Quick thoughts on the UN financial situation
Plus, looking back on a year on Substack
During a series of town hall meetings earlier this week, Secretariat staff were reportedly informed that the organization only has enough cash to pay salaries through August. As I’ve pointed out several times, this should have been expected, and contingency plans should have been developed early in the year to allow for a reduction of staffing-related expenditures to allow the organization to continue functioning—albeit at a significantly reduced level—than face the prospect of bankruptcy.
Most of the options used by previous Secretaries-General to manage previous financial crises have already been exhausted, and other alternatives that have been floated to manage expenditures won’t be sufficient. For example, not renewing contracts as they expire may not do enough to reduce expenditures in time, but will also deprive the Secretariat of needed capacity and expertise. Deferring the payment of salaries won’t work if the required payments never materialize—this is the reason why so many military and police contingents had to be repatriated despite the option of deferring reimbursements to troop- and police-contributing countries.
What the Secretariat may need to do is to place many staff on special leave without pay to allow them to retain their status as staff members and their continuity of service until the financial situation improves or until the start of the next financial period, when new assessments will be received. Under rule 5.5 (a) (iii) of the Staff Rules,
In exceptional cases, the Secretary-General may, at his or her initiative, place a staff member on special leave with full or partial pay or without pay if he or she considers such leave to be in the interest of the Organization1
This is far from an ideal situation and not a sustainable one in the long term, but it would be far better than the current strategy of playing financial chicken. It doesn’t make sense to hope that the major financial contributors driving the cash shortage are somehow so committed to ensuring the functioning of the Organization that they feel some sense of urgency or responsibility to pay up to avert insolvency, given all evidence to the contrary. Moving ahead with this a plan to use furloughs to control expenditure, however, would require the Secretary-General to demonstrate leadership and make difficult decisions regarding the prioritization of functions. This could be done by adapting existing policies such as the programme criticality framework.
In the longer term, a radically different approach to budgeting and financial management is needed, one that moves beyond performative—and counterproductive—budget cuts that exacerbate the liquidity situation to ones that accept the political and financial reality of nonpayment, but also work to mitigate the risk and impact.
A note to my readers
I launched this Substack a year ago shortly after curtailing an assignment in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General out of frustration regarding the direction of the UN80 initiative. Since then, I’ve published 42 posts examining various aspects of UN institutional reform, financing, and peace operations, drawing upon my years of experience working on these issues as a diplomat, as a UN staff member, and as a researcher. I’ve tried to keep these posts timely, relevant, and short enough to be read and reflected upon during a commute.
It’s my hope that my writings here have provided useful background, analysis, and actionable recommendations for both policymakers and practitioners thinking about how best to reposition the UN and how to re-imagine multilateral peace operations at a time of tremendous change in the international system. If there is a single key takeaway that I want readers to leave with, it’s that affecting change in an organization as complex as the UN requires understanding both the decision-making process and the interests of key decision-makers. Good ideas on UN reform are not worth much unless they are backed by a strategy for achieving them that accounts for both of these considerations.
Trying to publish a piece a week has been a fun challenge, but—as I have many projects to finish in the latter half of the year—I will be shifting to a more flexible schedule going forward, aiming at publishing every other week. This will allow me to spend more time working on longer-form pieces, including several policy reports in the pipeline for the International Peace Institute as well as some academic articles in various stages of drafting, while still being able to contribute to the discourse around UN reform as the organization selects a new Secretary-General.
Of course, I will undoubtedly have opinions to share on the long-delayed report of the Secretary-General on the outcome of the review of the future of all forms of peace operations, whenever it is finally released. In the meantime, here are a few relevant pieces I published early on that some of my newer subscribers may have missed:
As always, thanks to all of my subscribers for reading and sharing my posts. Special thanks to those of you who have contributed to my coffee budget over the past year!
© 2026 Eugene Chen under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations University.
Staff Regulations and Staff Rules of the United Nations (ST/SGB/2024/1)