The United Nations began this year by cutting 2,900 positions, with more than 1,000 staff already laid off. The reductions are the culmination of a process last year that ended up conflating an intended reform project, Secretary-General António Guterres’ UN80 initiative to respond to member states’ demands to update and streamline the institution for a new era, with budget cuts driven by drastic declines in funding from members, especially the United States under the second Trump administration.
The UN80 reform was to be an ambitious agenda to improve efficiency, update mandates, and realign the system, but it has increasingly been shaped and constrained by the U.N.’s most serious financial crisis in decades, caused in part by delayed or missing assessed contributions. As UN80 is implemented this year, it risks becoming a de facto cost-cutting and merging exercise that falls overwhelmingly on the functional staff who carry out the U.N.’s core mandates. It is the latest chapter in a long pattern of reforms that rearrange power without restoring purpose, leaving the U.N. top-heavy, with a confused mandate and less able to deliver for the people it was created to serve.
We write as two human rights lawyers who have worked with and inside the U.N. system, and who believe that the institution hollowing itself from within poses an even bigger threat to the U.N. than do detractors and budget cuts. Nowhere is this clearer than in the U.N. Human Rights Council and its operating arm, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
A Case Study: Human Rights Investigations on the Brink
As the Security Council has become paralyzed by its five permanent members making use of their veto power to protect their allies and interests in almost all major contemporary conflicts, it has increasingly been unable to take decisive, collective action to prevent violence, enforce international law, or uphold international peace and security. As a result, the Human Rights Council’s independent investigative bodies have become one of the few remaining parts of the U.N. capable of producing real impact. They document atrocities, support universal jurisdiction (when the national courts of a country prosecute serious international crimes, regardless of which country the crimes were committed in and irrespective of the nationality of the perpetrator or victim), inform courts, and preserve evidence in places such as Sudan, Ukraine, Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Belarus, Venezuela, and Afghanistan.
The independent experts themselves provide oversight and legitimacy, but they are in unpaid positions and not responsible for the intensive work required to implement these mandates. A typical mandate requires a coordinator, a team leader, investigators, a legal advisor, analysts, and communications and support staff. Today, many of these bodies operate with only a fraction of the intended working-level staff, as liquidity crises, hiring freezes, and internal incentives push leadership into a self-preserving reflex of shielding long-standing staff and protecting permanent contracts. And administrative security takes precedence over operational efficiency, even when staff lack the specialized expertise required for investigations and accountability work.
The fact-finding mission on Sudan, mandated to investigate one of the world’s largest and most brutal active conflicts, has filled less than one-third of its approved positions. Iran’s gender-focused fact-finding mission had dwindled to a few staff members at one point in late 2025, though staffing has rebounded again. A new independent investigative mechanism on Afghanistan created by the Human Rights Council in October, , which is critical in a context where the Taliban are removing women from public life, depends on voluntary contributions because the U.N.’s core budget cannot support it. And the chair of the fact-finding mission on Venezuela announced her resignation at the start of the year, becoming the third member to resign in quick succession. In doing so, she cited a lack of resources as impeding the mission’s substantive work.
That’s not to mention growing concerns about stark inequalities between staffing in Geneva and staffing in the field. Such disparities are feeding worries that headquarters posts are being protected while essential investigative capacity is being eroded. One independent expert told us, “We are fighting to keep our people,” and expressed disbelief that the cuts Geneva was demanding from field-level staff are far more severe than the budget tightening publicly described.
There is also a cognitive dissonance between the diplomatic functions of the Human Rights Council manifesting the political will of member States and the operational realities of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, who lacks the funding and operational support for implementation, a disconnect that investigative bodies are forced to absorb. As paralysis at the U.N. Security Council deepens, the Human Rights Council remains one of the few arenas where diplomats can meaningfully confront impunity. It has sought to meet this demand by creating an expanding number of investigative mandates to address crises around the world. While laudable in theory, this mandate inflation is not matched by credible financing, or practical staffing plans. The High Commissioner’s Office has, for example, advertised a full panoply of positions to staff the fact-finding mission on the Democratic Republic of Congo, even though High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said in December that the office is experiencing deep funding cuts, including for DRC efforts.
This is not only inefficient. These bodies are the backbone of accountability efforts worldwide. The European Court of Human Rights ruling last July that Russia is responsible for widespread human rights abuses during its war on Ukraine depended heavily on documentation from the Human Rights Council’s Ukraine Commission of Inquiry. The Council’s investigative mechanism for Myanmar has assisted prosecutors in Argentina in investigating serious international crimes committed against the Rohingya for a universal jurisdiction case. Further such cases in Germany, Sweden, France, and other countries rely on evidence collected by Human Rights Council bodies. They provide the ability for investigators and judicial authorities worldwide to supplement investigations and findings where long physical distances, inability to visit the crime scene, lack of familiarity with the context, and limited resources would prevent judges and prosecutors from effectively seeking justice. If these mechanisms collapse, accountability collapses with them.
UN80’s Deeper Problem: Reform Without Purpose as Power Remains Untouched
The UN80 initiative acknowledges fragmentation and inefficiency in the U.N. system, but it does not answer the most important question: reform for what? As discussions among U.N. member states reveal, even governments that support reform worry that cuts are driven by austerity, and that the U.N.’s ability to carry out its mission will suffer.
