foundation fellow in international regulatory affairs, who is an advocate of greater congressional oversight in the face of UN waste and actions deemed contrary to U.S. interests. Claudia Rosett, journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democrats, who reported on the Iraqi-U.N. oil-for-food scandal. Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based U.N. Watch will also testify on the U.N.’s controversial Human Rights Council which now has more seats in the hands of Islamic terrorist states and a record low number of voting members from democratic nations.
Peter Yeo, vice-president for public policy at the United Nations Foundation, a group set up in 1998 by a $1 billion donation from CNN founder Ted Turner to work on building public support for the U.N. and advocating for U.S. funding of the organization, will speak in support of the agency.
Ros-Lehtinen os-Lehtinen and other advocates of voluntary U.S. funding say it would compel agencies to demonstrate greater efficiency and transparency.
“The fact that the U.S. continues to contribute billions of taxpayer dollars every year to an unaccountable, unreformed U.N. is no laughing matter,” Ros-Lehtinen said last Friday after learning that the head of the U.N.’s internal oversight office, Michael Dudley is being investigated for retaliating against whistleblowers.
“These allegations reinforce the need for expanded and effective oversight of the U.N. Next week, our committee will lead the way by holding the first of several briefings and hearings on UN reform.”
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