President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations is vowing to force a massive reform at the global agency, pledging to slim it down through privatization and create more accountability in the wake of revelations that one of its relief agencies in Gaza funded employees who participated in the 2023 terrorist attack in 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 in a wide-ranging interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show that focused on ending abuses and fraud in American foreign aid.
“What President Trump has done with NATO, we’re looking to do to the United Nations,” he added.
Waltz sharply criticized the Biden administration for turning a blind eye to fraud across America’s multibillion foreign aid system and specifically for re-funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) despite evidence of close ties to the terror group Hamas.
Trump ended funding for UNRWA after taking office in 2025, and the USAID inspector general revealed last month that more than 100 workers funded by UNRWA have been identified as having participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities in Israel.
Waltz said those revelations are a wakeup call for the world that the U.N. is not serving its charter, and the Trump administration has already forced significant changes in recent months.
“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. We’re going to get more of our aid dollars,” he 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.”
Waltz said the next round of reforms that the U.S. will force as the largest contributor to the U.N. will be modeled after Trump’s effort to make European allies pick up a greater share of the NATO burden.
“The American people are generous people when it comes to tsunamis or earthquakes, 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.”
“I think people rightly ask why we’re even involved at all. I say two things. Number one, you need one place in the world where everyone can talk, and if we just walk out, 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 added. “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. I think that’s something that’s in line with the president’s America First foreign policy.”
Waltz succinctly summarized Trump’s policy toward the U.N.
“So, diplomacy first, words before bullets, and burden sharing are two of the reasons we’re still trying to keep this place up. But ultimately, 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 during the show on Thursday that the U.S. should continue to cut funding for the U.N., particularly as it relates to USAID funding, which has already seen cuts under the Trump administration.
Hellbound and Down 