Dan Banik speaks with Ronny Patz about the United Nations’ deepest financial crisis in decades and the ambitious reforms unfolding under the UN80 initiative. Together they unpack how politics, member state behaviour, and fragmented funding are reshaping the UN’s ability to act, and what this means for the future of multilateralism.
The United Nations is facing its worst financial crisis in decades. Compared to its 2023 peak, total UN spending has fallen by almost one-third.
While some countries have withheld much of their funding, others are paying late. And still others have reduced or postponed contributions. Against this backdrop, Secretary-General AntĂłnio Guterres has launched the UN80 reform initiative, an effort to streamline operations and review mandates at a time when the organization is struggling to keep the lights on.
In this conversation, Dan Banik speaks with Dr. Ronny Patz, an independent UN financing analyst and author of Managing Money and Discord in the UN, about what lies behind the current liquidity crunch and why reforming the UN is so politically fraught. They explore how money, mandates, and majorities rarely align; why a considerable amount of UN funding now comes through earmarked projects; and how donor mistrust, fragmentation, and “cutback management” are reshaping the very foundations of global governance.
The discussion moves beyond budgets to ask a larger question: Can the United Nations still fulfill its universal mission in a post-aid world?
Listeners will come away with a sharper understanding of how bureaucratic politics, donor behaviour, and global power shifts are redefining the future of multilateralism.
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Dan Banik: Ronny, it’s lovely to see you. Welcome to the show.
Ronny Patz: Thank you, Dan. Great to be here.
Dan: I wanted to start with something I hadn’t really considered before reading your work. I’ve studied local and national public administration. There’s plenty of academic work on implementation, policy formulation, and the role of bureaucrats. But there seems to be far less attention on international public administration —these large bureaucracies within the UN system that drive global governance. Why has international public administration (IPA) received so little attention?
Ronny: This question sparked a research agenda that colleagues began about 15–20 years ago. There are two main reasons international organizations’ bureaucracies haven’t been central in research.
First, there was a wave of interest in the 1960s–70s—journals published studies on UN staff and internal bureaucracy. Over time, however, IR scholars focused more on geopolitics—war, peace, trade—and decided bureaucracies didn’t matter as much for those questions. Meanwhile, public administration shifted toward designs that were easier to study at scale. You can compare 50 local administrations with a modest budget; doing the same for 50 international bureaucracies is far harder.
Second, access to information was poor. Two or three decades ago, people were begging for faxed tables from Geneva or Paris to get basic data I can now Google. When the data weren’t available, many researchers left the topic.
Around the early 2010s, interest converged again across disciplines. I entered that community via a Munich University project in 2014.
Dan: When I worked on India’s Administrative Service years ago, I expected bureaucrats wouldn’t want to talk. Instead, they were eager, even relieved, to share. Once you got in the door—back when business cards mattered—you gained access to big networks. In the international sphere, that kind of access seems harder, perhaps increasingly so due to controversy sensitivity, fear of speaking out of turn, or cultural dynamics.
Let’s focus on the UN system. I’ve lost count of how many agencies there are—funds, programs, core and support bodies, and many small units. How would you describe the UN civil service today? Is recruitment merit-based? Is it still as attractive as it was decades ago?
Ronny: For people less familiar with the UN, most know the General Assembly and Security Council—and yes, international officials service those bodies. But that’s a relatively small part of the UN’s bureaucracy.
I usually describe a UN core centered in New York, Geneva, Nairobi, and Vienna, with Bonn growing and Rome focused on food agencies, plus Bangkok as a regional hub. This core looks like a typical public service: clear hierarchies, organizational charts similar to national administrations.
Over time, this core has been supplemented by bodies that began as funds and grew into organizations —UNDP is the classic example, expanding into a global bureaucracy.
Crucially, alongside the core workforce there’s a huge “shadow” workforce — consultants and short-term experts who move across agencies and projects. Many contracts are six or twelve months. This level of mobility and precarity is unlike most national systems and is often overlooked.
Dan: On the oft-quoted figure of ~100–120,000 people: does that include consultants and short-termers?
