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  "path": "/post/206798/donald-trump-expensive-plan-replace-world-health-organization",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-19T19:11:31.000Z",
  "site": "https://newrepublic.com",
  "tags": [
    "Breaking News",
    "Politics",
    "Republican Party",
    "Donald Trump",
    "Money",
    "Health",
    "Public Health",
    "World Health Organization",
    "Infectious Diseases",
    "epidemic",
    "_The Washington Post_",
    "unfairly onerous payments",
    "sidestepped the government"
  ],
  "textContent": "It won’t be bigger or better, but the Trump administration is reportedly working to create a U.S. dupe of the World Health Organization.\n\nThe Department of Health and Human Services is proposing a plan that would cost taxpayers $2 billion a year to recreate the same systems that the country had access to when it was a member of the WHO, according to officials that spoke with _The Washington Post_ Thursday.\n\nThe Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of the WHO on January 22. In a statement, DHS blamed the exit on the global public health entity’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet Donald Trump—who railed against the WHO for years—saw it differently. On his first day back in office, Trump chalked the withdrawal up to “unfairly onerous payments,” claiming that the cost of membership within the WHO was disproportionately shouldered by the U.S.\n\nBut the federal directive has not quelled nationwide demand for health data. Over the last several weeks, Illinois and California both sidestepped the government to independently join the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) in newly localized efforts to stay abreast of changes in global health.\n\nThe White House’s plan to recreate the WHO’s health surveillance operation would involve the creation of laboratories, data-sharing networks, and rapid-response systems that the U.S. abandoned when it withdrew from the WHO last month—only this time, it will cost Americans much, much more.\n\nThe total cost could be as much as three times the price of America’s WHO membership. Citing figures in the proposal, U.S. officials told the _Post_ that the U.S.’s contributions to the WHO fell somewhere between 15 and 18 percent of the entity’s total annual funding of $3.7 billion. On the high end, that would represent a $666 million annual membership fee.\n\nMeanwhile, the Trump administration worked decisively last year to gut USAID, which did much of the work that the White House is planning to do with its slapdash WHO replacement.\n\nBut the Trump administration would apparently prefer to spend more, not less, for an inferior product.\n\nPublic health researchers were appalled by the initiative, arguing that the U.S.-led operation would not serve as an adequate or effective replacement to the WHO’s data sharing program.\n\n“Spending two to three times the cost to create what we already had access to makes absolutely no sense in terms of fiscal stewardship,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the _Post_. “We’re not going to get the same quality or breadth of information we would have by being in the WHO, or have anywhere the influence we had.”",
  "title": "Trump Has Needlessly Expensive Plan to Replace Crucial WHO Tool"
}