Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, referred to a satirical website and a Jewish actor, who is known for spoof roles, when he explained why he thinks the United Nations seems like a parody.

“There’s hardly a week that goes by that we don’t read some headline about the United Nations that reads like it’s something out of the Babylon Bee or Hollywood, like Sacha Baron Cohen,” he said.

Mast decried the global body on Wednesday during a hearing of the panel’s subcommittee on oversight and intelligence titled “U.S. Accountability at the United Nations: Challenges and Opportunities for Reform.”

“What was this week’s headline?” Mast said. “It was that the United Nations selected Iran to serve on the Board of Nuclear Non-Proliferation. I can’t even say it with a straight face.”

Tehran was selected earlier in the week as vice president of a conference to review the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, drawing Washington ire due to the Islamic Republic’s repeated, consistent violations of nuclear safeguards and commitments.

Mast also denounced the 54-nation Economic and Social Council for selecting Iran earlier in the month for the U.N. Committee for Program and Coordination, which shapes policy on women’s rights, human rights, disarmament and terrorism prevention.

“This is the same regime whose idea on women’s rights is enforcing physical assault or detention for women who are caught without a hijab,” Mast said. “How does that happen? That is a rotten institution.”

Peter Yeo, president of the Better World Campaign, part of the U.N. Foundation, told the House panel that its criticism is better directed at member states, not U.N. leadership.

“You should be calling the embassies of all the countries that sponsored their leadership role today and let them know how angry you are,” he said. “There was no U.N. official involved in any of these decisions.”

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), ranking member of the subcommittee, noted the rampant Jew-hatred “that exists at U.N. bodies and agencies having nothing to do with their feelings on Israel.”

He noted that Francesca Albanese, a U.N. special rapporteur for the Palestinians whom the United States has sanctioned, has made repeated, blatant antisemitic statements. (The global body considers rapporteurs to be independent “experts” and has said it won’t police their speech.)

“The U.N. still refuses to deal with her,” the congressman said. “We see the double, triple, quadruple standard when it comes to the war between Israel and Hamas, and we don’t see that from the U.N. on the war between Russia and Ukraine.”

“We don’t see that from the U.N. on what’s happened in Sudan. We don’t see that from the U.N. on what’s going on with Iran,” Moskowitz said. “Where was the U.N. when 30,000-plus people were killed in Iran for protesting?”

Two Christian charities are suing Albanese for defamation in U.S. court. She has said that diplomatic immunity shields her from having to answer the claims and from U.S. sanctions. Washington imposed the latter, it said, because she intimidated U.S. businesses and organizations with ties to Israel.

“U.N. employees have greater immunity than the president of the United States,” said Eugene Kontorovich, law professor at George Mason University and director of the international law department at the Jerusalem think tank Kohelet Policy Forum. (The House hearing listed a new role, senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom.)

“The U.N. has greater immunity than foreign countries,” Kontorovich told the House panel. “If a foreign country, like North Korea or Iran, sponsors terrorism, you can sue them in U.S. courts.”

U.S. funding for the global body ought to be tied to the United Nations waiving its immunities, according to Kontorovich.

“There is no such textual allowance for lawsuits against U.N. entities or other international organizations that sponsor terror,” he said.

Brett Schaefer, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the panel that U.N. staff are being vetted less since the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, was downsized and folded into the U.S. State Department.

USAID had contracts and conditions in place for its assistance to U.N. agencies and nonprofits, which required them to vet their personnel, according to Schaefer.

“We need to make sure that all these organizations enter into agreements with the United States that allow us to vet their staff,” he said.

Schaefer cited a bill emerging from the subcommittee which would demand such compliance and would allow U.S. funding via contractors, subcontractors and other recipients to be tracked.

The U.N. Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs received a $2 billion “blank check,” and “there’s no U.S. ability to direct the funds to certain organizations,” he told the panel. He added that the U.N. Consolidated Sanctions List, which doesn’t include terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, is the lone vetter.

‘Vastly inefficient’
Much of the panel’s discussion with witnesses centered on the extent to which Washington should apply financial leverage to Turtle Bay, the global body’s headquarters in New York, and which of its programs and agencies should be scrapped.

Schaefer told the congressmen that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, should shutter.

“Not only is it corrupted by the presence of terrorists within the organization, but it’s also vastly inefficient,” he testified.

UNRWA spends $800 per Palestinian refugee, 20 times what the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees spends, $40 per refugee, on refugees in the rest of the world, according to Schaefer.

He told the panel those elevated costs are due to UNRWA considering Palestinians refugees in perpetuity and funding their education, food and healthcare, among other services.

“These are services that should be provided by a government, which the Palestinians claim to be,” Schaefer said. “This is, frankly, discouraging the Palestinians from fulfilling the responsibilities of a government and allows them to instead focus their attention and their resources on places that it shouldn’t be, which is terrorism and support for extremism.”

Some subcommittee members advocated for a departure from the United Nations, or scaling back in a big way.

Moskowitz said that he worried that doing so would leave a void, which China would fill.

Kontorovich testified that a United Nations without the United States wouldn’t bring major gains for Beijing. “It is not the same prize for China to take over without the United States in it,” he said.

Without U.S. funding, which accounts for around 25% of the U.N. budget, “it would be a fundamentally different organization,” the scholar said.

The suggestion that the United Nations is “too big to fail” is dangerous and limits Washington’s power to negotiate by removing the threat that it could leave, he said.