The United States made its withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO) official on Thursday (22), a decision that comes from an executive order signed in 2025 by the country’s president, Donald Trump.
On the day of his return to the White House, January 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order with a formal warning of US withdrawal from the United Nations agency specializing in health.
Trump, who had already started the process in his first term (2017-2021) to remove the country from the organization, alleging mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic, again insisted on this point in the executive order he signed last year.
In the text, he also criticized the role of the WHO in “other global health crises”, its inability to implement reforms and “its lack of independence in the face of undue political influence” from other member countries, a direct reference to China.
An official from the American Department of Health highlighted this Thursday to the press that his country paid 25% of the WHO’s budget, that the entity never had an American director general and that the agency itself tried to prevent other countries from paying more quotas due to the great burden that Washington was bearing.
“There are numerous examples, both recent and historical, of the WHO’s shortcomings, but the bottom line is that we paid them, we trusted them, and they failed and took no responsibility for their failure,” the official added.
“We will continue to work with countries and ministries of Health, as we have done for decades, and we will continue to develop these relationships and use them in a way that is mutually beneficial and that respects the sovereignty of both our country and that of other countries,” he said.
When the WHO was founded in 1948, the USA joined the entity through a joint Congressional resolution in which it was stipulated that the country, unlike other members, reserved the right to withdraw from the agency.
Another American government official stated yesterday, in relation to the quotas that Washington has to pay, that the terms of the 1948 resolution do not include anything that, as a condition for leaving the WHO, “any payment must be made before the withdrawal becomes effective”.
The Trump administration has insisted on several occasions that it has no intention of paying its quotas corresponding to the 2024-2025 period, which are estimated to be US$260 million to US$280 million.
