Trump’s Needlessly Expensive Plan to Replace WHO Tool Revealed

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.

The 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.

The Trump administration pulled the United States 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.

But 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, or GOARN, in newly localized efforts to stay abreast of changes in global health.

The 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.

The 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 America’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.

Meanwhile, 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.

But the Trump administration would apparently prefer to spend more, not less, for an inferior product.

Public 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.

“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.”

President Trump wants to build a 5,000-person military base in Gaza.

Board of Peace contracting records viewed by The Guardian show that the Trump administration plans to use more than 350 acres of desolate land in southern Gaza full of twisted metal from multiple Israeli bombing campaigns to construct a massive base with 26 armored watchtowers, bunkers, an arms range, and a storage warehouse—all encircled in barbed wire.

The base will serve as the headquarters for the upcoming International Stabilization Force, which the Trump and the Jared Kushner–led Board of Peace say will have de facto control of Gaza. It is unclear what the rules of engagement for this force will be, and whether they will collaborate with the United Nations in any way.

“The Board of Peace is a kind of legal fiction, nominally with its own international legal personality separate from both the UN and the United States, but in reality it’s just an empty shell for the United States to use as it sees fit,” Rutgers law professor Adil Haque told The Guardian.

More importantly, this move shows once again that even amid the destruction and violence of Israel’s genocide, Palestinian sovereignty is still of no concern to the Trump administration, or any parties involved in this so-called Board of Peace.

“Whose permission did they get to build that military base?” asked Palestinian Canadian lawyer Diana Buttu.

Donald Trump announced Thursday that he wants the United States to contribute $10 billion to his so-called Board of Peace—essentially forming a slush fund of taxpayer money the president can use however he likes.

Speaking at the board’s inaugural meeting in Washington, Trump assured the folks watching at home that $10 billion was “a very small number when you look at that compared to the cost of war.”

There’s just one problem: Transferring billions of taxpayer dollars would require congressional approval. And Trump has not gotten that.

So far, Trump’s foreign policy has been nothing short of an assault on Congress’s power of the purse. The president has unilaterally declared war against foreign drug smugglers, launching a series of deadly extrajudicial strikes on vessels the government claims—but refuses to prove—are carrying drugs. (These strikes are still ongoing: 11 people were killed as recently as Monday.) Not to mention the massive military operation Trump mounted to depose a foreign leader and steal that country’s oil—all without Congress’s ever declaring war.

Now Trump wants to use U.S. money to facilitate Jared Kushner’s master plan for Gaza—just another luxury real estate grift.

Even if Trump did ask Congress for the funds, it doesn’t seem likely that it would approve. Currently, Democrats and the White House remain in a deadlock over funding for the Department of Homeland Security, resulting in a partial government shutdown. With midterm elections (and a potential upheaval in Congress) on the horizon, now isn’t exactly the best time for the president to make a major foreign policy slush fund, as Republicans may be hoping to convince their constituents they still put America first.

There is one other source of money Trump could potentially dip into. The president previously sold permanent seats on his board for $1 billion a head, but refused to say where that money was going.

President Trump has once again dozed off on camera at his own event.

Footage shows Trump looking extremely drowsy at his inaugural “Board of Peace” meeting on Thursday at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. His eyelids grew heavy during Major General Jasper Jeffers III’s presentation, and if he didn’t fall asleep completely, he at least looked incredibly disinterested in his own creation.

Trump continued to doze as several international dignitaries spoke.

The “bored of peace” jokes write themselves.

This is only the most recent instance of Trump’s drowsiness getting the best of him. The 79-year-old’s eyes were completely shut at multiple points of his whole-milk legislation signing ceremony last month. He struggled to stay awake during a marijuana rescheduling executive order signing, looked absolutely exhausted at his own Cabinet meeting in December, and fell asleep once again at a Rwanda–Democratic Republic of the Congo peace agreement signing.

This is clearly a pattern of behavior that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for the average 79-year-old man, but this is the president. Questions of cognitive decline and fitness for office are valid, and should be raised as midterms approach.

Even Florida cops are pulling their support from Representative Randy Fine over the Republican’s recent Islamophobic tirade.

Just days before Ramadan, Fine turned a simple joke about Islam’s prohibition against dogs into plain old bigotry, writing on X that “if they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”

Fine’s blatant religious intolerance inspired Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood to rescind his endorsement Thursday, writing on Facebook that Fine’s anti-Muslim commentary had carved “a path I just can’t follow.”

“I respect his fight for his faith and his beliefs. But I have to part ways when that fight turns into an attack on our Muslim neighbors,” Chitwood wrote, adding that Fine’s hatred doesn’t “align with my responsibility to stand up and protect the entire community.”

There are two Islamic congregations in Volusia County, compared to thousands of Protestant and Catholic parishioners, according to data from the Association of Religious Data Archives. Yet Chitwood—unlike Fine—recognizes that his public office requires him to protect and represent all religious bodies with equal fervor. In his missive, Chitwood noted that the county’s Muslim residents, who include business leaders, philanthropists, doctors, and teachers, had provided significant contributions to the community.

But it’s far from the first time that Fine has made vile, xenophobic remarks. The Arizonan-born MAGA diehard—who boasted last year that he was AIPAC’s “fastest-ever endorsement”—has come out in favor of starving Gazans, advocated for the mass deportation of Muslim American citizens from the U.S., and pushed for a bill that would allow drivers to mow down pro-Palestinian protesters if they blocked the road.

Chitwood noted in his post that he “[appreciates] the good work Rep. Fine has done to protect our Jewish neighbors, but as Sheriff I just can’t turn a blind eye to the harm he’s doing to our Muslim community.”

“In Volusia County, that community is small, but no less deserving of protection,” he wrote.

After a “frank” conversation with Fine, Chitwood posted another statement to his page, this time penned by Fine, at the lawmaker’s request.

“I respect Sheriff Chitwood and every thing he’s done to keep Volusia County safe, no matter your religious faith,” Fine said, according to Chitwood’s post. “We agree that no one should face discrimination for who they are and that no one should be able to use their faith to force their values on others.”