The UN80 initiative proposed by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has sparked concerns over the effect it could have on the core work of the organization, including its gender equality ambitions, according to about a half-dozen UN insiders and experts who spoke to PassBlue on the reform agenda underway.

Guterres announced the initiative on March 12, appointing an internal task force led by Under-Secretary-General Guy Ryder to propose strategies on how to make the 80-year-old institution more useful, cost-efficient and fit for the 21st century. Although he said that the UN80 plan was not related to the continuing massive cuts by the United States to international multilateral organizations and the aid sectors, the timing is not coincidental.

Since the announcement, the UN secretariat has struggled to manage communications about the reform. There have been a series of media leaks that some people in UN circles say reflect internal dissent against the proposed reforms.

“We are closely paying attention to everything that leaks into the media, and clearly that is coming from scared staff members,” said Dmitry Chumakov, a Russian diplomat, during a UN meeting this month about the proposals.

The first such leak was an official document from Courtenay Rattray, the chief of staff to Guterres, instructing UN agency heads to determine which positions could be relocated from New York City and Geneva to ostensibly cheaper locations. This missive was followed by a confidential document containing the UN80 task force’s proposed suggestions. Guterres’s speech outlining the reform’s agenda was also leaked to staff members before it was delivered, and an internal email to staff was also obtained by the press.

But it’s not just communications and documents that are becoming public. UN insiders and experts are wary that the reform agenda is merely a cost-cutting exercise, driven by the organization’s worsening financial crisis. Senior UN staffers told PassBlue that the proposed cuts and mergers could seriously undermine the UN’s core functions and roll back critical progress, particularly on gender equality. (Vote in PassBlue’s informal survey on the proposed reforms.)

The UN80 initiative is being driven not only by budget cuts from the United States — the largest contributor to key UN operations — but also persistent funding gaps due to late or partial payments by member states.

Late payments of mandatory dues from the US, China and a handful of other countries have created a perfect cash crisis storm. Currently, $2.4 billion in dues are unpaid to the UN’s regular budget against the $3.5 billion assessment for 2025. The US owes the most, about $1.5 billion.

The UN80 task force has proposed wide-ranging changes that would merge mandates across peace and security, human rights and development, the three pillars of the UN, according to a more extensive document seen by PassBlue. The task force, led by Ryder and Catherine Pollard, under-secretary-general for management strategy, policy and compliance, also proposed to relocate offices and personnel to less-expensive cities, among other cost-cutting steps.

The document gives a peek into how the proposed changes could be carried out to achieve Guterres’s goal to improve the 80-year-old institution as the US is still cutting millions of dollars from aid programs and threatening to stop funding to major parts of the UN, such as peacekeeping, despite its legal requirement to pay its share of those costs.

At the same time, there’s consensus among member states and the broader UN community that the organization needs reform across many fronts. The conversation so far has largely remained in words.

“We will advance all this work so that our three pillars — peace and security, development and human rights — are mutually reinforced, and the geographical balance of our workforce and our gender and disability strategies will be preserved,” Guterres told the General Assembly while presenting the plan publicly on May 12.

Development on the block

Sara Pantuliano, the chief executive at ODI Global, a policy think tank in London, said that while the UN80 initiative is framed as a strategic necessity, the plans suggest cost-cutting that could undermine the very work the UN was created in 1945 to do.

As the world is reeling from the impact of the billions of dollars of US aid cuts, many countries in Europe are also shifting their focus from humanitarian assistance overseas to bolstering their own military apparatus. Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) showed that official development assistance (ODA) has been dropping since 2022. Total financial contributions to the UN development system dropped by $9 billion, or 16 percent, in 2023 from the year before.

Pantuliano said, for example, that restructuring UN development efforts that do not help improve a country’s ability to respond to its specific problems can result in even more hardship for the world’s most vulnerable populations.

The UN development system includes its stable of resident coordinators that provides their skills to help approximately 160 countries. Overall, the system prioritizes international groups over local responders, who are often the first to step in to work and remain the longest, Pantuliano said. The system carried out by the UN duplicates national efforts and creates parallel entities that undermine effectiveness.

