"The World Health Organization (WHO), the troubled United Nations health agency, has just elected a controversial new director-general. The choice should disturb taxpayers, members of Congress, and the Trump administration.
We'll soon hear condemnation of the administration's plan for steep cuts in funding of international organizations, as proposed by the White House's budget blueprint. Cuts to WHO will draw dire warnings about global pandemics and cries for America to do more.
Global public health is, indeed, critical to American interests at home and abroad, and the U.S. government is the largest contributor to WHO's approximately $2 billion budget. However, like other U.N. subsidiaries, WHO is plagued by persistent wasteful spending, utter disregard for transparency, pervasive incompetence, and failure to adhere to even basic democratic standards. None of these problems are new, but they are worsening, and the latest developments underscore the need for tough love in the form of responsible stewardship of our largesse.
The May 23 election of Ethiopian politician Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to head WHO is the latest evidence that reform won't come from WHO itself. Dr. Tedros, as he likes to be called (he has a Ph.D. in community health), is a leader of Ethiopia's brutal minority party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front, a wing of the ruling Marxist-rooted Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front. He served the violently repressive regime as minister of foreign affairs from 2012 to 2016, after a stint as health minister...
The AP obtained documents showing that WHO 'routinely has spent about $200 million a year on travel expenses, more than what it doles out to fight some of the biggest problems in public health, including AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined.'..."