How the Trump Administration Is Moving Away From Key UN Initiatives

News Analysis

President Donald Trump during last week’s address to the U.N. General Assembly expressed sharp criticism of the 80-year-old international organization.

In his address, he told the leaders of member states that the organization had failed to contribute to peace deals in recent years.

“I ended seven wars, dealt with the leaders of each and every one of these countries, and never even received a phone call from the United Nations offering to help in finalizing the deal,” he said.

“All they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter and then never follow that letter up. It’s empty words, and empty words don’t solve war.”

The president also criticized the United Nations for “funding an assault on Western countries and their borders” by promoting and aiding illegal immigration into the United States.

Regarding U.N. actions involving so-called climate change, Trump said, “The entire globalist concept of asking successful industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally, and it must be immediate.”

Trump’s comments reflect a broader approach by his administration, which over the past eight months has taken multiple actions to move away from the U.N.

Moving Away From Key UN Projects

The most notable sign of this is the limiting of U.S. involvement in the overarching U.N. plan for human development, known as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Adopted in 2015 by the U.N. General Assembly, the 17 global goals in the 2030 agenda were described as “a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet.”

The goals touch every part of human life, from production and consumption to climate, health care, education, and the environment.

On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order titled “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements.”

Among other directives, the president ended U.S. support for all international climate agreements, including the U.N. Paris Agreement, “effective immediately.” He also ordered the defunding of financial commitments made by the United States in relation to that agreement.

U.S. envoy Edward Heartney restated the new U.S. position at a U.N. General Assembly meeting in March.

“Although framed in neutral language, agenda 2030 and the [Sustainable Development Goals] advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with U.S. sovereignty and adverse to the rights and interests of Americans,” said Heartney, then-counselor for economic and social affairs at the U.S. Mission to the U.N.

“Put simply, globalist endeavors like agenda 2030 and the [Sustainable Development Goals] lost at the ballot box. Therefore, the United States rejects and denounces the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals, and it will no longer reaffirm them as a matter of course.”

Mandy Gunasekara, former chief of staff for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and chief architect of the U.S. withdrawal, said exiting from U.N. climate agendas was crucial for the country.

“Withdrawing from the job-killing Paris Climate Accord was a critical step in rejecting globalist frameworks that undermine U.S. prosperity,” said Gunasekara, whose efforts were praised by the president in a July Truth Social post.

“Further decoupling from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the foundation of these anti-American climate initiatives, would strengthen our sovereignty and unleash our economic potential.”

Exiting From WHO, Other US Efforts

In July, the administration announced that in addition to withdrawing from the World Health Organization, it was also rejecting the organization’s proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations.

“[The proposed amendments] require countries to establish systems of risk communications so that the [World Health Organization] can implement unified public messaging globally,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a video statement. “That opens the door to the kind of narrative management and propaganda and censorship that we saw during the [COVID-19] pandemic.

“[The United States] can cooperate with other nations without jeopardizing our civil liberties, without undermining our Constitution, and without ceding away America’s treasured sovereignty.”

In late July, the State Department announced a U.S. exit from the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.

“[The U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization] works to advance divisive social and cultural causes and maintains an outsized focus on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy,” the State Department stated.

A spokesman for the State Department told The Epoch Times that the 2030 agenda is not consistent with U.S. sovereignty and is contrary to the rights and interests of the U.S. people.

The spokesman said that with that in mind, the U.S. government will no longer reaffirm the goals in future U.N. resolutions and measures.

In June, the U.S. delegation withdrew from the U.N.’s Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, which sought to raise trillions of dollars for U.N. purposes.

“The United States regrets that the text before us today does not offer a path to consensus,” acting U.S. Representative to the Economic and Social Council Jonathan Shrier said.

And in August, the Trump administration criticized the U.N. International Maritime Organization’s efforts to impose global taxes on shipping, calling its proposed framework “a global carbon tax on Americans levied by an unaccountable U.N. organization.”

On the domestic front, the EPA announced on July 29 a plan to repeal its “endangerment finding” on certain gases, including carbon dioxide.

Under an endangerment finding, the EPA stated on Dec. 7, 2009, that “the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases … in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”

The Obama administration-era determination underpinned a wide array of subsequent federal restrictions on human activities.

The U.N. has said global warming is being caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases.

Jack McPherrin, a research fellow for the conservative-leaning Heartland Institute’s Emerging Issues Center, said the 2030 agenda has “quietly influenced U.S. policy through sustainability mandates,” including the corporate adoption of environmental, social, and governance benchmarks and “centralized economic planning mechanisms.”

The Trump administration’s rejection of the U.N.’s agenda “is more than symbolic,” McPherrin told The Epoch Times.

“It’s a reassertion of national sovereignty and a clear rebuke of the global technocratic model that prioritizes compliance over consent,” he said.

While most of the actions to remove the United States from the U.N. and its 2030 agenda have come from the White House, Congress is also making its influence felt.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law on July 4, included multiple provisions undoing U.N.-backed federal programs and cutting funding to key initiatives.

Trump complained that the bill did not go far enough in rolling back “green tax credits,” which he described on social media as a “giant SCAM” benefiting China.

But the bill did roll back large swaths of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, touted by Democrats as the largest climate bill in history, as well as many other environmental and climate provisions.

“These measures reflect a growing recognition in Congress that the U.N.’s soft global governance regime is incompatible with American constitutionalism and economic freedom,” McPherrin said.

He called for more action from both the executive and legislative branches.

“For Americans, rejecting the U.N.’s agenda 2030 isn’t just a foreign policy issue,” he said. “It’s about restoring self-governance, safeguarding both individual liberty and economic freedom, and protecting U.S. industry from ideological interference.

“It means returning to a system where markets allocate capital, voters set priorities, and government power is exercised with constitutional limits—not outsourced to global institutions or activist scoring systems.”

Craig Rucker, president of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, said he expects a continued reversal of climate-related and other policies, including the abandonment of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and environmental, social, and governance policies; less funding for environmental programs; and a renewed emphasis on strengthening the U.S. energy sector.

“Agenda 2030 is a socialist dream of top-down, command and control governance tied to the priorities of the United Nations,” Rucker told The Epoch Times. “It has its tentacles in many parts of our government at the national, state, and local levels.”

National Security, Economy

Ambassador Kevin Moley, who served as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs during Trump’s first term, said the administration’s efforts to push back on the U.N. and its sustainable development agenda are important for national security, too.

He pointed to the influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the U.N. and in the development of its global programs.

The CCP is using the U.N. and its “pseudo-environmental agenda” to undermine U.S. economic vitality while building up its own economy, Moley told The Epoch Times.

“Ever since we allowed the CCP into the World Trade Organization under the false pretense that they’d become more like us, it has been a disaster,” he said. “That was never their intention.

“This most directly impacts the least among us—the poorest of the poor are the ones who get shafted by this fake environmentalism, simply another name for anti-capitalism. They want to redistribute our wealth. That’s all the U.N. has been trying to do for decades.”

The U.N. and various spokesmen for the organization did not respond to requests for comment.