SUMMER READING: International Governmental Organizations (IGOs)

Hopefully, members of Congress relaxing beachside and poolside (as well as those still sweltering in the Washington, D.C. heat) remembered to put their sunscreen on. Prolonged exposure to UV radiation, after all, will make it downright painful to put that suit on once September rolls around. But not so fast, because according to one mysterious international agency, a key ingredient of sunscreen called titanium dioxide is “possibly carcinogenic”, despite “inadequate evidence in humans” being presented for analysis. The organization making this scary-sounding claim is the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a sub-agency of the World Health Organization (WHO). 

After the complete failure of the WHO to provide any meaningful or timely information to help the world deal with COVID-19, Americans now know just how much taxpayer money was paid to this fearmongering failing agency: more than $400 million per year. Well, hopefully not for too much longer, as President Trump recently kicked off a one-year withdrawal process from the corrupt, grossly negligent WHO. The WHO is just one of many bogus International Governmental Organizations (IGOs) that taxpayers pay for, yet receive little to no benefit from, and in many cases are downright hostile to American interests.

The WHO is just the tip of the fiscal iceberg for taxpayer-funded IGOs.  Other problematic IGOs include the European Union, International Monetary Fund, International Labour Organization, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank. For example, the OECD has been  spearheading a reckless global campaign to increase job-killing taxes on businesses across the globe. Heritage Foundation senior policy analyst Adam Michel notes, “The…[OECD’s]… projects on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) and digital taxation are providing legitimacy to the global campaign for higher business taxes. Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. Treasury was rightfully skeptical of the OECD process to rewrite the international tax regime. The Treasury is now actively participating in OECD discussions to abandon physical presence as a necessary precondition for paying taxes and to allocate a portion of digital corporate profits through a new formulary system, thus increasing global taxes on businesses.”

Unfortunately, many taxpayers are in the dark about how their hard-earned dollars are spent by the federal government in Washington, D.C. But there’s even less knowledge about how their incomes are distributed to IGOs around the world. According to Council on Foreign Relations scholars, “The U.S. government contributed just over $10 billion to the United Nations in 2018 [including sub-agencies such as the WHO…. This represents roughly one-fifth of the $50 billion the United States spends annually on foreign aid. By comparison, that is about what the government allocates annually to the U.S. Coast Guard.”

Some of this funding finds its way to niche organizations such as IARC, that use taxpayer dollars to promulgate dubious medical findings. Other contributions go toward IGOs’ general operating budgets, which fund lavish travel budgets for employees and dubious dealings with China. According to an April 2020 report by the Daily Caller News Foundation, “Eight percent of the WHO’s budget in 2018 went to travel expenses, while just 4% went to medical supplies and materials…WHO didn’t return an email seeking comment on whether the organization should have spent more on medical supplies, in light of the shortage that many countries are experiencing as a result of the coronavirus crisis.” This travel budget amounts to nearly $200 million or about $25,000 per employee. In 2017, the Associated Press reported, “After praising health workers in West Africa for their triumph over the lethal virus, [former WHO director-general Margaret] Chan spent the night in the top-tier presidential suite at the beach-side Palm Camayenne hotel. The suite, equipped with marble bathrooms and a dining room that seats eight, has an advertised price of 900 euros ($1,008) per night.” Unfortunately, stories of luxurious accommodation and unnecessarily expensive modes of travel are a dime-a-dozen.

While these stories have long inspired outrage among taxpayer advocacy organizations, the final straw came in 2020 as the coronavirus spread unabated. As TPA senior fellow Tim Andrews noted in a March article published by The Federalist, “the WHO has let funding priorities and the personal ambitions of its leadership get in the way of sound public policy…through all the CCP’s obfuscation and ensigning preventable deaths, the WHO consistently praised the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] for its ‘transparency’ and ‘leadership,’ saying its actions were ‘making us safer.’ To the incredulity of health professionals around the world when finally alerted to the seriousness of the threat in January, the WHO refused to declare it a public health emergency [until the end of the month].” The WHO has also kowtowed to Chinese attempts to exclude Taiwan from the coronavirus response effort, despite the island-nation developing an early, successful effort to contain the disease.

New York University scholars Yu-Jie Chen and Jerome Cohen note that “due to the PRC’s great-power status, including its seat as a permanent UN Security Council member, Beijing has been able to impose its ‘One China’ policy upon the world” at the expense of Taiwanese inclusion. That includes keeping Taiwan from WHO deliberations, even if that exclusion comes at the expense of public health.

TPA and IGO Watch have been sounding the alarm to key policymakers, who have kickstarted the process of US withdrawal from the WHO. By next July, the U.S. will officially leave the deeply dysfunctional organization. Lawmakers should embrace this decision and keep up the scrutiny on all the IGOs that U.S. taxpayers continue to fund. With enough determination, the U.S. will stick to its announced WHO withdrawal and also start to hold other global bureaucracies accountable. And maybe, just maybe, lounging lawmakers can finally put on sunscreen.