Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are “falling short” of their original missions and guilty of “mission creep” as he asked them to refocus efforts on helping the US restore balance to the international economic system.
The US helped create both institutions near the end of World War II as part of a Bretton Woods Agreement that set a framework for a new international monetary system in the decades that followed.
Bessent argued in his speech that the purpose of the IMF and the World Bank was to “better align national interests with international order, thereby bringing stability to an unstable world. In short, their purpose was to restore and preserve balance.”
“Yet everywhere we look across the international economic system today,” he added, “we see imbalance.”
He did not say that the US intends to withdraw from either organization, noting that “America first does need mean America alone.”
Instead he said the US wants to retain its leadership role and offered suggestions for changing how the organizations approach global trade.
“The IMF and World Bank serve critical roles in the international system,” he said. “And the Trump Administration is eager to work with them — so long as they can stay true to their missions.”
Bessent stressed that “mission creep has knocked these institutions off course. We must enact key reforms to ensure the Bretton Woods institutions are serving their stakeholders — not the other way around.”
The IMF, he said, is devoting a disproportionate amount of time and resources to work on climate change, gender, and social issues.
“The IMF’s focus in these areas is crowding out its work on critical macroeconomic issues,” he said. “We must make the IMF the IMF again.”
And the World Bank, he added, “should no longer expect blank checks for vapid, buzzword-centric marketing accompanied by half-hearted commitments to reform.”
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