President Trump Orders the U.S. to Exit the World Health Organization and Paris Climate Agreement on His First Day in Office
The actions will take effect in a year, reinstating withdrawals he had set in motion during his first term
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/Sara_-_Headshot_thumbnail.png)
President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders on the first day of his second term in office on Monday, and among them were motions to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization (WHO). Climate and public health experts have expressed concern about these actions, which they say will endanger the nation’s ability to shape the global response to climate change as well as its fight against infectious disease.
During Trump’s first term as president, he issued similar executive actions. His decision to exit the Paris Agreement took effect in late 2020 and was quickly overturned when Joe Biden entered office months later. Because U.S. law requires one year of notice before exiting the WHO, the country had not fully withdrawn from the agency before Biden was sworn in and reversed that motion, too. This time, by issuing the orders on his first day of presidency, Trump will be able to see these decisions through, writes USA Today’s Eduardo Cuevas.
The president has been vocal about his frustrations with the international climate pact, which aims to limit long-term global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels—a threshold scientists say is necessary for avoiding the more extreme effects of climate change. In previous remarks, Trump has called the Paris Agreement unfair to Americans.
His executive order regarding the Paris accords says that international agreements the U.S. has joined in recent years “do not reflect our country’s values or our contributions to the pursuit of economic and environmental objectives. Moreover, these agreements steer American taxpayer dollars to countries that do not require, or merit, financial assistance in the interests of the American people.”
Trump also signed an executive order expressing intent to withdraw from the WHO, a United Nations agency that he has accused of being “owned and controlled by China.” He has said the group mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic, while the WHO has denied the president’s allegations, report Reuters’ Patrick Wingrove, Jennifer Rigby and Emma Farge.
The U.S. is currently the WHO’s largest financial backer, contributing around 18 percent of the group’s funding. Removing this support from the organization will leave the WHO with fewer resources for its programs, including its work on fighting Zika and Ebola. The executive order says the WHO asked for “unfairly onerous payments” from the U.S.
“We hope the United States will reconsider,” the WHO said in a statement on Tuesday. “We look forward to engaging in constructive dialogue to maintain the partnership between the USA and WHO, for the benefit of the health and well-being of millions of people around the globe.”
Trump’s order to exit the Paris Agreement comes just after 2024 became the hottest year on record and while wildfires continue to wreak havoc around Los Angeles. Iran, Yemen and Libya are currently the only countries not signed onto the Paris Agreement.
“President Trump’s decision to withdraw once again the United States from the Paris Agreement is extremely disappointing, if not unexpected,” Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, says in a statement. “It means that the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases will be turning its back on the landmark agreement in a year when all countries are due to come forward with more ambitious pledges for action ahead of the next United Nations climate change summit in Brazil in November.”
Critics also say the U.S. will be negatively impacted by exiting the WHO. Withdrawing is “really bad for the U.S. [in terms of] access to data, to surveillance, to being at the table negotiating and holding other countries accountable when there is an epidemic or pandemic,” says Elisha Dunn-Georgiou, president and CEO of the Global Health Council, a nonpartisan group that advocates for global health, to NPR’s Gabrielle Emanuel.
Recently, conservatives have criticized an effort by the WHO to create a “pandemic treaty” that would require member countries to conduct surveillance of pathogens, share data and support vaccine manufacturing, per the New York Times’ Sheryl Gay Stolberg.
Brett Schaefer, a researcher at the Heritage Foundation, the D.C.-based think tank that published the “Project 2025” Presidential Transition Project, tells NPR that other global health groups, such as UNAIDS and the Vaccine Alliance, could lead the fight against health crises like pandemics.
“In the next pandemic,” Lawrence Gostin, a global public health expert at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, tells USA Today, “we might find ourselves at the back of the line, on the outside looking in.”
