For many United Nations fans, the last several weeks have provided a ray of sunshine following an otherwise dark year on the foreign aid front. The Trump administration pledged to spend $2 billion at the U.N. in 2026 on humanitarian relief, and both houses of Congress agreed to fund U.N. programs the White House had sought to eliminate. But this week, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the U.N. risks “imminent financial collapse.”

If member states, principally the United States, don’t either pay their dues in full and on time, or at least agree to overhaul the organization’s financial rules to enable it to manage a mammoth cash crunch, the U.N. will be in dire straits.

The bleak warning underscored the degree to which recent pledges by the Trump administration and the U.S. Congress for the U.N. in 2026 don’t go nearly far enough to address a slow-moving financial crisis. It comes just weeks after the U.N. membership adopted a $3.4 billion administrative budget for the coming year, representing a $270 million reduction from the 2025 budget.

At the heart of the current crisis is a rule that requires the U.N. to repay governments hundreds of millions of dollars in credits for budgeted U.N. programs, even those that were never realized. Many of those programs were not implemented, in large part, because the U.S. has not yet paid its dues for 2025. In essence, according to Guterres, the U.N. is being penalized for spending less than it has been authorized to spend, demonstrating the U.N.'s risk of financial collapse.

“We are suffering a double blow: on one side, unpaid contributions; and on the other side, an obligation to return funds that were never received in the first place,” Guterres wrote in a letter to member states. “In other words, we are trapped in a Kafkaesque cycle; expected to give back cash that does not exist.”

“We face a moment of truth. The crisis is deepening, threatening programme delivery and risking financial collapse,” Guterres wrote. “Either all Member States honour their obligations to pay in full and on time – or Member States must fundamentally overhaul our financial rules to prevent an imminent financial collapse.”

Read the full article about insufficient U.N. funding by Colum Lynch at Devex.