UN will cut 2026 budget by $577m by slashing workforce

The UN plans to chopped astir a 5th of its positions arsenic unpaid subordinate dues ascent to $1.59 trillion.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said the UN volition chopped its fund by 15.1 percent and trim unit by 18.8 percent successful 2026 arsenic unpaid dues from subordinate states ascent to $1.59 trillion.

The UN main announced adjacent year’s fund connected Monday, which helium acceptable astatine $3.24bn – a simplification of $577m from 2025.

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As of September, the shortfall came from unpaid dues from the United States, China, Russia and Mexico, according to a abstracted UN statement.

Guterres said the fund for the UN bureau for Palestinian refugees – the UNRWA – volition stay intact owed to the precocious level of request successful Palestine.

“I made the determination to exempt UNRWA from immoderate reductions that would person melodramatic consequences connected the backbone of the full humanitarian effect successful Gaza,” Guterres said. The fund for the “Development Account and advocacy for Africa’s development” volition besides stay astatine 2025 levels, helium said.

The UN volition marque up the shortfall by cutting 2,681 positions crossed aggregate UN agencies, which helium said, “correspond to functions that, successful our opinion, tin beryllium done amended by others oregon tin beryllium reduced by efficiencies”.

Some 18 percent of UN posts are already vacant owed to its ongoing liquidity situation from unpaid subordinate dues and different debts, the secretary-general said. They are not needfully related to the positions that person been targeted for cuts, helium added.

“Those vacancies bash not correspond to a governmental determination oriented by a strategical priority, but simply by the information that radical left, and we person not the wealth to wage for the replacement due to the fact that of the liquidity crisis,” helium said.

The fund for peculiar governmental missions volition besides beryllium chopped to $543.6m successful 2026, down $149.5m oregon 21.6 percent from a twelvemonth earlier, helium said.

The cuts volition beryllium made by closing immoderate missions and cutting down the operations of different ongoing ones.

The UN has gradually reduced its beingness successful New York, the location of UN headquarters, besides among the astir costly commercialized existent property successful the world.

Guterres said the UN plans to terminate 2 leases successful New York by precocious 2027, redeeming $24.5m annually from 2029. The UN has already saved $126m since 2017 by shuttering different New York offices, helium said.