Ronny: Those official numbers (from UN databases) generally cover regular staff with contracts of at least a year. My guesstimate is that, across 40–60 organizations, the total workforce is at least double that.
I realized the scale while studying UNRWA (the Palestine refugee agency): a couple of hundred core UN staff on the UN payroll — but tens of thousands of local staff who don’t show up in official staff counts.
Why? UN officials get special protections and pay scales set by the International Civil Service Commission. In a system largely dependent on voluntary funding, putting large numbers of annually funded staff on the regular payroll is seen as too expensive. Keeping many as local or project staff cuts costs and signals impermanence—UNRWA’s mandate is renewed every three years, so technically it isn’t “permanent.”
Dan: There’s also a perception—especially in the Global South — that UN officials are paid too well compared to national civil servants: generous benefits, tax-free salaries, schooling, pensions. This fuels accusations of waste. Do UN officials need to be paid this much?
Ronny: On “waste,” I don’t begrudge anyone’s salary, but the gap between international and local pay can feel unjust—less so in high-cost duty stations like Geneva, more so elsewhere.
Importantly, salaries are set by member states, not by the UN bureaucracy. The International Civil Service Commission proposes scales and the General Assembly adopts them. If the Global South—holding a majority—wanted to reduce pay, it could. But once your nationals are in the system, you tend not to slash their incomes.
As to whether we recruit the best people: my research (mostly HQ-level, some field) doesn’t suggest a class of overpaid loafers. Yes, in any large system you’ll find a few “dark horses,” but the average UN official is not lazy or corrupt. A bigger issue is internal disparities — international staff on high packages working alongside nationally recruited staff on different scales, and consultants who may earn well for six months but face income gaps between projects.
Another point: what looks like bureaucratic inaction from the outside is often diplomatic “emotional labor.” Member states can be vague, divided, or contradictory; UN officials must navigate competing demands to avoid diplomatic blowups. That invisible work is real.
Dan: And of course there are big differences across grades—P1 to P5 and beyond—and duty stations. Many officials serve in difficult and dangerous postings (Afghanistan, Sudan, etc.). Those roles can be career-defining and deserve compensation.
Let’s turn to UN financing, your specialty. How bad is the situation in 2025 compared to the 2023 peak? Are we looking at something like a 30% drop?
Ronny: In 2023, funding peaked at around $70 billion across the system—driven by late-COVID spending, the Ukraine war (displacement, refugees), and the global food crisis (WFP needed far more funding).
By contrast, the core UN budget (the Secretariat, etc.) is only about $3.6 billion, plus roughly $6–7 billion for peacekeeping—say $10 billion combined. The rest (the majority) is voluntary funding for 50+ agencies.
For 2025, the projection is down to around $50 billion — about a 30% cut, and it hit quickly as the incoming U.S. administration slashed voluntary funds and delayed/withheld assessed contributions. Imagine a national government cutting 30% across agencies within weeks—chaos.
The U.S. owes the largest share — 22% of the regular budget, more for peacekeeping — around $2 billion of the ~$10 billion core. If the U.S. doesn’t pay in full, and China also pays late (its share is now ~20%), cashflow collapses. By spring 2025, UN HQs were already planning to underspend by ~$600 million versus the adopted budget, with a risk of ending the year much worse.
Consequences: a shadow budget of frozen vacancies; peacekeeping reimbursements to troop contributors (e.g., Nepal, India, Bangladesh) delayed; and project-heavy agencies like IOM having to terminate staff as projects stall.
Dan: When the UN was designed, how were member-state payments enforced? The U.S. long shouldered a big burden. Now we have a more multipolar world with China, India, and the broader Global South playing larger roles. Is that part of why some rich countries feel they can pay less or pay late? And what are the enforcement mechanisms—just naming and shaming?
Ronny: The assessed scale has always aimed to reflect economic capacity — richer countries pay more. Historically, the U.S. sometimes would have owed >30%, but caps were negotiated—today the maximum is 22%. In 2025, China rose to ~20%, so together the U.S. and China account for ~42% of the regular budget (even more for peacekeeping). If either doesn’t pay or pays late, the organization is in crisis.
