After blasting WHO costs, Trump officials propose more expensive alternative

After pulling out of the World Health Organization, the Trump administration is proposing spending $2 billion a year to replicate the global disease surveillance and outbreak functions the United States once helped build and accessed at a fraction of the cost, according to three administration officials briefed on the proposal.

The effort to build a U.S.-run alternative would re-create systems such as laboratories, data-sharing networks and rapid-response systems the U.S. abandoned when it announced its withdrawal from the WHO last year and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations.

While President Donald Trump accused the WHO of demanding “unfairly onerous payments,” the alternative his administration is considering carries a price tag about three times what the U.S. contributed annually to the U.N. health agency. The U.S. would build on bilateral agreements with countries and expand the presence of its health agencies to dozens of additional nations, the officials said.

“This $2 billion in funding to HHS is to build the systems and capacities to do what the WHO did for us,” one official said.

Public health experts said the effort would be costly and unlikely to match the WHO’s reach.

“Spending two to three times the cost to create what we already had access to makes absolutely no sense in terms of fiscal stewardship,” said Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who served as a senior covid-19 adviser during the Biden administration. “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.”

Read full story (paywalled)

Source: Washington Post, 19 February 2026