Trump Re-Withdraws U.S. From UNESCO Eight Years After Withdrawing The First Time, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That An Agency Devoted To Literacy And Holocaust Education Was Once Again Receiving American Membership
WASHINGTON. The U.S. State Department on Tuesday confirmed that the United States would formally withdraw from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization for the second time in eight years, resolving a long-standing concern that an international agency devoted to literacy, World Heritage preservation, Holocaust education, and the coordination of global tsunami warning systems was once again receiving American membership.
The withdrawal, set to take effect on December 31, 2026, undoes a 2023 decision by the Biden administration to rejoin UNESCO after the Trump administration first pulled the United States out of the body in October 2017. State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce cited UNESCO's "advancement of divisive social and cultural causes" and its "globalist, ideological agenda," language officials confirmed had been substantially recycled from the announcement materials prepared eight years earlier. American funding for UNESCO has, in practice, been suspended since 2011 over the body's recognition of Palestine as a member state, meaning Tuesday's action withdrew from financial obligations the United States had already declined to meet for fourteen years.
"This decision was not taken lightly," said a senior administration official, who declined to specify either the considerations weighed or any facts about UNESCO that had changed since the United States rejoined the body two years earlier. UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay confirmed that the American share of the agency's budget, roughly 8 percent, would now be backfilled in part by increased contributions from the People's Republic of China, which has used the period of recent U.S. engagement to expand its coordinating role on standards governing global higher education, archival preservation, and the use of artificial intelligence in classrooms.
UNESCO administers the World Heritage program, which oversees the designation and protection of 1,223 cultural and natural sites in 168 countries, including 26 located inside the United States. The organization also coordinates Holocaust remembrance education in roughly 80 countries, runs literacy programs serving an estimated 770 million adults who cannot read, and operates the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, whose Pacific tsunami warning network alerts American coastal residents to seismic events originating off the coasts of foreign countries. State Department officials, asked which of these functions had become objectionable in the interval since 2023, did not respond to inquiries.
In a separate written statement, the President described UNESCO as "a disgrace" and "totally biased against Israel," a characterization administration officials clarified covered the body's 2011 admission of Palestine as a member state, the 2017 designation of Hebron's Old City as a Palestinian heritage site, and a variety of other organizational positions taken before the agency's current leadership assumed office. The statement did not address UNESCO's designation, since 1979, of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum as a World Heritage Site, or the agency's coordination of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, which the United States co-sponsored at the U.N. General Assembly every year from 2005 until Tuesday afternoon.
The withdrawal was the third by the United States from a U.N. specialized agency since January 2025, following exits from the World Health Organization and the U.N. Human Rights Council. Administration officials confirmed that additional withdrawals from the U.N. system were being studied on a rolling basis, and that the criteria for selection turned principally on the political utility of the announcement rather than on any documented finding about the underlying agency.
At press time, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum continued to qualify for World Heritage protections under the international convention the United States had drafted in 1972.