The United States will withdraw from dozens of international organizations, citing threats to American sovereignty, freedom, and general prosperity. An executive order signed by US President Donald Trump on Wednesday suspended American support for 66 organizations, agencies, and commissions, including the United Nations’ population agency and the UN treaty that establishes international climate negotiations.
The move comes as the administration reviews US participation in and funding for all international organizations. ‘The Trump Administration has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity,’ Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.
Many of the affected bodies are UN-related agencies, commissions, and advisory panels focusing on climate, labour, migration, and other issues that the Trump administration has categorized as serving diversity-driven and ‘woke’ initiatives. Beyond UN-affiliated institutions, Washington is also withdrawing from the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, and the Global Counterterrorism Forum.
The withdrawals represent another blow to the diminishing liberal world order and the technocratic multilateralism that has dominated global governance since the fall of the Soviet Union. After taking office on 20 January 2025, Trump ordered the United States to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO), followed by UNRWA, the UN Human Rights Council, and UNESCO. In parallel, Trump instructed the State Department to review projects administered by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), an organization widely accused of foreign interference in countries unwilling to commit themselves to a globalist–progressive agenda. USAID was shut down in mid-2025.
Following the Trump administration’s withdrawals in January 2025, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—long a vocal critic of the liberal world order’s institutional framework—said that ‘it is time for Hungary to review what we are doing in international organizations’ that the United States had left or sanctioned. At the same time as the withdrawals, Trump imposed sanctions on prosecutors of the International Criminal Court. In April 2025, Hungary officially withdrew from the ICC.
Despite the scale of the shift, Trump administration officials say they continue to see value in the United Nations and intend to redirect taxpayer funds towards expanding American influence in standard-setting UN bodies where strategic competition with China is intensifying, such as the International Telecommunication Union, the International Maritime Organization, and the International Labour Organization.
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