President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations is forcing a massive overhaul of the global agency, slashing its workforce and cutting funding to terror-linked relief programs after revelations that a U.N. agency in Gaza funded employees who participated in the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel.
“The charge from the president is to clean this place up and get it working for the American people,” U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz said Thursday night on the Just the News, No Noise television show.
Waltz made clear the scope of Trump’s ambitions for the United Nations.
“What President Trump has done with NATO, we’re looking to do to the United Nations,” he said.
“WE FORCED THEM TO TAKE THEIR FIRST BUDGET CUT EVER IN THEIR 80-YEAR HISTORY. THEY ARE GOING TO FIRE 3,000 U.N. BUREAUCRATS OUT OF THE HEADQUARTERS BUILDING IN NEW YORK.”
The Trump administration ended funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) after taking office in 2025. Last month, the USAID inspector general revealed that more than 100 workers funded by UNRWA participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities in Israel.
Waltz sharply criticized the Biden administration for re-funding UNRWA despite evidence of close ties to the designated foreign jihadist organization Hamas.
The reforms Trump has already forced at the U.N. include historic changes.
“We forced them to take their first budget cut ever in their 80-year history. They are going to fire 3,000 U.N. bureaucrats out of the headquarters building in New York,” Waltz said. “And then there’s 90,000 U.N. peacekeepers around the world. We’ve cut 25% of them. So we put the U.N. on a diet.”
The next round of reforms will mirror Trump’s effort to make European allies pick up a greater share of the NATO burden, Waltz explained.
“The American people are generous people when it comes to tsunamis or natural disasters, like we just had in Venezuela, or other types of famine. But we need to know that it’s not filtering through a bloated bureaucracy; that it’s actually getting to people in need,” he said. “We’re making it leaner and more focused.”
Waltz defended continued U.S. involvement in the U.N. on two grounds: maintaining a forum where American interests can be advanced, and burden-sharing that keeps U.S. troops out of hotspots like Gaza and Haiti.
“I don’t want to see the U.N. in Beijing or Brussels or somewhere else, we need to get in there and fight and win for American interests,” Waltz said. “And then number two, there’s a burden sharing component to it. I don’t want to see U.S. troops in places like Gaza or, you know, dealing with the gangs in Haiti when the U.N. is willing to go in there and we can push that agenda.”
Waltz summarized Trump’s policy toward the U.N. in three principles: “diplomacy first, words before bullets, and burden sharing.”
“That’s the charge from President Trump: Help it realize its potential, and the U.N. should be helping him craft these peace deals around the world,” he said.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer agreed that the U.S. should continue cutting U.N. funding, particularly through USAID.
“That was the first thing they cut when [Elon] Musk started DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency]. That was the very first entity,” Comer said. “And remember how bad the Democrats and the media acted. They clutched their pearls and went on MSNBC and screamed bloody murder. But now we’re seeing that this was going to fund, you know, extremist activity. This is going to fund groups that hate America and everything America stands for.”
“THERE ARE 350,000 LESS FEDERAL EMPLOYEES TODAY THAN THERE WERE WHEN DONALD TRUMP TOOK OFFICE THE SECOND TERM.”
Comer said the Trump administration has cut “left-wing activists” from the federal government workforce.
“A lot of your deep state actors are left-wing activists. A lot of the employees in the EPA and other government agencies are left-wing activists,” he said. “One of the greatest accomplishments, I think, of this administration and this Congress is that there are 350,000 less federal employees today than there were when Donald Trump took office the second term.”
The largest expense in most government agencies is personnel, Comer noted.
“We have shrank the government, even though I don’t think a lot of people realize that, and that’s a step in the right direction. We’ve got a long way to go, but there has been progress in the last two years,” he said.
Former USAID Inspector General Jonathan Schofield, who spent 25 years rooting out fraud in the federal government, said his agency would actually travel to investigate fraud stemming from USAID funding.
“They’re not sitting in the embassy. They’re going out. They’re doing field visits and interviews and conducting investigations that have had tremendous results,” he said.
Fraud continues to be uncovered across government spending.
Most recently, the Health and Human Services department is investigating more than $80 million spent in California on refugee programs and other public disbursements that went to supporting organizations with connections to foreign groups, according to Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum.
“The theme of this was that there was so much money being granted to overseas assistance without any oversight, without any audit, without any forensic review of what was going on,” Roman said. “Contractors were just trying to cough the money up from the U.S. government and spend it willy-nilly before their fiscal year ended, and this culture of largess, of no accountability, ended up being given to individuals and organizations which were contrary to what I think would be where America would want to spend its funds.”
