In 2015, then-President Barack Obama committed the United States to achieving newly adopted U.N. global goals by 2030, including ending poverty, achieving gender equality and urgently tackling climate change. The Trump administration now says it “rejects and denounces” the goals.
The U.S. renunciation was one of the first — if not the first — by any country of the 17 goals that were adopted unanimously by all 193 U.N. member nations, with the aim of eliminating global hunger, protecting the planet, ensuring prosperity for all people, and promoting peace.
The Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, also include providing clean water and sanitation for all people and quality education for every child, while promoting good health and decent work and economic growth for everyone.
The Trump administration’s announcement was buried in remarks on a General Assembly resolution on the International Day of Peaceful Coexistence this week by Edward Heartney, a minister-counselor at the U.S. mission to the United Nations.
Heartney said that while framed in “neutral language,” the goals and the U.N. agenda for 2030 “advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with U.S. sovereignty and adverse to the rights and interests of Americans.”
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In last November’s election that gave President Donald Trump a second term, he said, “globalist endeavors like Agenda 2030 and the SDGs lost at the ballot box” to the U.S. government focusing first and foremost on Americans.
“President Trump also set a clear and overdue course correction on `gender’ and climate ideology, which pervade the SDGs,” Heartney said.
Trump has said the U.S. government will only recognize two sexes, male and female, and spoken out against transgender people and rights. The SDGs stress that they apply to everyone, everywhere, and will “leave no one behind,” but they do not specifically mention LGBTQ people.
As for climate, Trump has promoted more oil and gas drilling and he withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 landmark Paris climate agreement to combat global warming, and said he would take the U.S. out of other climate pacts. The SDGs call for urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts, noting that planet Earth is “standing at the brink of climate calamity.”
U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric, responding to the U.S. announcement, said all 193 U.N. member states voted in 2015 for the SDGs and agreed to work together to deliver the 2030 Agenda, which is “the path to bridging divides, restoring trust and building solidarity.”
It continues to be the U.N.’s guiding principles “to advance a world of peace, prosperity and dignity for all” and “a better, healthier, safer and more prosperous and sustainable future,” he said.
After Trump’s first election in November 2016 on an “America First” platform, the U.S. also opposed multilateral solutions, but it didn’t disavow the SDGs. It just ignored them.
Following Joe Biden’s election to the presidency in 2020, the U.S. renewed support for the SDGs, reporting to Congress on how the United States was contributing to achieving the 17 goals.
© 2025 The Canadian Press