That is the news from The Hill two days ago!
Finally an elusive number I’ve wondered about for years is mentioned here:
The US pays $1.5 billion of the $4 billion annual budget of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
That is the agency of the UN choosing our refugees for your towns and cities!
The Hill:
President Trump’s administration has told the State Department to cut more than 50 percent of U.S. funding to United Nations programs, Foreign Policy reported.
The push for the drastic reductions comes as the White House is scheduled to release its 2018 topline budget proposal Thursday, which is expected to include a 37 percent cut to the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development budgets.***
It’s not clear if Trump’s budget plan, from the Office of Management and Budget, would reflect the full extent of Trump’s proposed cuts to the U.N.
[….]
The U.S. spends roughly $10 billion annually on the U.N., and the cuts could have the greatest impact on peacekeeping, the U.N. development program and UNICEF, which are funded by State’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs.
The fate of other popular [?—ed] programs, like the World Food Programme and U.N. refugee operations, are less clear. The World Food Programme’s funding comes from the Department of Agriculture.
Let the wailing begin….
Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the alterations would spark “chaos” if true.
“[It would] leave a gaping hole that other big donors would struggle to fill,” he told FP, pointing to how the U.S. provided $1.5 billion of the U.N. refugee agency’s $4 billion budget last year.
“Multiply that across other humanitarian agencies like the World Food Programme and you are basically talking about the breakdown of the international humanitarian system as we know it.”
More here, and then yesterday The Washington Post reported the news as well, but does not mention the UNHCR.
The Post quotes Trump’s UN ambassdor Nikki Haley as saying the following in her confirmation hearing in January. (Just a reminder dear readers that Haley works for Trump, so let’s hope she is now on the same page as the President!)
“I do not think we need to pull money from the U.N. We don’t believe in slash-and-burn.”
***Let’s talk about USAID for a minute!
We haven’t written much over the years about the Agency for International Development which also gives gobs and gobs of (your) money to some federal refugee contractors.
I knew the International Rescue Committee couldn’t be pulling in millions from solely seeding refugees in places like Missoula, Montana, so I checked USA Spending just now to see what they were getting from USAID. Yikes! Here is a screen shot of one tiny portion of one page. (These are grants from 2008 to 2016).
The IRC received nearly $1 billion from US taxpayers during the Obama years!
No wonder they have money to community-organize against citizens in small city America!
For our complete archive on the IRC, click here.