I’ve been very critical of the world’s three biggest international bureaucracies.

• The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
• The International Monetary Fund
• The United Nations

I’m not against international cooperation, per se. It’s simply a question of whether a bureaucracy is a net plus for economic liberty.

As a result, I’m largely sympathetic to the World Trade Organization. It has helped to reduce taxes on cross-border trade.

But the same can’t be said about the OECD, IMF, and UN. These bureaucracies seek to strengthen government at the expense of the private sector.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that the Trump Administration is very skeptical about the merits of some of these organizations. And he’s acting on those feelings.

Adam Taylor has a report in the Washington Post about Trump’s

The Trump administration announced Wednesday that it will withdraw the United States from dozens of international organizations and bodies associated with the United Nations as Washington retrenches from global cooperation on everything from climate change to cotton. In total, according to the White House, the United States will withdraw from 66 organizations or bodies. Of that number, 31 are entities associated with the United Nations. The White House said in a statement the U.S. will withdraw from the bodies and halt any funding because they “operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty.” …Among the notable organizations that the United States will leave is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific body for global climate research and policy guidance. It will also withdraw from the Global Forum on Migration and Development, an organization that helped develop a 2018 United Nations compact on migration that Trump administration officials rejected as an infringement on sovereignty during his first term. The U.N. Population Fund, the main agency supporting worldwide reproductive health and rights, also appeared on the new list of withdrawals. …Rubio, who oversaw the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development last year, said that the United States was taking aim at the “NGO-plex” and the “elite networks” who ran it.

All of this is great news.

But the news is also very disappointing because the bureaucracies that do the most damage to the global economy – the OECD and IMF – are not on the list.

• There is no redeeming quality to the OECD. It pushes for global tax harmonization and promotes tax-and-spend fiscal policy. Not in every instance, to be sure, but the Paris-based bureaucracy is clearly a net negative. It advocates bad policy in every corner of the globe.
• There is no redeeming quality to the IMF. It also regularly pushes bad policy – especially higher taxes – when dealing with national governments. An even-bigger problem is the bureaucracy providing bailouts, thus causing moral hazard for lenders and enabling profligate governments.

The bottom line is that Trump has moved the ball in the right direction, but it is frustrating that the two worst bureaucracies emerged unscathed.

I’ll close by assigning blame to the Treasury Department. I don’t have any inside knowledge of what’s happened in recent months, but I know from battles during the Bush years and during Trump’s first term that Treasury bureaucrats were unfortunately effective at manipulating the the people that Bush and Trump appointed to senior positions.

Part of the problem is that career bureaucrats lean left. And some of those Treasury bureaucrats probably aspire to eventually landing a sinecure at the OECD or IMF (where they receive lavish, tax-free salaries). So it’s understandable that they do everything they can to sabotage the president’s agenda.

Let’s hope Trump eventually takes another whack at international bureaucracies. He should definitely not be happy with the OECD since some senior bureaucrats in Paris have personally attacked him.