However, the UN80 plan, she noted, does not show a shift in the allocation of power, resources and coordination to local partners, but rather shrinks operations without changing basic structural defects of UN development operations.

“This reform is long overdue,” Pantuliano told PassBlue during an interview, “but we just need to make sure that it’s not yet another technocratic exercise, or one that is just looking at cost efficiencies.”

Dorothy Shea, the US interim chief of mission to the UN, told the General Assembly on May 12 that the “most significant way to achieve savings is to cut posts, as the majority of costs are non-discretionary staff costs.”

Shea added, “The generous package of compensation and benefits should also be closely looked at.”

Jeopardizing human rights monitoring

UN80 proposes to merge many human rights entities into a single body. A key proposal is to collapse several protection mandates that operate as solo offices — such as Children and Armed Conflict, Sexual Violence in Conflict and Preventing Sexual Exploitation and Abuse — into one, according to the suggestions in the leaked confidential document. The single body would be called the Office for the Protection of Vulnerable Populations.

Louis Charbonneau, the UN director at Human Rights Watch, said this particular merger could destroy the UN’s ability to pay close attention to and act on human rights abuses. Merging these specialized departments – all based in New York City – looks efficient on paper, but the trade-offs would be weakening the systems that ensure accountability.

“We can’t just throw these people all in together under one roof. They have a very important job to be done,” Charbonneau told PassBlue in an interview. “The message that it’s sending; downgrade, reduce, merge is very worrying, and I think it potentially could have a destructive impact on the ability of the UN to monitor, investigate and deter human rights abuses.”

The sharp increases in attacks against civilians in Yemen in the last several years is a clear example of the consequences of a softened human rights system. The Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council (HRC) voted in October 2021 against renewing the mandate of independent investigators looking at instances of war crimes in Yemen.

In 2018, the Group of Regional and International Eminent Experts on Yemen released a report accusing parties from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen and Houthi rebels of all committing war crimes in Yemen’s protracted civil war. Charbonneau said the number of civilian attacks rose after the mandate was canceled.

“You could basically see the removal of the deterrence; once they knew that the eyes would be removed, there was this sense of impunity. They felt emboldened. We can’t allow these things to happen,” he said.

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) receives just five percent of the UN’s overall regular budget, severely straining its work. Such restrictions have made it challenging for the UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine investigating war crimes and other human rights abuses in the war to conduct significant ground research.

Charbonneau said that unlike other conflicts where governments often block access, Ukraine presents a rare opportunity for field inquiries, yet tight budgets hinder the UN’s ability to take full advantage of this openness.

“This is the main problem that the UN human rights work is facing; lack of funds, lack of staff, and a political environment in which an increasing number of countries consider their work to be something that they want to suppress or stop,” he said.

The UN’s human rights work is already constricted, Charbonneau said. Russia and China have for years pursued ways to defund UN human rights initiatives and offices in peacekeeping missions. The US and Europe, as the most influential members of the UN General Assembly’s budget committee, have traditionally countered these efforts.

However, given the shifts in foreign policy in the current Trump administration, human rights specialists are increasingly concerned that Washington may no longer oppose such moves by Russia and China and could even agree to more cuts in human rights funding.

“For those who engage in abuses, this is exactly what they want, is shrinking and reducing this kind of . . . UN monitoring work,” Charbonneau said.

Goodbye to gender equality goals?

The current far-reaching job losses across many UN agencies are not stopping soon. Guterres told the General Assembly on May 12 that UN80 is looking to cut at least 20 percent of posts in some departments to rid them of “functions that are also exercised in other parts of the system.”

Such talk alarms some gender advisers who spoke with PassBlue. Both gender equality work and the UN’s own gender parity goals could suffer greatly from budget slashes.

Senior gender advisers in the UN, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not allowed to talk to the press on the issue, said they fear gender units would be easy targets for the goal of 20 percent cuts. Senior UN officials told PassBlue that some managers may view the gender units in their departments as expendable.