Years of political manipulation and easy funding for whatever program happens to be the flavor of the hour have pulled U.N. entities away from their original mandates, creating confusion about what the U.N. is trying to be. Is it a humanitarian responder, a normative authority, a development contractor, a peace broker, a technical agency, or a donor-funded service provider? Perhaps it does need to be all or many of those to a certain extent, but it cannot keep expanding into every role without a coherent theory of purpose establishing clear priorities, institutional discipline, and political backing. Without clarity of purpose, restructuring becomes choreography. Clustering agencies or merging functions cannot fix a crisis of legitimacy. Coherence cannot be engineered when the system lacks consensus on its mission.
The structural forces that undermine the U.N.’s ability to deliver on its mandates remain unaddressed. The five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, Russia, China, the U.K., and France — continue to shape outcomes through their veto power, paralyzing responses to the very crises that investigative bodies document. Donor governments exert disproportionate influence through earmarked funding, which skews priorities and pushes agencies to pursue donor-preferred projects rather than country needs. Senior U.N. leadership positions continue to be allocated through geopolitical bargaining, creating incentives that prioritize diplomacy over operational effectiveness.
UN80 does not confront these realities. The proposed reform process focuses on administrative reorganization without addressing the political economy that determines which mandates are protected and which are quietly weakened. When power remains untouched, cuts fall where resistance is weakest — on working-level staff, on investigative bodies, and on mandates that challenge powerful states. Reforms that avoid politics fail to resolve inequities and play into them instead.
The Human Cost: A Top-Heavy System That Protects Itself First
Across the U.N., staff are bearing the brunt of cuts, especially national staff and those serving in conflict zones. Senior management positions remain largely untouched, and new posts are being created that cannot be funded even as working-level expertise is eliminated.
We have witnessed how internal hiring practices prioritize tenure and contract type over merit and expertise. Staff with deep technical and investigative skills on temporary contracts are routinely displaced in favor of permanent staff with little relevant background but better contracts. A system that rewards seniority over competence is a system consuming its own capacity.
If U.N. leadership wants to restore credibility, it must model shared sacrifice. In global civil society, leaders often absorb risk to protect mission and staff. The U.N. must do the same.
Some argue that greater transparency about the U.N.’s weaknesses will embolden bad faith actors who attack multilateralism or target agencies such as U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinians. But these critics are not the U.N.’s base. Even governments that challenge U.N. norms, including Russia and China, do not withdraw from the U.N. And while the Trump administration recently announced a withdrawal from 66 U.N. agencies, it still stopped far short of a full pullout. Global powers compete within the U.N. because it remains the main global forum with broad legitimacy.
A Way Forward: Rebuild Purpose, Power, and People
The U.N. can reverse its decline by repairing the foundations that allow the institution to function: a clear purpose, a balanced distribution of power, and staff with expertise to sustain its most consequential work. That means the U.N. must:
Rebuild strategic purpose.
A credible reform process must begin with a shared understanding of what the U.N. exists to do in a century shaped by mass displacement, climate collapse, digital repression, and rising authoritarianism. That purpose must be defined with all member states, and especially with developing and conflict-affected countries, not only with those that are the biggest donors. Without renewed purpose, reform will be driven by cuts rather than impact. Reform that excludes the Global South is merely managed decline.
Rebalance power and accountability, beginning with human rights mechanisms.
The U.N.’s most consequential accountability tools—including its investigative mechanisms, commissions of inquiry, and fact-finding missions, as noted above—are also its most fragile. Protecting them must be the first step in rebalancing power within the system. This requires insulating investigative bodies from discretionary cuts, ending practices that preserve headquarters-based posts while eroding field expertise, and ensuring that leadership is selected for investigative and legal competence rather than institutional longevity or political bargaining. In the U.N.’s human rights bodies, this requires predictable funding for fact-finding missions and commissions of inquiry so staffing reflects the gravity of their mandates and their intended impacts. If the U.N. is serious about accountability, these mechanisms must be treated as essential global public goods.
Creating alternative structures outside of the U.N., or that may seek to take the place of the U.N., such as President Donald Trump’s proposed Board of Peace, is hardly a solution for many reasons, including that it lacks the transparency needed to solve the world’s crises in a fair and equitable way.
Conclusion
UN80 could have been a turning point. Instead, it risks becoming another exercise in managerial reshuffling that protects power rather than the U.N.’s mandates and cuts staff rather than reducing inefficiencies. The U.N. was created for moments of crisis. If it is to survive its first year after 80 with integrity, senior leadership must be honest with themselves and understand that the Trump administration’s budget cuts necessitate a new way of working. They cannot simply trim the less costly posts at the bottom of the organizational pyramid that keep the U.N. running with impact. They must be willing to sacrifice some of their own and chart a new vision for a world that is increasingly regressing into “might is right” politics.
This is the only way the U.N. can prevent decline from within, and the sooner that reinvention occurs, the better. The world has long depended on multilateralism as a pillar of peace and justice. Notwithstanding vocal but isolated calls for retreat, communities across the globe — and even the American public — continue to depend on it.
