The United States already pays well over one-fifth of the unproductive U.N.'s bills. And those costs are about to go higher.
U.N. headquarters in New York is undergoing a major "facelift," and the cost estimate keeps going up. A decade ago, when the work was originally mapped out, it was supposed to cost between $875 million and $1.2 billion, notes Brett Schaefer, the Jay Kingham Fellow in international regulatory affairs at The Heritage Foundation.
Now the official U.N. estimate of the cost is nearly $2 billion. And the U.N. acknowledges that even that huge figure may have to be revised upward.
U.S. Ambassador Joseph Torsella at the U.S. mission to the U.N. was understandably furious.
"U.S. support [is] not a blank check from American taxpayers" to the U.N., he declared.
Nor should it be. At its best, the U.N. is a bureaucratic money-waster, and at worst it directly or indirectly defends oppressive regimes around the world. Americans shouldn't be footing the bill for that.