Global Bureaucracies Must Answer Tough Money Questions - Now

OPINION

Global Bureaucracies Must Start Genuinely Embracing Transparency

U.S. taxpayers having to foot the bill for deeply dysfunctional federal, state, and local governments is bad enough.

On top of rising spending and red ink, struggling Americans are being "asked" to pay nearly $20 billion per year to the United Nations (UN) and sub-agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO).

Taxpayers deserve to know what this gargantuan bill for intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) is funding.

Unfortunately, UN and WHO activities are shrouded in secrecy and largely exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)-style laws ubiquitous across the developed world. Instead of providing basic information on core operations, global bureaucracies boot journalists from their meetings and redact anything they can.

It’s time for the UN and its sub-agencies to embrace honesty and transparency.

A little sunlight shouldn’t be too much to ask for any governing body.

Thanks to a 12-year effort spearheaded by the late Rep. John Moss, D-Calif., Americans can submit FOIA requests to just about any federal agency and obtain a wide array of documents and communications.

States and localities have passed their own information access laws, allowing residents to gain critical insight into the activities of their governments.

The Taxpayers Protection Alliance Foundation and countless other organizations have used these laws to peer into bureaucracies and better understand regulatory holdups.

Watchdog groups have not had similar success obtaining information from global bureaucracies such as the UN. Despite celebrating "World Press Freedom Day" every May 3 and claiming "Freedom of information is an integral part of the fundamental right of freedom of expression," the UN does not have a FOIA-style law on the books.

Longtime UN correspondent Thalif Deen notes, "a longstanding proposal for a FOIA at the United Nations has failed to get off the ground due largely to the inaction by the 193-member General Assembly, the UN’s highest policy making body, resulting in the lack of transparency in the inner workings of the UN and its Secretariat."

This leaves journalists and watchdogs with few outlets for information because, "most senior UN officials . . . never had even the basic courtesy or etiquette to respond to phone calls or email messages even with an acknowledgment."

Some UN sub-agencies have taken heed of taxpayers’ and journalists’ concerns and implemented rudimentary FOIA-like policies.

However, these modest provisions are often sorely lacking.

For example, the WHO’s "Information Disclosure Policy" states that, "Information, the disclosure of which may adversely affect WHO’s relations with a Member State or other intergovernmental organization" is considered "confidential information" that "is not normally subject to disclosure."

In other words, any documentation of any disagreement between the WHO and any of its 194 member states can be shielded from public view.

This broad-based prohibition on information disclosure has come at the cost of addressing global pandemics and tobacco harm reduction efforts.

WHO bureaucrats are notoriously anti-vaping and have claimed "these products [e-cigarettes] are harmful to health and are not safe" despite ample evidence to the contrary.

Member states such as the United Kingdom (UK) have boldly defied the WHO’s stance and readily embraced vaping as a smoking alternative that is 95 percent safer than tobacco products.

It would be helpful to see communications between UK public health officials and WHO bureaucrats to determine areas of disagreement and make sense of these disparate policy approaches.

But, until the WHO lifts its iron curtain of secrecy, no such communications will come to light. It would similarly be interesting to know why the WHO was so hostile to Taiwanese scientists and journalists (especially during the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic) but that information will never come to light as long as China remains a member state.

The UN and the WHO have enjoyed the best of both worlds, taking billions of dollars' worth of taxpayer funding without having to answer any tough questions about their inner workings and the expenditure of that money.

This sorry status-quo will not change until IGOs embrace FOIA-style information disclosure. Taxpayers and journalists are tired of unaccountable global bureaucracies mired in secrecy.

David Williams is the president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.