The Trump administration is withdrawing the United States’ membership from 66 international organizations, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Wednesday.
The list includes 31 United Nations organizations and several agencies committed to countering the global impacts of climate change and international peacebuilding, including the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, the Global Counterterrorism Forum and the International Energy Forum.
Rubio wrote in a press release that the administration “has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity.”
These withdrawals are a result of an executive order issued by President Trump less than a month into his second term, which charged Rubio with conducting reviews of “all international intergovernmental organizations of which the United States is a member and provides any type of funding or other support.”
Rubio said the State Department is reviewing additional agencies.
“We will not continue expending resources, diplomatic capital, and the legitimizing weight of our participation in institutions that are irrelevant to or in conflict with our interests,” Rubio wrote. “We reject inertia and ideology in favor of prudence and purpose. We seek cooperation where it serves our people and will stand firm where it does not.”
The United States’ withdrawals have drawn pushback from some within the international peace-building community.
“I deeply regret that the US is further isolating itself by withdrawing from 66 international organizations, including the International Law Commission,” UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Counter Terrorism wrote on the social platform X. “This move weakens efforts to forge cooperative global solutions to common human challenges.”
