From Great Lakes Parasites to Martian Microbes: Where US Multilateral Funding Survived, and Didn't, in FY25

The Great Lakes Fisheries Commission helps combat invasive, parasitic sea lampreys that threaten native fish populations (and thus fisheries)—and look like the stuff of nightmares. Some good news for the lamprey-phobes among us is that US contributions to the Commission continued at about the same level as in previous years into FY 2025. The bad news is that many other organizations supporting other vital forms of international cooperation, often as little known as the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission, were not so lucky.

Sea lampreys (Allie Weill, USGS)

Over the years, President Trump has made no secret of his skepticism toward multilateralism. As his second administration has leveled substantial cuts to foreign aid writ large, many multilateral organizations have seen their US contributions fall precipitously—in many cases to zero.

According to a report recently published by the State Department, US contributions to international organizations fell from $19.5 billion in FY24 to $8.6 billion in FY25. And the number of entities receiving any money fell from 189 to 121. Admittedly, that’s still a lot of organizations. And some of those cut are relatively small political coordination bodies that wouldn’t be categorized as foreign aid. Meanwhile, the State Department’s report leaves out a large share of funding managed by the Treasury Department and specifically excludes shareholding commitments and pledges to the World Bank (outside of select managed trust funds or financial intermediary funds) or the regional development banks.

Still, a number of development and humanitarian organizations took significant hits. A few of the largest account for a sizeable share of total funding each year, with the World Food Programme consistently topping the list, trailed by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Boasting the largest contributions in recent years, these organizations also saw the biggest cuts in FY25. While some downward trend may have been inevitable after funding boosts in response to COVID-19 and Russia’s war in Ukraine, the reductions were still substantial.

Table 1: International organizations that saw the largest funding reductions in FY25 compared to FY21–24 average

The second Trump administration’s relationship with the UN system, as well as other multilaterals, has grown more complicated since USAID was shuttered. Administration officials continue to find fault with the UN system, but the State Department has still channeled considerable aid through “global awards” to a number of UN organizations—relying, in particular, on UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs to coordinate substantial humanitarian support. Just this Friday, the UN officially appointed Luke Lindberg, President Trump’s pick, to take the helm of the World Food Programme—bolstering the massive food aid organization’s standing. Other multilateral organizations have also found favor: as the State Department moves to transition responsibility for global health services to country governments, it has looked to the Global Fund for its expertise and procurement platform.

On the other hand, the State Department announced earlier this year US withdrawal from organizations it didn’t see as aligned with US interests or, in some instances, simply weren’t priorities. But according to the latest report, eight of those appear to have received some FY25 funding (though funding may have been committed in the final months of the Biden administration). And the organizations from which the US withdrew accounted for just 5 percent of US reported contributions to international organizations in FY24 (down to 2.6 percent in FY25).

Outside of those who have at one time been employed by State’s Bureau of International Organizations, we suspect few could explain the operations of some of the smaller entities on the list. But while they may be underappreciated, many are hard to rule out as unimportant.

Among those zeroed out in FY25 is the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), down from $25 million the year before. While perhaps caught up in the catch-anything-related-to-climate net, the WMO plays a pivotal role in coordinating global weather forecasting, standardizing observation techniques, data collection and coding, and sharing that data and forecast model output. It also guarantees a minimum level of surface and air observations in each country. All of that makes forecasting more accurate worldwide. Given that forecasting is associated with many billions of dollars in savings, this seems a good deal.

A lot of the small, zeroed-out organizations typically receive just thousands of dollars a year but produce valuable global or even solar system goods. The International Hydrographic Organization, for example,sets global standards for nautical charts and depth surveys so that electronic chart systems from any country can understand the charts produced in any other. Given how much moves by sea, this seems well worth a small annual investment. The Committee on Space Research, also zeroed out, maintains the planetary protection policy—the rules on sterilizing spacecraft so that we don’t infect Mars or Europa.

Among the mid-sized organizations slashed is the Montreal Protocol Multilateral Fund, created under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan to fight ozone-depleting substances. Critics suggest that since the 2016 Kigali Amendment, it has become a climate fund. Still, it is the original treaty financing mechanism, that brought developing countries into the ozone agreement, and US manufacturers dominate production in hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) alternatives—an example of multilateral support benefiting the US economy.

Cuts in support for UN peacekeeping may not be quite as bad as the headline figures suggest, since some reductions reflect operations that are winding down, including UNAMID (Darfur), MINUSMA (Mali), and UNIFIL (Lebanon). But others appear to be shrinking due in part to US pressure, including MINUSCA (Central African Republic) and UNMISS (South Sudan). And in some cases, the US really may just be failing to pay up, including the UN Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS), which provides the logistics for the African Union force fighting al-Shabaab.

Good stewardship of taxpayer dollars matters, but funding for many of these amounts to a rounding error on the Pentagon’s balance sheet. And in an increasingly connected world, investing in coordination and agreement leaves us—along with our ozone, Great Lakes fish, and consumer goods—far better off than trying to scrape by without it.