WHO Funding Cuts Coming This Week, White House Insider Says

Late last week President Donald Trump suggested that he would be considering placing a funding hold on the World Health Organization (WHO) but wanted to discuss it with officials over the weekend. An individual with inside knowledge of these conversations said that cuts to the group will likely be announced this week.

An anonymous Trump administration official who spoke with the Washington Post said that “the money is not guaranteed if WHO does not do its mission.”

During a press conference on Friday, Trump reiterated allegations that WHO officials had acted improperly during the early weeks of the coronavirus outbreak and had coordinated with the Chinese government to misrepresent the seriousness of the disease to the rest of the world.

“They are very, very China-centric. China always seems to get the better of the argument and I don’t like that, I really don’t like that. I don’t think that’s appropriate. I don’t think it’s fair to the American people,” Trump said.

Officially, Trump has not yet committed to many any cuts to the United States’ WHO funding.

As the anonymous official explained, the Trump administration’s issue with the WHO is not specifically with the organization itself. “The system has good people. It’s about comments made from the leadership which went beyond what I told their own staff wanted to say,” the insider said.

The United States is the single largest financial contributor to the WHO, most recently allocating $893 million over a two-year period to the United Nations group.

Several Republican lawmakers have also echoed Trump’s charges against the WHO and China. Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., have been among those leading this charge in Congress, recently announcing the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s intent to open an investigation into the WHO’s actions in the early days of the pandemic.

“The bottom line is the WHO’s actions and China’s actions killed a lot of people,” Scott claimed.

Last week, WHO head Tedros Ghebreyesus fired back at these allegations, asking for world leaders to not “politicize the virus” as doing so would lead to “many more body bags.”