Trump should cut US funding to the World Bank

Still, recognizing the moral and investment interests of free markets, the U.S. should redirect its World Bank funding to other agencies such as USAID. That choice will allow the world’s poorest peoples a greater chance of prosperity, while also sending a clear message of discontent to how the World Bank is being run.

Of course, some believe the World Bank’s environment investment agenda is just great. Professor Jason Kirk recently lauded the organization’s abandonment of fossil fuel investments. Indeed, he says the bank’s efforts don’t go far enough in that the bank says it may assist with a very limited number of fossil fuel projects.

“Given the bank’s emphasis on climate action,” Kirk claims “supporting oil, gas and coal production — the main cause of climate change — makes little institutional sense.”

Consider those words.

Kirk is saying that the World Bank’s priority mission is now no longer to bring peoples out of poverty and foster conditions for sustainable economic growth, but rather to fight climate change. This isn’t just mission creep, it’s mission transformation made through the looking glass! And in that, it is absolutely not what the U.S. or any other founding member of the World Bank signed up for. This is not why Congress appropriates taxpayer money to the World Bank every year.

But Kirk wasn’t done. The professor and his colleagues also “expect developing countries to continue to exploit their oil and gas deposits even without the World Bank’s help, even if that means they reap less revenue from these industries due to their weaker bargaining power.”

Stated with such moral ambivalence, those words hide a very dark portent. After all, if poor nations now find themselves less able to generate revenues from their energy industries, they will have far less money to invest in their peoples future prosperity. And that’s even before considering the higher operating costs that green energy projects impose on consumers versus fossil fuel based programs. How are the impoverished of Bangladesh, Chad, Burkina Faso and many other nations supposed to pay their green energy bills?

Kirk doesn’t say. Perhaps he doesn’t care. Regardless, considering relative poverty rates in developing nations (which make U.S. poverty look like a vacation), this lost revenue will cost lives and immense suffering.

Let’s be clear, what the World Bank is doing here is accepting the sustained subordination of impoverished peoples to the agenda of liberal arrogance. Clinking glasses at the high-end bars near their Foggy Bottom headquarters in Washington D.C., Kim and his top World Bank staffers must be proud of themselves. Tens of millions — perhaps hundreds — will suffer unnecessarily for their enlightened choices, but at least the World Bank warriors have shown themselves to be pure worshipers of the Paris accord. That alone will give them a lifetime full of the finest Sancerre-based dinner parties among the Western Left.

President Trump should not stand for it.

First, recognizing the U.S.’ outsize influence at the World Bank — we account for more than 16 percent of the World Bank’s voting share — Trump should start tweeting about the stupidity of this agenda. The threat of hundreds of millions of dollars in lost U.S. funding might spark the World Bank to reconsider its course.

But if the World Bank fails to act, Trump should simply cut funding to the organization and redirect it into programs that will better serve the World Bank’s original interest of reducing poverty and promoting growth.

Nevertheless, there’s a broader point at stake here.

Whether it’s the United Nations, U.S. agencies such as OPIC, or the World Bank, we too often neglect the necessity of accountability in our investment choices. And in doing so, we risk policies such as the World Bank’s “greening” that would cause immeasurable harm to those in need.

For the sake of our moral agenda, we must look far more carefully at how U.S. funded international agencies operate and where they spend our money.