Here’s What to Know About US Withdrawal From the WHO

World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attends a press conference on the World Health Organization's 75th anniversary in Geneva on April 6, 2023. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

On his second term’s first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), making good on a project from his first administration.

Trump’s Jan. 20 order halted U.S. funding to the United Nations body, citing the WHO’s “mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that arose out of Wuhan, China,” as well as other global health concerns.

Negotiations with the group about the pandemic agreement and International Health Regulations will be suspended while the withdrawal is taking place.

Because of the 1948 joint resolution by Congress, the United States has the right to withdraw from the WHO, but it must give a one-year notice. The resolution also requires the United States to fulfill “financial obligations” to the WHO for the current fiscal year.

The Largest WHO Funder

The United States is currently the largest WHO funder, contributing about $1.28 billion during 2022–2023, the last reported year on the organization’s website. That equates to almost half of the WHO’s joint external evaluation missions for the last fiscal year.

The 2024–2025 fiscal year is shaping up similarly, with the United States serving as the largest donor by far, contributing an estimated $988 million, or roughly 14 percent of the WHO’s $6.9 billion budget.

Documents obtained by The Associated Press (AP) show that the U.S. covers about 95 percent of the WHO’s work on tuberculosis in Europe and about 60 percent in Africa and the Western Pacific and that the WHO’s Europe office is more than 8 percent reliant on U.S. contributions.

Additionally, American funding provides “the backbone of many of WHO’s large-scale emergency operations,” covering up to 40 percent of that funding.

WHO Response

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described relations with the United States as “a good model partnership” during a press briefing in Geneva in December 2024.

“[We] have been partnering for many years, and we believe that will be the case. And I believe the U.S. leaders understand that the United States cannot be safe unless the rest of the world is safe,” he told reporters.

Following the announcement of Trump’s decision to remove the United States from the organization, Ghebreyesus spoke out, asking world leaders to push the White House to reverse the decision.

The WHO chief said during a closed-door meeting with diplomats that the United States would miss out on critical information about disease outbreaks, the AP reported.

George Kyriacou, the agency’s financial director, said if the group’s spending continues at its current level without funding from the United States, the organization would be “very much in a hand-to-mouth type situation when it comes to our cash flows” for at least portions of 2026. 

CDC Response

Officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have ordered agency employees to stop working with the WHO, effective immediately.

John Nkengasong, the CDC’s deputy director for global health, sent a memo to agency leadership on Jan. 26 calling on staff to cease collaborating with the WHO immediately and wait for further guidance. CDC staff also are not allowed to engage with the WHO, virtually or in person, and staff members are not allowed to visit the WHO offices.

Some public health experts have voiced concern about halting the collaboration, including Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine and global health at UCLA who works with the WHO on sexually transmitted infections.

“Stopping communications and meetings with WHO is a big problem,” Klausner said. “People thought there would be a slow withdrawal. This has really caught everyone with their pants down.”

Behind the Withdrawal

The Trump administration said the WHO was not able to demonstrate independence from the “inappropriate political influence” of member states and had failed to “adopt urgently needed reforms.”

The president’s executive order also cites “unfairly onerous payments” by the United States that Trump said are “far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments.”

“China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has 300 percent of the population of the United States, yet contributes nearly 90 percent less to the WHO,” the order stated.

This is Trump’s second attempt to withdraw from the WHO. The president began the process in 2020 due to frustration over the WHO’s reaction to China’s coverup of details surrounding the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 at the start of what became the COVID-19 global pandemic.

The House Oversight and Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a report in December 2024 on the WHO’s response to the pandemic, calling it “an abject failure.”

According to the report, the WHO is accused of bending to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and placing “China’s political interests ahead of its international duties.”

As part of the alleged failure, the WHO reportedly ignored warnings by Taiwan on Dec. 31, 2019, about “atypical pneumonia cases” in Wuhan, which it asked the WHO to investigate.

“The initial mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic not only potentially caused the further spread of the virus, but it created a situation where people lost trust in the global public health organization,” the report said.

The Associated Press and Aldgra Fredly contributed to this report.