Trump Admin Rescues the UN — and Increases the Education Department’s Budget
The Trump administration has no intention of letting the UN collapse under the weight of its bloat and uselessness. Moreover, the government funding package President Donald Trump signed into law last week includes an increase of hundreds of millions in funding for the Education Department.
The United States government will soon give billions of dollars in unpaid member dues to the UN, which is — nay, was — on the brink of “financial collapse,” according to comments UN Secretary-General António Guterres made in late January. According to Reuters, the United States “will make an initial payment towards the billions of dollars it owes to the United Nations in a matter of weeks.” U.S. ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz said this during a phone interview. “You’ll certainly see an initial tranche of money very shortly,” he told Reuters. “It’ll be a significant … down payment on our annual dues…. I don’t believe that the ultimate figure is decided, but it’ll be in a matter of weeks.”
The government funding bill Trump just signed “includes $3.1 billion for U.S. dues to the U.N. and other international organizations,” Reuters pointed out.
Guterres wrote in a letter dated January 28 that the UN was on the brink of “imminent financial collapse.” The major reason was member states’ refusal to pay their dues. And at the top of that list was the United States. According to reports, “U.N. officials say more than 95 percent of what is owed to the regular U.N. budget is owed by the United States,” and “the U.S. also owes another $2.4 billion for current and past peace-keeping missions and $43.6 million for U.N. tribunals.”
Critic or Supporter?
Trump has derided the UN in multiple speeches and statements. Last September, in a scathing speech before the UN General Assembly, he skewered the organization for its failure to facilitate peace in worn-torn regions, its financing of disastrous open-border policies, and the litany of erroneous climate doomsday predictions and correlating policies the organization has endorsed over the decades. But he also said the UN had great potential. This reflects the chaotic, oftentimes wishy-washy, policies and rhetoric that emanate out of this administration.
The Trump administration’s refusal to let the UN collapse is not surprising. In addition to Trump’s comments about its potential, Waltz said last November that America didn’t plan on leaving the UN. His primary justification for continued involvement rested on the idea that an American retreat would create a void filled by other power nations. And if that were to happen, those nations would influence international rules in a way that would eventually hurt Americans.
But that rationale doesn’t hold water if the UN were to collapse entirely, which was its trajectory until America came to the rescue.
America First UN
It only gets more nonsensical. In an interview Fox News published Saturday, Waltz laid out an “America First” vision for the UN. He said:
There are times where the U.N. has been incredibly helpful to U.S. foreign policy and objectives, but there are also times where it’s working against us. It has become bloated. It has become duplicative. It has lost its way from its original founding. When we give the U.N. some tough love … these are the American taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars. At the end of the day, we will get the American taxpayers’ money’s worth, so to speak, out of this organization.
This “tough love” is going to lead to efficiency, according to Waltz. “They just agreed to cut nearly 3,000 headquarters bureaucratic positions,” he said. “They agreed to the first-ever budget cut in U.N. history in 80 years, a 15% budget cut, and they’re cutting global peacekeeping forces by 25%.”
The idea of an “America First” approach toward a globalist organization created to serve as the headquarters of a world government designed to destroy U.S. sovereignty is as absurd as the “America First” interventionist foreign policy the Trump administration purports to be carrying out. There is nothing MAGA about sending American tax dollars to the UN, just as there is nothing America First about bombing nations on the other side of the planet that pose no imminent danger to the homeland. There is also no sane America First framework that justifies propping up and supporting hundreds of military bases around the world. The administration appears to be conflating “America First” with “America the Empire.”
Nevertheless, Waltz, who accumulated a dismal score of 68 percent on The New American’s Freedom Index during his five-year congressional stint insists that preserving an organization filled with literal communists is somehow good for Americans.
Fed Ed
Back at home, the president just signed a government funding bill that increases the budget of the Education Department by $217 million to $79 billion. This flies in the face of his promises. During his re-election campaign, the president vowed to close the department multiple times. “One other thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states,” Trump said in 2023. “We want them to run the education of our children because they’ll do a much better job of it.” He said something like this numerous times.
Once he moved into the Oval Office, it looked like he was going to do his best to keep this promise. In March of last year, he signed an executive order titled “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities.” The order touts the sensibleness of closing the department. “Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them,” the order reads.
One paragraph down, it reiterates what a great a idea closing it down is. “Closure of the Department of Education would drastically improve program implementation in higher education,” the order says, concluding that “ultimately, the Department of Education’s main functions can, and should, be returned to the States.” Then it suggests that the Secretary of Education do whatever it takes to “facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States.”
Compromise
That mission appears to be aborted now. Trump agreeing to increase funding for the Education Department may have been an act of compromise. The top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.), wrote in a social media post after Trump signed the law:
Our funding bills send a message to Trump: America will continue to fund cancer research. We WILL keep investing in affordable housing. Congress will NOT abolish the Department of Education. Well, he got the message, and he signed those bills into law.
Libertarian icon Ron Paul was not happy with the move. He recently wrote:
Increasing the budget of an unconstitutional Cabinet department is never a good idea, but it is especially bad when the federal debt is increasing by trillions of dollars a year. If President Trump and the other Republicans who have said they want the Education Department shut down are not going to even attempt to shut it down, they could at least reduce its funding.
Paul adds that if the department is ever going to be shut down, “pressure needs to be put on lawmakers to restore control over education to states, local communities, and parents.”
Public Pressure
Public pressure is the key to critical and lasting change when it comes not only to closing the education department but exiting the United Nations. The torrent of pressure that results from civic engagement needs to be too powerful to be denied. We’ve caught a glimpse of what that looks like with the Epstein files. The executive and legislative branch fought tooth and nail to make the issue go away without providing further transparency. But the public wouldn’t have it. And thanks to pressure that was carried out through a small number of lawmakers, documents that were never supposed to see the light of day became public.
As of now, the battle for more transparency continues. The Justice Department so far continues to conceal millions of documents it was supposed to make public and has redacted information it shouldn’t have. But the files are already having seismic consequences. They’re toppling elites all over Europe and proving to the entire world the existence of an elite international oligarch class of sophisticated criminals.
As earth-shattering as Epstein transparency will prove to be, exiting the UN and shuttering the Education Department could prove equally pivotal.