President Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from dozens of international organizations, including U.N. commissions and major bodies set up to tackle climate change.
An executive order posted Wednesday evening said the U.S. would withdraw from and end funding to 66 international groups and agencies, calling them “contrary to the interests of the United States.”
The list includes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The changes will see the U.S. ending its participation and cutting all funding to the affected entities, Trump said.
In a post on X on Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the 66 listed organizations as “anti-American, useless, or wasteful,” adding that the government was conducting a review of additional international groups.
“These withdrawals keep a key promise President Trump made to Americans – we will stop subsidizing globalist bureaucrats who act against our interests,” Rubio said.
On the White House list of organizations the U.S. is pulling out of are 31 United Nations bodies, several of which are involved in protecting vulnerable groups during armed conflicts, including the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict.
Trump and his allies have long been critical of the United Nations, other international organizations and multilateral agreements. The executive order deepens the administration’s withdrawal from international climate diplomacy. It also includes the U.S. exit from the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, a treaty aimed at stabilizing greenhouse-gas concentrations and requiring member states to submit annual inventories of their emissions.
Last year, Trump for the second time pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement—the world’s most significant effort to curb rising global temperatures—and chose not to send a delegation to the COP30 climate summit in Brazil.
