Trump Withdraws U.S. From UN Human Rights Council And Defunds Agency Feeding Palestinian Children, Resolving Two Long-Standing Obligations Of Conscience In Single Executive Order

The Filing

WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order withdrawing the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council, suspending all funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and initiating a review of broader U.S. participation in U.N. bodies, completing two diplomatic exits widely identified by aides as having weighed on the President since the administration's first morning.

The Human Rights Council, established by the U.N. General Assembly in 2006 to monitor and respond to violations of human rights worldwide, had during the first Trump term published findings critical of the administration's family separation policy, its handling of police violence in U.S. cities, and its application of the death penalty. The withdrawal, which the Trump administration had also executed in 2018 and the Biden administration had reversed in 2021, restores a U.S. posture of nonparticipation in international human rights review, a posture officials described as preserving American sovereignty against any future finding that American conduct violates human rights.

The simultaneous defunding of UNRWA, the U.N. agency that provides food, education, and primary medical care to roughly six million Palestinian refugees across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, freezes approximately $300 million in annual U.S. contributions previously routed through the State Department. The administration cited unresolved 2024 Israeli allegations that a small number of UNRWA employees had ties to Hamas, an assertion partially supported by an independent U.N. review that found no evidence of systemic infiltration but recommended additional vetting. Officials confirmed the President had reviewed neither the allegations nor the review.

"It is time the United States stopped paying for things that do not benefit the United States," Mr. Trump said in remarks delivered from the Oval Office, where he was flanked by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The President added, in a separate exchange with reporters, that he had been told UNRWA "schools teach hate" and that the Human Rights Council "is run by countries that hate America," neither of which administration officials would specify on the record.

The withdrawal places the United States in a smaller caucus of nations that decline to sit on the U.N. Human Rights Council, alongside Israel, which has never joined. The UNRWA defunding, by contrast, makes the United States the sole industrialized economy to terminate contributions to the agency, the funding gap from which European officials privately confirmed they were unprepared and largely unwilling to backfill.

At press time, the President was reviewing whether the United Nations itself might be the next institution from which the United States could productively withdraw.

Who Benefits

§President Donald J. Trump, who consolidates support among the pro-Netanyahu donor class and delivers an additional concrete deliverable on the narrow set of foreign policy positions he treats as personal.
§The Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose objection to UNRWA's continued operation, longstanding before the October 2023 Hamas attack, becomes the operative U.S. position, and whose conduct in Gaza is now reviewable by one fewer multilateral body in which the United States participates.
§Iran, Russia, China, Cuba, and Venezuela, all of which have at points been the subject of Human Rights Council resolutions and which now share the diplomatic novelty of a major democracy declining to sit on the body.
§Miriam Adelson and donors aligned with hardline Israel policy, who had publicly identified both moves as priorities and who committed approximately $100 million to the 2024 Trump campaign.
§The administration's multilateral-withdrawal faction, who add UNHRC and UNRWA to a growing tally that already included, in just the second term's opening weeks, the Paris Climate Accord, the World Health Organization, and a pending review of UNESCO.

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