Officials at the World Health Organisation – whose anti-vaping messaging border on disinformation to the point where they are routinely called out on Twitter/X – are staring down the barrel of 25% staff cuts in the wake of Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the organisation.
“The refusal of the U.S. to pay its assessed contributions for 2024 and 2025, combined with reductions in official development assistance by some other countries, means we are facing a salary gap for the 2026–27 biennium of between US$ 560 and US$ 650 million” the WHO’s Director General, Dr Tederos Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told Member States at a briefing on 22 April.
“[T]he sudden drop in income has left us with a large salary gap and no choice but to reduce the scale of our work and workforce” he continued.
“[W]e are facing a salary gap for the 2026–27 biennium of at least US$ 560 million. This represents about 25% of staff costs…[e]xactly how many positions are abolished will depend on many factors, including grade and duty station”.
With much of the disinformation about safer nicotine products originating from the WHO itself or from its cheerleaders, harm reduction campaigners are hopeful that such a precipitous drop in the organisation’s budget might lead it to refocus away from culture wars on nicotine and towards more pressing matters like the conclusion of a pandemic treaty.
But the way WHO’s work on tobacco is structured makes this a less straightforward proposition. The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) – an international treaty on tobacco products which has been misinterpreted by prohibitionists as an invitation to attack safer nicotine products – has its own Secretariat which is financed separately from the main WHO budget. Since the US is not a signatory to the FCTC, it never contributed to the budget, meaning there’s no American funding that the White House can pull.
That’s not to say Trump’s decision to leave WHO will have no impact.
“About 45% of the FCTC budget is from Assessed Contributions which the USA doesn’t pay” explains Martin Cullip, International Fellow of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance Consumer Center. “The rest is from extrabudgetary contributions which are voluntary and come from organisations such as the Bloomberg and Gates Foundations, which have strings attached”.
One organisation that provides extrabudgetary contributions is the CDC Foundation, which is controlled by the US government, so the FCTC may lose that. But more importantly, the WHO may ask philanthropic donors like Bloomberg and Gates to divert funding away from FCTC and towards more urgent priorities that are subject to reduced funding. Were that to happen, we might see a significant drop off from the FCTC Secretariat.
There is also a question mark around other informal bodies that the US finances. Cullip cites the Global Tobacco Regulators Forum as one such organisation.
