Mary Rooke Commentary and Analysis Writer
President Trump wasted no time withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization (WHO), formalizing the decision with an executive order signed Jan. 20.
Trump’s move revives and expands a policy from his first term halting U.S. funding and severs formal ties. The Trump administration presented the decision as a necessary step to safeguard American sovereignty, taxpayer dollars, and global health effectiveness. The U.S. has historically been the largest contributor to the WHO’s biennial budget, providing approximately 20 percent of the $6.8 billion required for its operations.
Now, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who is staring down the loss of his biggest funder, turned to Politico to beg Trump to reconsider his plan to withdraw.
“If donors or others also see that what they give is no charity and it’s a security for everybody, I think we’ll be in a better situation,” Tedros said.
The U.S. will officially leave the health organization in January; until then, Tedros believes he has a chance to get Trump back on his side. However, there is so much bad blood between the Trump administration (and the U.S.) and the WHO that it doesn’t seem possible.
President Trump has just withdrawn the 🇺🇸 from the World Health Organization (WHO)
I’m sure big pharma and the globalists aren’t too happy about this.
— Patrick Bet-David (@patrickbetdavid) January 21, 2025
The Trump administration’s core grievance is the WHO’s tendency to be more favorable to China than to most other nations, especially the U.S., despite being the organization’s largest donor. After the U.S., China is the second-largest donor, contributing about 16 percent of the organization’s biennial budget. The Trump administration argues that the WHO’s compromised impartiality during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the organization’s praise of China’s ostensible transparency during the crisis, among other issues, is reason enough to withdraw. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)
At the start of the pandemic in January 2020, Tedros praised China’s efforts to tackle the coronavirus outbreak, while simultaneously criticizing the responses of other countries.
“I was very encouraged and impressed by the president’s [Chinese President Xi Jinping] detailed knowledge of the outbreak and his personal involvement in the outbreak. This was for me a very rare leadership,” Tedros said after spending two days in China on a supposed fact-finding mission. Tedros also commended Xi for their “very candid conversation,” which apparently didn’t include China admitting fault for creating the virus and allowing its spread from their virus lab in Wuhan.
Tedros’s tune has changed, arguing with Politico that China is angry with the WHO after it admitted that COVID-19 originated in the Chinese lab.
“I don’t know if people know that China is not happy with the position that we have on COVID’s origins, because our position is that all hypotheses are on the table, including spillover and lab leak,” he told the outlet.
Like many legacy institutions, the WHO has become mired in bureaucratic bloat, entrenched paradigms, conflicts of interest, and international power politics. While the United States has provided the lion’s share of the organization’s funding historically, other countries such as… pic.twitter.com/VvWbVBkb6M
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) May 20, 2025
Still, it’s not just its relationship with China that should cause donor countries to pause their funding. The WHO is notorious for mismanaging its health crisis response, including in 2017 when The Associated Press reported that the organization spent more on executive travel than it did on fighting public health crises like AIDS, tuberculosis, or malaria. People were outraged to find that the WHO spent approximately $200 million a year on travel, including the infamous funding of former WHO director-general Dr. Margaret Chan’s over $1,000-a-night stay in the presidential suite at the Palm Camayenne hotel in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, a country in West Africa.
“When you spend the kind of money WHO is spending on travel, you have to be able to justify it,” Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health Dr. Ashish Jha told the AP in 2017. “I can’t think of any justification for ever flying first class.”
“If WHO is not being as lean as possible, it’s going to be hard to remain credible when they make their next funding appeal,” Jha said.
The WHO’s COVID vaccine distribution plan (COVAX) was a hotbed for fraud, according to researchers who found that it was the key reason for the organziation’s failure to meet distribution expectations. An informant told researchers that the lack of transparency regarding vaccine prices had allowed for “a huge window for corruption.”
“All decisions are very opaque. We don’t even have the prices. We need to know how decisions were made and what were the other available option,” the informant said. “It’s difficult to evaluate at times of crises, we don’t have coordinates to see how these decisions were made. I don’t know if a country paid $10 or $2 because nothing to compare it against.”
The director-general of the World Health Organization said he hopes the United States will continue to be a “generous friend to WHO.” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the WHO is reviewing what impact a loss of U.S. funding would have on its work. pic.twitter.com/jvcYecJN1j
— WSPA 7NEWS (@WSPA7) April 16, 2020
And yet, Tedros wants the U.S. to continue funding his biased disaster of an organization because he’s facing a massive loss in revenue with the American taxpayers. (ROOKE: Trump’s Supreme Court Picks Could Come Back To Haunt Him On His Favorite Issue)
Follow Mary Rooke on X: @MaryRooke