THE DOGE-UN APPROACH
Many major donor UN Member States are closely assessing their resources and scaling back on customary giving. United States cutbacks in spending would be the most significant. The US announced a 180-day review (by end of August 2025) of all international organizations it participates in. An ambitious task, but our approach could support the effort to review the resources flowing to United Nations’ accounts and whether they’re of value.
How do we assess the effectiveness and efficiency of the UN bureaucracy? On any given day, is it doing the right thing, and doing it in the right way?
In bringing tough love to the UN’s doorstep, critics caution against throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Here’s the riddle: unlike most enterprises, the UN is not a for-profit business that could depend upon stock and bond market-type indicators to reflect its performance and value year-over-year.
The UN’s “profits and losses" reside only in the minds-eyes of its supporters and detractors alike.
Public rancor has prevailed, instead of a sober assessment of the UN’s future viability and needed reforms.
The UN has been missing in action over Ukraine, Syria, Sudan and other headline news, yet budgets itself north of $20 billion (by safe estimates).
Regardless, public opinion thinks the UN has no profit-centers, only loss centers.
The reality: there are simply no financial metrics to account, unambiguously, for UN-generated profits or losses.
Yes, there is an abiding sense that the UN is somehow net-positive in the ledger of goodwill, and that better stewardship might generate enough continued goodwill net/net to satisfy its critics.
However, these goodwill-generating activities need to be defined in substantive and relevant, non-financial terms, to validate the UN's value proposition to its various resource contributors and stakeholders. Including showing outcomes that align with Member States’ agendas and directives.
DOGE-UN invites all to join this challenge.
Below are our initial recommendations…
In order to find the proverbial baby in the deep bathwater - if the baby is still there.
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The UN is the world’s hub for cooperation, coordination and collective action to promote peace, security, development, and human rights globally. It deserves radically-improved stewardship and administration.
If it’s worth keeping, let’s find out WHY and HOW best.
WHY is the UN worth keeping?
Participation in international organizations is a matter of national interest. In today’s world, national interest depends on the quality of the global neighborhood.
Recently US Secretary of State Rubio offered a three-point quick-check test for each foreign engagement to consider. Other countries make the same calculation:
Does it make our country safer?
Does it make our country stronger?
Does it make our country more prosperous?
Thoughtful answers will indicate why participation in international organizations is worth keeping.
HOW is the UN best worth keeping?
When nations interact well is how a good global neighborhood happens.
“Live and let live”: Eventually, cavemen tired of their “fight-or- flight” instincts. Customs evolved for co-existence.
When everyone makes nice, their surpluses get shared and traded for better quality of living. Cooperation starts between nations - deliberately - to benefit their peoples.
As paths and zones overlap, cooperation needs a few rules-of-the- road. We move up to coordination - among nations.
When bigger threats arise everywhere, nations have gone beyond co-existence, cooperation and coordination to designing and taking collective action to face down challenges shadowing all their doorsteps and thresholds.
A nation-state could refer usefully to the following checklist for assessing the value proposition for participating in an international organization:
• Does it provide an effective way to promote core national interests of a Member State?
• Does it work efficiently and provide good return on a Member State’s investment?
• Does it help a Member State achieve soft power goals, in terms of reputation and influence?
• What are the implications if other Member States assume leadership in the organization in the absence of a given Member State’s voice and funding?
• Is working through the respective organization, even if less central to a Member State’s national interests, a means to secure leverage in other venues on more critical issues?
As regards the United Nations Organization for participation by a nation-state, let’s break down the practical steps of stewardship. The steps are program planning, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation - and technology innovation…
UN Program Planning
• Interpret Member-States’ intentions in agreeing to each program, the spirit as well as the letter of each mandate they authorize.
• Incorporate comparative and absolute advantages of the UN Organization into the planning of each program.
• Shop the entire UN System (the UN Organization, UN Funds and Programs, its 16 Specialized Agencies, and other associated entities) for solutions, and piggyback on their resources wherever mutually practicable.
• Incorporate appropriate outside methods and resources in planning each program.
• Adopt a medium-term timeframe of ten-to-twenty years, to account for uncertainty.
• Be creatively bold and visionary as to tomorrow’s opportunities, while staying humble mindful of uncertainties over the horizon.
UN Budgeting
• Adopt a results-based budgeting methodology.
• Scrutinize budgets year-over-year on the basis of zero-real growth assumptions, in order to incentivize efficiencies.
• Look for any and all waste, fraud, and abuse.
• Propose cost-savings and accountability measures.
UN Monitoring
• Analyze workflows.
• Gauge implementation of those projects agreed by UN Member-States.
• Establish metrics, or “in-progress report cards” for real-time monitoring.
• Create online “money-flow” maps for stakeholders to track the receipt and management of all resources.
• Incorporate appropriate best practices.
• Propose suggestions for improved operations.
UN Evaluation
• Assess results as outcomes, not outputs.
• Provide cost-benefit analysis of each program,
• In balance sheet accounting, under the asset category “goodwill,” provide detailed qualitative footnotes for the various non-financial valuation components considered.
• Propose streamlined processes.
• Provide guidance for subsequent, appropriate program planning.
• Publicize findings to the general public in layman’s terms.
UN Technology Integration
• Modernize the UN administrative culture into the “sharing economy.” (NOTE: Uber, AirBNB and others).
• Rationalize its duplicative administrative resources into net/benefit performance.
• Implement information technology (IT) solutions for economically-efficient horizontal delivery services systems, in communication, data management and related common services among the bureaucracy’s many expense centers.
• Otherwise, the deep state UN will continue jealously and wastefully emboldening its bureaucratic fiefdoms; at the expense of “We the peoples” whom it’s meant to serve
Some wonky resources for reference
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Please return to this evolving page, as DOGE-UN continues to update its evolving approach to assessing the UN’s performance and value.