President Donald Trump's ambassador to the United Nations is vowing to force a massive reform at the global agency, pledging to slim it down through privatization and create more accountability in the wake of revelations that one of its relief agencies in Gaza funded employees who participated in the 2023 terrorist attack in Israel.

"The charge from the president is to clean this place up and get it working for the American people," U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz said Thursday night in a wide-ranging interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show that focused on ending abuses and fraud in American foreign aid.

"What President Trump has done with NATO, we're looking to do to the United Nations," he added.

Waltz sharply criticized the Biden administration for turning a blind eye to fraud across America's multibillion foreign aid system and specifically for re-funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) despite evidence of close ties to the terror group Hamas.

Trump ended funding for UNRWA after taking office in 2025, and the USAID inspector general revealed last month that more than 100 workers funded by UNRWA have been identified as having participated in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities in Israel.

Waltz said those revelations are a wakeup call for the world that the U.N. is not serving its charter, and the Trump administration has already forced significant changes in recent months.

"We forced them to take their first budget cut ever in their 80-year history. They are going to fire 3,000 U.N. bureaucrats out of the headquarters building in New York. We're going to get more of our aid dollars," he said. "...And then there's 90,000 U.N. peacekeepers around the world. We've cut 25% of them. So we put the U.N. on a diet."

Waltz said the next round of reforms that the U.S. will force as the largest contributor to the U.N. will be modeled after Trump's effort to make European allies pick up a greater share of the NATO burden.

"The American people are generous people when it comes to tsunamis or earthquakes, like we just had in Venezuela, or other types of famine. But we need to know that it's not filtering through a bloated bureaucracy; that it's actually getting to people in need,” he said. “We're making it leaner and more focused.”

“I think people rightly ask why we're even involved at all. I say two things. Number one, you need one place in the world where everyone can talk, and if we just walk out, I don't want to see the U.N. in Beijing or Brussels or somewhere else, we need to get in there and fight and win for American interests,” Waltz added. “And then number two, there's a burden sharing component to it. I don't want to see U.S. troops in places like Gaza or, you know, dealing with the gangs in Haiti when the U.N. is willing to go in there and we can push that agenda. I think that's something that's in line with the president's America First foreign policy.”

Waltz succinctly summarized Trump’s policy toward the U.N.

“So, diplomacy first, words before bullets, and burden sharing are two of the reasons we're still trying to keep this place up. But ultimately, that's the charge from President Trump: Help it realize its potential, and the U.N. should be helping him craft these peace deals around the world,” he said.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer agreed during the show on Thursday that the U.S. should continue to cut funding for the U.N., particularly as it relates to USAID funding, which has already seen cuts under the Trump administration.

“That was the first thing they cut when [Elon] Musk started DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency]. That was the very first entity,” Comer said. “And remember how bad the Democrats and the media acted. They clutched their pearls and went on MSNBC and screamed bloody murder. But now we're seeing that this was going to fund, you know, terrorist activity. This is going to fund groups that hate America and everything America stands for. So, the Democrats don't think there's one penny of fraud in the federal government, and there's significant fraud.”

Comer went on to say that in addition to cutting the U.N. workforce, the Trump administration has also cut “left-wing activists” from the federal government workforce.

“A lot of your deep state actors are left-wing activists. A lot of the employees in the EPA and other government agencies are left-wing activists,” he said. “One of the greatest accomplishments, I think, of this administration and this Congress is that there are 350,000 less federal employees today than there were when Donald Trump took office the second term. And if you look at the federal government, you look at spending, the biggest expense in just about every government agency and every division of every cabinet is personnel. So, we have shrank the government, even though I don't think a lot of people realize that, and that's a step in the right direction. We've got a long way to go, but there has been progress in the last two years.”

Former USAID Inspector General Jonathan Schofield, who spent 25 years working to root out fraud in the federal government, said his agency would actually travel to investigate fraud stemming from USAID funding.

“They're not sitting in the embassy. They're going out. They're doing field visits and interviews and conducting investigations that have had tremendous results,” he said. “So, that is something that I think is a very, very important first step to remember in terms of how it is that foreign assistance can be protected moving forward. We have the answer. You have a really solid, experienced cadre of professionals who know how to address it.”

And fraud is still being found across government spending.

Most recently, the Health and Human Services department is investigating more than $80 million spent in California on refugee programs and other public disbursements that went to supporting terror organizations, according to Gregg Roman, executive director of the Middle East Forum.

“The theme of this was that there was so much money being granted to overseas assistance without any oversight, without any audit, without any forensic review of what was going on,” Roman said. “Contractors were just trying to cough the money up from the U.S. government and spend it willy-nilly before their fiscal year ended, and this culture of largess, of no accountability, ended up being given to individuals and organizations which were contrary to what I think would be where America would want to spend its funds.”