The United Nations faces a severe liquidity crisis, with Secretary-General António Guterres warning of a “race to bankruptcy” by mid-August.
The United Nations is going broke as the U.S. and China withhold payments to the institution in a jostle for control.
Washington has failed to pay billions of dollars owed to the international body and exited dozens of its programs and agencies, including the World Health Organization, to combat what President Trump describes as wasteful spending and bad policymaking. The U.S. is more than $4 billion in arrears to the U.N.
China has compounded the U.N.’s liquidity crisis by slow-walking its own payments, even as Beijing declares itself the organization’s leading defender and, in a jab at the U.S., the “de facto No. 1 financial contributor.” Beijing still owes the U.N. $455 million even after injecting almost $850 million this week into the organization during a visit by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
The U.N. relies on U.S. and Chinese money for 42% of its basic funding.
Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that the U.N. is in a “race to bankruptcy” and cited a “very real prospect of the financial collapse of our organization.” On the current trajectory, the U.N. says it will be out of cash by mid-August—just when the process of picking a successor to Guterres shifts into high gear.
China says it will honor its financial obligations. The U.S. says it is conditioning future financial support on deeper savings, with more job cuts, less business-class travel and greater use of machine translators.
“What we are working toward is not a rejection of multilateralism, but putting clarity and results over inefficiency and hollow words,” a senior State Department official, Michael G. DeSombre, told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday.
The U.N. has complained about funding problems in the past, but this time it is taking unprecedented actions to deal with the shortfall.
Starved of cash, the U.N. has made historically large spending cuts and embarked on an efficiency drive. It has closed offices and eliminated a record 3,000 secretariat posts. It has shortened interpreter hours, powered down escalators and ignored loose cladding on its 75-year-old headquarters in New York.
The U.N. has accelerated troop drawdowns in African hot spots such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo to conserve cash and slashed peacekeeping expenditures. It has also delayed reimbursements to Nepal, Bangladesh and other poor nations that supply troops for “blue-helmet” operations.
How insolvency would play out for the world’s leading international forum is unclear. But staff around the world would go unpaid, halting food and security programs.
The U.N. can’t borrow money and its leadership has limited power to restructure operations or fire employees, whose salaries account for 70% of expenses. The U.N.’s 193 member states determine staffing and mandates, and have been more inclined to add initiatives than cut the organization’s roughly 40,000 programs.
When the U.N. comptroller tried to save $700,000 by closing one of the headquarters’ secure entrances, diplomats revolted at the inconvenience of a crisis largely manufactured in Washington; the gate reopened two days later.
The U.N.’s sprawl includes the New York-based secretariat and 15 specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization, the International Civil Aviation Organization and the International Telecommunication Union, which respectively coordinate responses to diseases like Ebola, ensure aircraft fly safely and standardize how phone networks interconnect. It also manages over 50,000 peacekeepers in conflict zones.
The funding deficit hits the U.N. as it is saddled with ever more governance challenges, from artificial intelligence and biosecurity to ocean mining and outer space. The countries with the most influence are delaying funding, the U.S. and China, both permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, where most nations get rotating seats but no veto.
U.N. finances are byzantine. The organization runs different budgets for its regular operations and its more costly peacekeeping endeavors, while the specialized agencies handle their own money and bureaucracies.
Assessments are based on the size of member economies, with U.S. contributions capped at 22% of the regular budget. China’s economic growth over the past decade has rocketed it into second place, to just above 20% from around 5%.
Unusual rules undermine the U.N.’s financial position: Funds unspent at year-end get credited back to member states based on what nations owe—whether or not they contributed.
Chronically late payments limit the time for the U.N. to allocate the funds; one year, China didn’t pay until Dec. 27. Credits are building up because of unspent money: $299 million for 2026, or over 9% of the budget, and an expected $400 million next year.
“We are trapped in a Kafkaesque cycle; expected to give back cash that does not exist,” the secretary-general wrote to members this year urging them to adjust the policy.
In line with its large cutbacks in foreign assistance, including the closing of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Trump administration has overhauled how it will provide “voluntary” assistance at the U.N.
At the U.N., the Trump administration has begun to channel aid money through a single department established to manage emergencies, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, earmarking $3.8 billion so far.
The U.S. remains the largest underwriter of humanitarian funding, but its allocation is down from more than $10 billion or more annually in recent years. The new strategy also puts stipulations on how and where the funds can be used, and raises questions about future direct U.S. support to specialized U.N. bodies such as the United Nations Children’s Fund.
“Individual U.N. agencies will need to adapt, shrink or die,” the State Department said in December when it announced the approach.
While U.S. support for U.N. work is a positive, the amounts remain unclear, said Jordie Hannum, senior director of U.S.-U.N. relations at the United Nations Foundation, which advocates for the body.
Contributions to humanitarian activities don’t address the U.S. arrears to the U.N.: some $2.037 billion owed for the regular budget plus $2.247 billion for peacekeeping.
U.S. Ambassador Mike Waltz has pledged a “substantial” U.N. budgetary payment but has conditioned the money on deeper cuts. A problem looms: Under U.N. rules, members lose voting rights in the General Assembly once their arrears top two years of assessed dues, a situation the U.S. could face as early as 2027.
Other traditional donors are likewise cutting funding to U.N. humanitarian programs that combat hunger and disease, driven by austerity efforts in the U.K. and Germany and rightward political shifts in Sweden and the Netherlands. Like the Trump administration, Argentina has exited agencies like the WHO.
“The U.S. is the epitome of the trend, but it’s not unique to the U.S.,” said Thibault Camelli, a former French diplomat now at New York University and an authority on U.N. budgeting.
China’s pressure on U.N. finances is more subtle, including through a body that controls the U.N. purse—the Advisory Committee on Administrative and Budgetary Questions.
At the U.N., Beijing’s diplomats often speak through a coalition of nations called the Group of 77, such as in May when it opposed a motion to reduce the pay of peacekeepers, many of whom are Chinese. A study published this year by a nongovernmental organization tracked how Beijing harnessed the G77 to lobby the budgetary committee in concert with Moscow to reduce spending on human rights. China provides minimal funding to U.N. humanitarian programs.
Historically, China paid its dues in the first several months of each year, but in 2022 began withholding final contributions until much later for what U.N. analysts view as leverage to promote political priorities.
“The U.S. isn’t paying its dues and over the past few years, China has been gaming the payment system,” said Hannum.
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