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WHO starts cutting costs as US withdrawal date set for January 2026

“Just stupid”

On January 23, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus sent a memo to staff announcing the cost-cutting measures. Reuters obtained a copy of the memo.

“This announcement has made our financial situation more acute,” Tedros wrote, referring to the US withdrawal plans. WHO’s budget mainly comes from dues and voluntary contributions from member states. The dues are a percentage of each member state’s gross domestic product, and the percentage is set by the UN General Assembly. US contributions account for about 18 percent of WHO’s overall funding, and its two-year 2024-2025 budget was $6.8 billion, according to Reuters.

To prepare for the budget cut, WHO is halting recruitment, significantly curtailing travel expenditures, making all meetings virtual, limiting IT equipment updates, and suspending office refurbishment.

“This set of measures is not comprehensive, and more will be announced in due course,” Tedros wrote, adding that the agency would do everything it could to protect and support staff.

The country’s pending withdrawal has been heavily criticized by global health leaders and US experts, who say it will make the world less safe and weaken America. In a CBS/KFF Health News report examining the global health implications of the US withdrawal, Kenneth Bernard, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who served as a top biodefense official during the George W. Bush administration, did not mince words:

“It’s just stupid,” Bernard said. “Withdrawing from the WHO leaves a gap in global health leadership that will be filled by China,” he said, “which is clearly not in America’s best interests.”

Americans spend more years being unhealthy than people in any other country

disability, disease, health, health care, life expectancy, lifespan, Science, us / Kelly Newman / December 13, 2024

For the new study, researchers at the Mayo Clinic analyzed health statistics collected by the World Health Organization. The resource included data from 183 countries, allowing the researchers to compare countries’ life expectancy and healthspans, which are calculated by years of life weighted by health status.

Longer, but not better

Overall, the researchers saw lifespan-healthspan gaps grow around the world, with the average gap rising from 8.5 years in 2000 to 9.6 years in 2019. Global life expectancy rose 6.5 years, to about 73 years, while healthspans only rose 5.4 years in that time, to around 63 years.

But the US was a notable outlier, with its gap growing from 10.9 years to 12.4 years, a 29 percent higher gap than the global mean.

The gap was most notable for women—a trend seen around the world. Between 2000 and 2019, US women saw their life expectancy rise 1.5 years, from 79.2 to 80.7 years, but they saw no change in their healthspans. Women’s lifespan-healthspan gap rose from 12.2 years to 13.7 years. For US men, life expectancy rose 2.2 years, from 74.1 to 76.3 years, and their healthspans also increased 0.6 years. Their lifespan-healthspan gap in 2019 was 11.1 years, 2.6 years shorter than women’s.

The conditions most responsible for US disease burden included mental and substance use disorders, plus musculoskeletal diseases. For women, the biggest contributors were musculoskeletal, genitourinary, and neurological diseases.

While the US presented the most extreme example, the researchers note that the global trends seem to present a “disease paradox whereby reduced acute mortality exposes survivors to an increased burden of chronic disease.”

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