Exclusive: Fed up with its inefficiency, a group of former United Nations employees have launched DOGE-UN, an investigative effort to highlight waste at the world body.
The initiative is aimed at ensuring that the next leader prioritizes the efficient running of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), similar to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), by 2026. It will culminate in the online production of a report ahead of the election of the Secretary-General.
“Why would you stop at a federal agency in this country?” said Hugh Dugan, a longtime member of the U.S. mission to the United Nations and former National Security Council adviser on international organizations.
“We need to centralize our understanding of our cash flows to and from the United Nations and the outcomes we want to get from our participation in international organizations,” he told Fox News Digital.
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Mr. Dugan works with a group of former United Nations General Assembly presidents who meet regularly to discuss agency issues. He said the United Nations has hired “insiders and outsiders who were once insiders” to help identify where the United Nations is inefficient in its mission and where funds are being wasted.
“Unfortunately, the long-standing local mindset has tended to be more about outcomes than results,” Dugan said. “It's not about the outcome, but how many meetings we held, how many pencils did we buy? Was there an opportunity to make peace faster in a conflict, or how much could we have improved the world's hunger rate? ”
United Nations Headquarters in New York City (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Dugan said his team plans to ask two questions: “Is the United Nations working?” “Will it work for us?”
The United Nations has Internal monitoring service roomBut unlike other government agencies' inspector generals, the office is internal and not independent, Dugan noted.
Last month, a former U.N. official was ordered to pay back $59 million the United Nations lost in a deal with a British businessman who gave his sons interest-free loans and gifts including a Mercedes.
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“Normally there are no consequences for bad behavior, but it's unusual for something like this to be caught,” Dugan said.
He recalled the United Nations' Oil for Food program, in which former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein siphoned off more than $10 billion through illegal oil smuggling, according to a 2004 CIA report.
“I hope this will really help break through this dark room that seems to persist only on the goodwill of the Charter, but the actual performance is not helping the people of the world.”
The United Nations, founded after World War II with the mission of promoting peace, development, and respect for human rights worldwide, relies on the United States for about one-third of its budget. President Biden increased U.S. financial contributions to the United Nations and its sister agencies, increasing from $11.6 billion in 2020 to $18.1 billion in 2022.
In the same year, the United States contributed about three times as much as the next largest donor, Germany, with $6.8 billion, and Japan with $2.7 billion.
Some Republicans believe this amount of funding will give the new administration leeway to withhold funding to the U.N. if the U.N.'s global interests do not align with U.S. interests. We are already pushing ahead.
President-elect Trump is international organization The next Secretary-General will be selected in 2026, and the United States will have veto power over any nominee.
Delegates attending a meeting of the United Nations Security Council.
Biden significantly increased the United Nations budget during his presidency. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
The United Nations is particularly dependent on the United States for global aid programs.
In 2022, half of all contributions to the World Food Program will be allocated to approximately half of all contributions to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. provided a third. International Organization for Migration.
Mr Dugan said the report would also highlight ways to prevent China from “hijacking” the UN's “deep state” to divert aid to its own Belt and Road Initiative.
China doubled the number of its nationals employed at the United Nations from 2009 to 2021 to nearly 15,000.
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Mr. Musk and Mr. Ramaswamy outlined their approach to DOGE in a November 20 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “DOGE's Plan to Reform Government.''
They said they would focus on driving change through “administrative action based on existing laws” rather than “passing new laws.” They will seek to rescind regulations introduced by government agencies that did not pass Congress, backed by new authority granted in the Supreme Court's West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022). The ruling states that government agencies cannot impose regulations that concern serious economic or policy questions unless Congress authorizes them to do so.