Beyond assessed dues, most of the system’s money is voluntary (in 2023, perhaps only ~$15B of $70B was assessed). The U.S. historically added ~$10B in voluntary, earmarked funds; China contributes very little voluntarily. This year, the U.S. cut voluntary funds and didn’t fully pay assessed dues—so agencies lost both core and top-up money.
On enforcement: Article 19 allows suspending General Assembly voting rights if a country is two years in arrears. But if you’re the United States, losing one vote among 193 isn’t decisive. You still have a Security Council veto, attend meetings, and wield influence. In practice, naming-and-shaming has limited bite. (The UNESCO case a decade ago is instructive: the U.S. stayed a member without paying, lost voting rights, but still sat on the Executive Board.)
Dan: You mentioned China paying late—despite its strong pro-multilateral rhetoric. Why the delays?
Ronny: We don’t know for sure. Reporting suggests that instead of paying early in the year, China now pays in three tranches—a small spring payment, one in autumn, and a large payment very late (e.g., 27 December last year). From a cashflow perspective, that’s disastrous: if money arrives too late to be spent, unspent funds must be returned to member states in the subsequent budget cycle, which shrinks the following assessed budget and creates deficits through no fault of the Secretariat.
It could be signaling toward the U.S., or a way to exert control by tying payments to more frequent conversations with the UN. Publicly, China rarely addresses this alone; it speaks via the G77 + China, which criticizes the one big nonpayer (implicitly the U.S.) without acknowledging China’s timing issue.
Dan: On earmarking: I’ve seen trust funds do innovative, useful work, but they also create heavy reporting burdens and fragmentation—lots of individual projects, less pooled funding. As we close, two big questions:
Ronny: Fragmentation is driven by financing and disunity over priorities. Here’s the cycle: A coalition of 20 states wants the UN to prioritize an issue. They can’t get system-wide consensus, so they set up a trust fund and pay a UN body/NGO/company to do it anyway. Individually sensible; collectively, it splinters the system. Later, to control fragmentation, you create coordination structures—which replicate the original political disagreements.
On UN reforms (often referred to in current debates as UNAT reforms in shorthand): there are three streams:
Dan: There are rumors about moving more core functions from New York to Nairobi or elsewhere in the Global South to save costs. Is relocation a viable long-term solution?
Ronny: Most moves under discussion are partial—specific units, not entire organizations. Savings are often 1–3% of total costs—worth considering, but not game-changing, and relocation itself is costly up front. Strategically rebalancing where the UN is present can make sense (the world has changed since New York/Geneva-centric decisions were made), but pure cost-cutting via relocation won’t deliver major savings unless you move whole organizations — and even then, travel and operational realities may offset gains.
Dan: I’ve visited UN campuses in Nairobi and Addis Ababa; many staff like those postings—quality of life, strong facilities, salaries go further.
Before we wrap, you’ve recently stepped off the academic track and become an influential public commentator on this. Why the shift, and what are you working on now?
Ronny: I spent about a decade in academia (until January 2025), with earlier stints at an NGO—Transparency International—and independent research during my PhD. Academic careers can feel like diplomatic postings—moving from one university to another. I chose to prioritize local life near Berlin. My project at Potsdam ended, and I considered shifting to local administration or business.
Ironically, I didn’t think there was much public interest in UN finance and bureaucracy—Twitter never showed much. But this spring I began posting on LinkedIn; the response was huge. Now I write almost daily on the UN financial crisis and the reform process. I cross-post everything to my blog (ronnie-putts.de) because LinkedIn’s algorithm buries older posts.
I’m freelancing, supported partly by crowdfunding, and doing small pieces of analysis and think-tank work. I’ll likely comment actively through the fall of 2025—a crunch period for UN finances and reform—and then reassess in early 2026. Never say never; I didn’t expect to be here, so let’s see what January 2026 brings.
Dan: You’re doing a fantastic public service. I’ve learned a lot from your posts and from this conversation. Ronny, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Ronny: Thank you for having me, Dan. A real pleasure.
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