Geneva (AFP) – The World Trade Organization and the International Labour Organization told AFP on Thursday that they no longer figured among entities targeted in the White House’s latest round of foreign aid cuts. US President Donald Trump’s Republican administration announced last Friday that it was cancelling $4.9 billion of congressionally-approved foreign aid, sparking outrage among Democrats.
In a memo detailing the cuts, the administration said it was “committed to getting America’s fiscal house in order by cutting government spending that is woke, weaponised, and wasteful.” Trump, who has already effectively dismantled USAID — the world’s largest humanitarian aid agency — since taking office again in January, listed a number of international organisations among the targeted entities. The list originally included $107 million in cuts to ILO funding and another $29 million in slashed funding to the WTO.
But by Wednesday, the WTO had disappeared from the list, and on Thursday the ILO had also vanished. “We are aware of the removal of the International Labour Organization from a US administration memo released on 29 August,” the agency told AFP. “We are seeking more information on what this latest development means for the ILO.” The WTO also confirmed to AFP that it was “not on the funding cut list any more.”
There was no immediate explanation for why the two Geneva-based organisations had been quietly removed from the official White House document. The UN labour agency told AFP earlier this week that after Trump’s earlier executive orders slashing foreign funding, “the majority of ILO projects funded by the USA were given closure orders.”
Of the 229 ILO staff who had been working on projects funded by Washington, 190 initially received a pink slip, but in the end more than half of them were reassigned to other projects, a spokeswoman said. The United States remains the largest contributor to the WTO’s budget, pitching in 23 million Swiss francs ($28.5 million) this year, or 11.4 percent of the total. US backing had meanwhile covered 22 percent of the ILO’s regular budget. But Washington has so far not paid its contributions for 2024 or 2025 to either organisation, with such delays quite common among member countries.
© 2024 AFP
