United States Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz declared this week that the Trump administration is only at the beginning of a massive overhaul of the UN system. Walking outside UN headquarters in Manhattan alongside reform envoy Jeff Bartos, Waltz criticized the institution as bloated and inefficient while celebrating more than one billion dollars in early spending cuts.
In a video posted Tuesday on X, Waltz said President Donald Trump believes the United Nations still has significant potential, but has allowed wasteful practices to pile up for decades. The ambassador insisted that Washington is now forcing long delayed reforms and applying what he called his version of the Trump style cost cutting approach often referred to as DOGEing.
Standing in front of the UN complex, Waltz gestured toward the building and said the administration has already slashed the organization’s spending. He noted that the United States pays roughly a quarter of the UN’s total budget. According to Waltz, the White House has already pushed through a 25 percent reduction in global peacekeeping costs and a 15 percent cut to the UN’s regular operating budget. He added that the next target is a reduction of more than two thousand six hundred staff positions across the organization.
Waltz then introduced Bartos, President Trump’s chosen representative for UN management and reform. Bartos described the mission as simple: eliminate unnecessary spending and demand real accountability.
Bartos said that after just two months in office, the reform team has saved more than one billion dollars in UN expenditures. He pointed to several examples of what he views as irresponsible spending.
The UN spent roughly 360 million dollars last year on meetings, conferences and reports, and more than 70 million dollars on tuition reimbursement for its employees. Bartos said these expenses show how deeply embedded the waste has become.
He also linked the financial mismanagement to long standing political issues inside the UN. Bartos said the organization has demonstrated an unacceptable pattern of hostility toward both the United States and Israel for nearly eighty years. According to him, that era is now coming to an end under Trump’s leadership.
Bartos added that many nations, both developing and developed, have privately expressed support for the reform agenda. He said he expects the next several years to reshape the UN into an institution that is more efficient, more disciplined and more aligned with its original purpose.
Waltz concluded the video by stressing that the goal is not to abandon the United Nations but to force it to operate as intended. He said the world needs a central place where diplomacy can function, but the institution cannot continue growing into an oversized bureaucracy. Waltz repeated that he intends to clean up the organization and that President Trump will lead the effort.
DOGEing, the term Waltz referenced, originated with the former Department of Government Efficiency and is now used as shorthand for rooting out fraud, excess spending and redundant programs. The Trump administration is applying that approach to UN agencies, staffing levels and compensation packages.
Earlier this month, Bartos spoke at a UN common system meeting and warned that the institution spends nearly sixteen billion dollars each year on staff salaries across its various bodies. He said UN employees often earn more than civil servants in any member state, including the United States, and that additional benefits only increase the financial burden. Analysts estimate that these inflated compensation packages cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
The new video from Waltz also expands on an earlier interview he gave to Breitbart News from inside the General Assembly chamber. In that interview, Waltz said President Trump is withholding portions of United States funding until the UN produces verifiable cuts.
Waltz claimed that Secretary General António Guterres has already agreed, under American pressure, to reduce his own internal budget by 15 percent, cut overall staff by 18 percent and reduce peacekeeping expenses by 25 percent.
Waltz previewed this aggressive approach during his Senate confirmation hearing, where he promised to make the UN effective again and condemned what he described as decades of political bias, especially against Israel. He also pledged to confront Chinese influence and overhaul peacekeeping missions that he argued have delivered few results despite dramatic increases in UN revenue.
With Bartos now joining him inside the system and Trump back in the White House, Waltz said the administration is launching the first phase of a multi year restructuring focused on eliminating unnecessary bureaucracy rather than reducing support for American workers or vital programs.
In the closing moments of the video, Waltz summarized the entire reform effort in one sentence as he walked away from the UN complex:
“We are going to clean house, and this is only the beginning.”