The U.S. suspended all payments to the globalist World Trade Organization (WTO) on Thursday as the Trump administration strives to reduce government spending.
The move is part of the new administration’s realignment of U.S. taxpayer dollars being handed to institutions it sees as at odds with his “America First” economic policies.
It plans to quit some, such as the World Health Organization, and has cut adrift others as part of a broad review of federal spending, Reuters reports.
House conservatives urged the House Foreign Affairs Committee to take up two bills that would defund and withdraw from the World Health Organization (W.H.O.), Breitbart News has learned exclusively. https://t.co/BEUnxjDeZj
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) May 24, 2023
The Geneva-based trade watchdog had an annual budget of $232.06 million in 2024. The United States was due to contribute about 11 percent of that based on a fees system that is proportionate to its share of global trade, according to public WTO documents as cited by Reuters.
That contribution is now in doubt.
Under WTO rules, any member that fails to pay its dues after more than a year is subject to “administrative measures” – a series of punitive steps that get progressively stricter the longer the fees go unpaid.
The country is now classified as being in the first of three such categories, two of the trade sources confirmed to Reuters, which means its representatives can no longer preside over WTO bodies nor receive formal documentation.
The WTO self-defines its entire mission as overseeing global trade while answering to nobody but itself.