“No one’s been given instructions as to how we take into consideration gender in the cut,” one gender adviser told PassBlue. “Women with weak contracts are at risk because gender parity only came in the last six years. It came in with António Guterres. So, if women have only come in over the last couple of years, then they’re not going to be on the permanent and continuous [contracts].”

That fear gained root when Guterres said in his informal session with member states that one way to lower expenses would be to combine the gender units in an entity merging the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs with the Department of Peace Operations.

Anne Marie Goetz, a clinical professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs and a former UN Women executive, said that assuming that gender units’ functions in major UN departments overlap is often misplaced.

“The primary focus of these units is largely internal, applying a gender perspective to core mandates to enable entities to improve performance.” Goetz said to PassBlue. “Doing so requires entity-specific skill sets that are not replicated in gender units elsewhere and cannot be substituted for (if that is ever the assumption) by UN Women, which, in parallel, is going through its own efficiency drive, with critical posts being sent to Nairobi.”

“If the elimination of duplicate functions and skill sets is the concern, then cost-cutters might more fruitfully set sights on much larger areas of overlap between cognate entities,” she added, “whether in communications or executive office functions, for instance.”

The UN80 plans laid out by Guterres did not explicitly say how gender work in the UN could be affected by the reforms. Insiders say that while there are women staff members on the task force, there are no gender advisers among the seven official working groups in the task force.

Some experts contend that silence about the status of gender equality in the reform plan is to make UN80 more acceptable to the US. Since January, American diplomats have attempted — sometimes successfully — to remove references to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) from UN documents and to drop such hiring practices in UN agencies.

The transparency of the entire UN80 process has also been questioned. The plan is rushed, said Ian Richards, the president of the UN Geneva Staff Union, adding that overhauling the operation and administrative structure of the organization in two budget cycles would result in costly mistakes. Richards said the staff union was informed of  “timetable and the setup” but had no say in the plan.

One major issue is the recommendation of relocating certain jobs from Geneva and New York City to cheaper places. Several UN agencies, including Unicef and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), have initiated independent cost-cutting measures. Unicef might send some of its operations to Valencia, Spain. The UN Population Fund is moving much of its personnel to Nairobi.

Rwanda is promoting itself as an alternative location to save money for the UN, while Qatar is contending to be a humanitarian hub. An Italian diplomat said that Rome welcomes more UN offices to the three agencies based there, including the World Food Program.

“It’s hard to see how having more administrative staff in Nairobi improves development on the continent, besides that it is good for the Kenyan economy,” Richards asked. “He [Guterres] said there’s a liquidity crisis and there’s a crisis of multilateralism. But then all the solutions he provided were basically or mostly about cost-cutting, and he didn’t link how the cost-cutting would improve the UN’s effectiveness or relevance or ability to deliver to member states.”

While many people are highlighting the problems in the proposed budget cuts and restructuring, Damian Lilly, a former UN staff member turned independent consultant, said UN80 offers executives a chance to address inefficiencies that have plagued the UN for years. 

Rather than viewing overlapping mandates and merging administrative functions as downsizing, Lilly said, reform can improve synergy among departments, especially in fragile and crisis settings where peace-building, humanitarian aid and development work are often duplicated.

“It’s difficult when jobs are being lost, departments are being closed,” Lilly said. “Nobody wants to say that their area is not important. Nobody’s going to be willing to be cut. So it does require tough decisions. It’s an opportunity to do many of the things that people have said for many years, but there hasn’t been the political will to do it.”

Damilola Banjo

Damilola Banjo is an award-winning staff reporter for PassBlue who has covered a wide range of topics, from Africa-centered stories to gender equality to UN peacekeeping and US-UN relations. She also oversees all video production for PassBlue. She was a Dag Hammarskjold fellow in 2023 and a Pulitzer Center postgraduate fellow in 2021. She was part of the BBC Africa team that produced the Emmy-nominated documentary, “Sex for Grades.” In addition, she worked for WFAE, an NPR affiliate in Charlotte, N.C. Banjo has a master’s of science degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and an undergraduate degree from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.