
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), today led 14 of his Senate colleagues in pushing appropriators to include in its 2021 appropriations bill language requiring the Administration to pay the full amount of dues for each international organization that the U.S. is a member of, including the World Health Organization (WHO).
President Trump has said, “Had the WHO done its job to get medical experts into China to objectively assess the situation on the ground and to call out China’s lack of transparency, the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death,”
The U.N. and it agencies like the World Health Organization regularly pander to activists and, not coincidentally, adopts policies that expand its own scope and responsibilities. Science, innovation, and free markets routinely get short shrift. In U.N. programs and projects, everything—even the naming of a new virus—becomes an exercise in public relations, politics, and international horse-trading.
Two respected commentators have called for the United States to cut funding for WHO and its International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is plagued by incompetence and poor science on its good days, and was at the epicenter of a major scandal marked by corruption and conflicts of interest.
In a letter to Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the Chairman and Ranking Member of the SFRC Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs, the lawmakers wrote: “It has never been clearer that global governance structures such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization are critically important. Therefore, we urge that the State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Subcommittee include in the fiscal year 2021 appropriations bill the funds necessary, and bill language requiring the Secretary to use such funds, to pay the full U.S. assessment for each international organization funded in the ‘Contributions to International Organizations’ account.”
“As assessed contributions are required dues shared among member states to pay for the expenses of the organization, any withholding of assessed dues violates our treaty obligations and undermines coordinated responses by member states to the emerging political, humanitarian and economic crises erupting throughout the world,” the lawmakers continued. “Such language would provide the multilateral institutions of which the U.S. is a member the funding predictability and stability needed to respond.”
The letter was signed by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Ed Markey (D-MA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-NV), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Richard Blumethal (D-CT), and Tim Kaine (D-VA).
Full text of the letter is available here.
I cannot name one thing this useless senator has done for NJ
That’s why hes called the “Stealth Senator’.
Unlike crying chuck whose on tv every weekend, this guy disappears until the next election.