Overview

Withdrawal from the World Health Organization

In the order, Trump cited the WHO's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, its failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from inappropriate political influence by WHO member states. He also referenced U.S. funding obligations, which account for 22 percent of WHO's assessed dues. The administration framed the withdrawal as a correction of an unfair financial arrangement and a response to institutional failure.

The order also carried a broader political message about the Trump administration's view of the U.S. role in the world: the U.S. will go it alone if others do not align with its values. The WHO withdrawal was one of several early actions — alongside withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and curtailment of foreign aid — signaling a systematic retreat from multilateral commitments.

The legal mechanics of withdrawal were not straightforward. The WHO's charter does not contain a withdrawal clause, but when agreeing to join decades ago, the U.S. Congress included an option to leave as long as the U.S. gave a year's notice and met its financial obligations by paying dues in full. Under the 1948 congressional resolution that enabled U.S. membership, withdrawal required not only a one-year advance notice but also full payment of outstanding assessed contributions. Reuters reported that the U.S. was expected to settle around $260 million in unpaid mandatory dues for the 2024–2025 budget cycle before departure.

During the yearlong process, the U.S. stopped funding the WHO, withdrew all personnel from the WHO, and began pivoting activities previously conducted with WHO to direct bilateral engagements with other countries and organizations. Washington also recalled all U.S. government personnel working with the WHO and ordered them to cease participating in negotiations on a WHO-led global pandemic treaty. At the World Health Assembly in May 2025, the U.S. did not sign the WHO Pandemic Agreement intended to foster international collaboration after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Significance and Impact

The U.S. has historically been the largest funder of the WHO, through both its assessed and voluntary contributions, making the departure poised to disrupt both global and domestic health. In recent years, U.S. contributions accounted for roughly 15 to 18 percent of WHO revenue, supporting outbreak response, vaccine delivery, HIV and malaria programs, and global health emergency operations. The sudden loss of that funding set off an immediate institutional crisis at the WHO.

The WHO headquarters in Geneva was in upheaval throughout 2025 as the organization worked to rearrange its budget to address roughly a 25 percent cut. The withdrawal unleashed mass layoffs and restructuring. The WHO is slashing its staff by around a quarter — aiming to shed about 2,371 staff by mid-2026 — with ripple effects across the organization's global operations. This has affected WHO's ability to respond to health emergencies around the world.

U.S. funding had covered 95 percent of the WHO's tuberculosis work in Europe and 60 percent of its TB efforts in Africa, the Western Pacific, and its Geneva headquarters. As a result of the withdrawal, WHO responses in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Sudan were placed at risk, along with its polio-eradication and HIV programs.

While WHO policies are determined by consensus among all member states, the absence of the U.S. creates room for other countries to exert more influence. Countries like India, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China are stepping in to fill some of the void, which has consequences for who is setting priorities and who has influence in guiding WHO policy and guidelines. Shortly after the formal exit, the Trump administration proposed to spend $2 billion per year to duplicate the kinds of global disease surveillance systems it had helped build and previously accessed at a fraction of the cost through its WHO membership.

Reactions and Debate

The reaction from the international public health community was sharply critical. The WHO renewed its call for the United States to reverse the decision, warning of potential global health consequences, and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told an executive board meeting that the agency regretted the U.S. decision and hoped Washington would reconsider. WHO member states subsequently discussed cutting part of its program budget by $400 million in light of the loss of its biggest government funder.

Independent health experts were equally alarmed. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, called the withdrawal "one of the most penny-wise and billion-dollar-foolish moves." The U.S. was already disengaging before formal withdrawal — preventing CDC employees from co-authoring papers with WHO staff — disrupting mechanisms for addressing transnational health threats and weakening the WHO's financial stability and operational capacity, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

The withdrawal did not occur in isolation. By July 2025, the Trump administration had formally dismantled USAID and cancelled funding for more than 80 percent of its programs. Critics argued that the combination of the WHO withdrawal, the dismantling of USAID, and concurrent cuts to the CDC compounded one another into a systemic rollback of U.S. global health engagement. The restricted WHO budget potentially means fewer resources to support the health of low- and middle-income countries, which rely on the WHO for financial support and guidance on health policies, and as the workforce shrinks, technical expertise becomes less available.

The Trump administration and its supporters, by contrast, framed the withdrawal as a long-overdue correction. HHS described the decision as driven by profound failures in the WHO's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, its persistent refusal to implement necessary reforms, and its lack of accountability, transparency, and independence. The administration's position reflected a broader skepticism of multilateral institutions that characterized its foreign policy orientation, and it found support among conservatives who had long argued that the United States overpaid for international organizations that did not serve American interests.

Following Trump's lead, Argentina announced in February 2025 that it would also withdraw from the WHO, citing profound differences with the organization relating to the management of public health issues. No other major economies followed, however, and most U.S. allies publicly expressed concern about the decision's consequences for global health governance.

Outlook

As of August 2026, the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO is complete and its consequences are accumulating. The WHO has restructured, shed a substantial portion of its staff, and is operating under a reduced budget. The withdrawal forced the WHO Director-General to revise the organization's budget to rely less heavily on dominant donors; as of early 2026, the organization had roughly 75 percent of its needed budget covered, with 25 percent remaining to be raised.

Since the U.S. has been the largest funder of the WHO, the withdrawal has forced the organization to revise its budget and rely less heavily on dominant donors. Japan has increased its commitments to multilateral health institutions, and Canada has reaffirmed its role as a core immunization donor to Gavi, pledging $500 million for the 2026–2030 strategic period. These commitments, while significant, fall well short of replacing the scale of U.S. contributions.

In January 2026, the United States also announced its withdrawal from 66 international organizations, including 31 entities within the United Nations system, situating the WHO departure within a much broader pattern of institutional disengagement. The question of whether a future administration could restore U.S. membership — and under what conditions — remains unresolved, as does the deeper question of whether the international health architecture can be sustainably reconfigured around the absence of its historically largest patron. The WHO withdrawal has, at minimum, accelerated a structural rethinking of how global health is financed and governed — a reckoning whose full consequences will unfold over years, not months.