A group of former United Nations officials, frustrated up with the organization’s inefficiencies, formed “DOGE-UN,” an investigative attempt to highlight waste.
The endeavor, similar to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), would culminate in an online report prior to the 2026 secretary-general nomination, with the expectation that the next leader will prioritize making the agency work more effectively.
“Why stop at this country’s federal agencies?” Hugh Dugan, a former National Security Council counsel on international organizations and a veteran member of the US mission to the United Nations, stated this.
“We need to centralize our understanding of our cash flow to and from the U.N. and the results we’d like to see from our participation in international organizations,” the reporter told Fox News Digital.
Dugan is working with a group of former presidents of the United Nations General Assembly who meet on a regular basis to discuss agency concerns. He has enlisted “insiders and outsiders who used to be insiders” to identify areas where the United Nations is unproductive in carrying out its mandate and where funds are being wasted.
“Unfortunately, the mindset there over the years prefers to look at outputs over outcomes,” Dugan told me. “Instead of outcomes, we measured how many meetings we had and how many pencils we purchased. For example, was there a potential to accelerate peacemaking in war zones, or to what extent are we reducing global hunger?
According to Dugan, his team would ask two questions: “Is the U.N. working?” and, “Is it working for us?”
The United Nations maintains an Office of Internal Oversight Services, but unlike other government organizations’ inspectors general, this office is internal rather than independent, according to Dugan.
A former high-ranking U.N. official was sentenced last month to repay the agency’s $59 million loss in transactions he struck with a British businessman who provided him interest-free loans, a Mercedes, and other presents for his sons.
“Usually, there is no consequence for bad behavior, and that’s a rare thing that they caught this one,” Dugan disclosed.
He recalled the United Nations’ oil-for-food scheme, in which former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein stole more than $10 billion through illegal oil smuggling, according to a 2004 CIA investigation.
“I’m hoping this will serve to really crack open this dark chamber there that seems to just perpetuate itself on the goodwill of the charter, but actual performance is not serving the peoples of the world.”
The United Nations was founded after World War II with the purpose of promoting worldwide peace, development, and respect for human rights. The United States accounts for around one-third of its budget. President Biden boosted the United States’ financial contributions to the United Nations and its sister agencies, taking them from $11.6 billion in 2020 to $18.1 billion in 2022.
The United States gave over three times as much that year as the next-highest contributions, Germany ($6.8 billion) and Japan ($2.7 billion).
That amount of money allows a new administration the flexibility to withhold payments from the United Nations if its global goals do not line with those of the United States, as some Republicans have previously advocated.
President-elect Trump will be in office when the international body elects its next secretary-general in 2026, and the United States will have the right to veto any candidate.
The United Nations is particularly reliant on the United States for worldwide aid programs.
In 2022, it made about half of all contributions to the World Food Programme and almost one-third 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 International Organization for Migration.
Dugan stated that his study would also highlight methods to prevent China from “hijacking” the United Nations’ “deep state” to redirect funds to its own Belt and Road Initiative.
From 2009 to 2021, China’s number of UN employees more than doubled to approximately 15,000 people.
Musk and Ramaswamy described their DOGE work in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on November 20: “The DOGE Plan to Reform Government.”
They stated that they will prioritize driving change through “executive action based on existing legislation” above “passing new laws.” They would work to repeal regulations proposed by government agencies that were never passed by Congress, aided by newfound authority under the Supreme Court’s West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022), which stated that agencies cannot impose regulations that address major economic or policy issues unless Congress authorizes them to do so.
