With significant leadership by the United States, the United Nations was founded on high ideals.

The pursuit of international peace and development, and the promotion of basic human rights are core, historic concerns of the American people.

At its best, the UN can play a substantive role in promoting U.S. interests and international security.

But reality hasn’t always matched the ideals.  Over the past six decades the United Nations has also evolved into a sprawling, opaque bureaucracy without parallel in human history.

In recent memory, we have endured:

• the multi-billion-dollar oil-for-food scandal;
• hundreds of millions of dollars lost to waste, fraud, and abuse in peacekeeping procurement;
• egregious sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers in Africa and Haiti;
• millions of dollars allegedly embezzled from the World Meteorological Organization;
• use of UN Development Program funds in the Palestinian terrorist to pay for HAMAS campaign posters that said: Gaza today, Jerusalem tomorrow”
• payments to North Korea’s rogue regime for programs that the UN Development Program was not allowed to properly monitor

This week, Chairman Lantos joined me in urging the Government of Cyprus to extradite Benon Sevan, the former head of the UN Office of Iraq Programs, who was indicted last month in New York, for allegedly accepting 160 thousand dollars in bribes provided by the Saddam Hussein regime.

This is but a microcosm of a much broader and endemic problem.

Much of this graft and mischief is paid for by the working men and women of the United States.

My colleagues should bear in mind that the biggest benefactors of the UN are – and always have been – American taxpayers.

According to OMB, the United States paid over 5.3 billion dollars into the UN system in 2005. 

That is something between a quarter and a third of all UN system funding, significantly more than is paid by any other nation.

We seem to be stuck in a once-a-decade cycle of calls for UN reform that lead to studies, reports, and incremental changes – especially if those changes involve the creation of a new UN entity or bureaucracy.

But the changes do not remedy key systemic flaws, and so the cycle begins again.

The UN’s basic problems stem not from international politics, but from human nature.

If we give people the power to spend other people’s money with minimum oversight and accountability, we should not be surprised that they do not want to give it up.

This is exactly what has happened with regard to the UN regular budget, and activities that are funded by assessed dues compelled from member states.

The fact is, you can cobble together the two-thirds majority needed for important UN budget votes with a group of countries that, taken together, pay less than one percent of the total regular budget.

This complete disconnect between contribution levels and management control, creates extremely perverse incentives in terms of spending, transparency, and accountability.

The tragedy of this situation is borne by those who need and would benefit the most from an efficient UN – the people of the developing world.

Some would argue that they are not well-served by their elite diplomats, who may be more concerned about protecting cushy UN jobs, than they are about transforming the UN system into an efficient organization that demands measurable results from its employees.

The situation is marginally better with UN programs funded by voluntary contributions, such as UNICEF and UNDP, whose contributors can choose not to fund future activities.

But even there, the accountability mechanisms are far below what we would expect even from private sector corporations, and grave problems remain.

As we discovered in the recent UNDP-North Korea scandal, that program’s Executive Board members were not given routine access to audits, or even to performance indicators.
I worry that raising alarms about U.S. under-funding without also demanding fundamental reforms, will only feed a sense of entitlement at Turtle Bay that threatens the long-term viability of the UN system.

Against this background, I appreciate the new Secretary General’s outspoken personal commitment to reform.

I believe that he is an honorable public servant who perceives the need for profound changes at the United Nations.

In our meetings, Secretary General Ban [BAHN] has sounded exactly the right notes about the need to re-make the bureaucratic culture within the UN system.

But as was discovered by his predecessor, whose modest reform proposals were stymied by the General Assembly, the Secretary General simply does not have the power to impose the fundamental management reforms needed within that organization.

So while I welcome Secretary-General Ban’s public commitments, and pledge my support for his genuine reform efforts, I believe that basic reforms will require more concerted action by major donor countries.

I look forward to any suggestions that our witnesses today might like to offer along those lines.

The United Nations system is leaking money and prestige at an alarming rate.

But rather than rushing to plug the holes, some nations would prefer to complain that the U.S. should pay more to bail out that ailing organization.

These failings have prompted a number of congressional reform efforts over the years, including the Kassebaum-Solomon Amendment in the mid-1980s, the U.S. withdrawal from UNESCO in 1984, the Helms-Biden Agreement in the late-1990s, and the Henry J. Hyde UN Reform Act, which the House passed twice during the 109th Congress.

Unfortunately, the Senate failed to act on the Hyde Act, and there remains a significant need for reform.

American taxpayers have a right to demand that their hard-earned dollars do not go to line the pockets of UN contractors, to prop up rogue regimes like North Korea, or to pay the salaries of rapists.

Until we can credibly provide such basic assurances, we should be more vigilant about how our funds are being spent and offer options that will ensure that our contributions to the United Nations are a force for change, rather than for maintaining the status quo.