President Trump’s UN ambassador will prioritize reform

By Lisa Correnti and Rebecca Oas, Ph.D.

WASHINGTON, D.C. January 24 (C-Fam) Following her Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Representative Elise Stefanik is on track to become President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the UN.  In keeping with the president’s “America first, peace through strength” agenda, Stefanik promised to carefully “evaluate every UN agency to determine if what they are doing is beneficial to America.”

Along with Stefanik, numerous senators on the Committee on Foreign Relations expressed concerns that the UN system is falling short of its mission. “The vast majority of the American people do not recognize the deterioration that has happened at the United Nations and how it has strayed from its original purposes,” said Senator James Risch (R-ID), the committee chairman.  “The UN was founded to be a force for peace and stability in the world, an admirable goal. It is not working.”

Nevertheless, the U.S. remains the largest funder of the UN system, paying 22% of its regular budget and 25% of its peacekeeping budget.  Stefanik pledged to ensure that “we are good stewards of taxpayer dollars” and fund “programs that have a basis in the rule of law.”

The issue of abortion was not explicitly raised in the hearing, but it remains one of the areas in which the UN system has deviated from what has been agreed by its member nations, which have never accepted it as a human right.  However, numerous UN agencies including the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) have a long history of aggressively promoting abortion, as do the expert committees and rapporteurs in the UN’s human rights bodies.

Any serious attempt to reform the UN would involve making agencies operate within their mandates.  When asked which agencies she thought were doing well, Stefanik pointed to the World Food Program and UNICEF, both of which operate with U.S. leadership.  However, UNICEF has joined with other UN agencies in promoting comprehensive sexuality education and youth gender transition, and participated in the corruption of the Education Cannot Wait program offering education to children in crisis-affected regions.

Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), an ardent supporter of abortion rights who serves as minority ranking member of the committee, urged Stefanik to support UNFPA. President Trump defunded the controversial agency in his first term.  Stefanik responded that she was “committed to doing a review of UNFPA” and cited her strong record of standing up for women’s health, particularly by addressing maternal mortality, ensuring pre and postnatal care, and reducing malnutrition.  The Biden administration drastically increased funding to UNFPA to over $300M in 2022 and 2023 without Congressional approval.

Defunding UNFPA would be consistent with Trump’s priority to eliminate federal overspending, including “the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended.”

The executive order on “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid” offers one of the clearest signals to date that Trump’s White House views U.S. foreign assistance as a political and cultural battleground where it must stamp out progressive policies and programs.

“The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values. They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries,” the order alleges.

Stefanik appears to have a smooth path ahead to confirmation to the Cabinet post.  The 40-year-old from New York was the youngest woman elected to Congress in 2014, and would be the first UN ambassador appointed directly from Congress.  Notwithstanding her rapid rise, Stefanik emphasized that “of all the titles I held…my most important title is mom.”  Acting on this sentiment at the UN in defense of the Family will be difficult. Stefanik will soon learn that the hottest debates at the UN center around life and family.

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