Former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — the cost-slashing body known as DOGE — should train its sights on the World Bank after it was accused of losing track of $24 billion in climate funding.
Ross, President Trump’s Commerce secretary during his first term, notes that US taxpayers are the biggest backers of the World Bank and are bankrolling economic growth in China — even as the US borrows virtually nothing from the group.
The World Bank’s international debt report from 2024 shows that Beijing currently owes the body $15.4 billion from a vast web of World Bank loans that China was able to secure at low rates. Its biggest debtor is currently India, which owes just over $34 billion.
“With the World Bank, we have let China take advantage of us,” Ross told The Post. “It seems ludicrous that we, as the largest shareholder of the World Bank, permit China to be such a big borrower from it.”
A report by the US spending watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, in 2023 found that Chinese firms were also favored for contracts bankrolled by World Bank money.
Chinese businesses raked in one-third of all World Bank contract dollars between 2013 and 2022, the GAO study found, while US businesses made up just over 1% of contracts put out for tender over the same period.
That is despite the Chinese Communist Party holding foreign currency reserves of $3.2 trillion.
Officials documents posted online show how regional authorities in Guiyang are plotting to borrow $250 million from the lender to bankroll “low-carbon and nature-positive urban development” in the southwestern Chinese city.
Another so-called green project in the city of Shijiazhuang, 160 miles from Beijing, looks to take out a loan for the same amount to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions and scale up low carbon urban development.”
Ross, a former Rothschild banker, accused Beijing of declaring “economic warfare” on the United States by using the loans to advance its foreign policy interests.
“In effect, the World Bank is funding part of the Belt and Road program that China is using to increase its influence throughout the world.”
“One area that I think will be very fruitful for the DOGE is these multilateral organizations. There are dozens of these and with each one, we’re usually the largest single-payer. We usually get very little – if any – true economic benefit.”
A World Bank spokesperson said the lender “operates at zero cost to U.S. taxpayers as the vast majority of our expenses are covered by loan repayments from borrowing countries.”
“The claim that the World Bank is boosting China is simply wrong. China repays more than double what it borrows—year after year—and we’ve cut its borrowing in half in recent years,” they added. “Every dollar China repays helps fund projects that advance American and global business interests while delivering development impact where it’s needed most.”
A White House spokesman did not reply to The Post’s request for comment.
According to a Jan. 2 report by the Congressional Research Service, the United States provides or is on the hook for just shy of $60 billion for the bank’s main lending arm, known as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
The World Bank has nearly $300 billion of what it brands “callable capital” to deploy as an economic firefighting fund and deal with a major financial shock, according to the CRS report.
American tax revenues to the tune of another $60 billion have also been funneled to its International Development Association, which has a war chest of $311 billion to dole out as grants to poor countries.
The United States is the only government from the 189 World Bank countries with the power to veto any changes regarding how it is run because it is the global body’s main founding member.
Ross, who has just penned a memoir “Risks and Returns: Creating Success in Business and Life,” stopped short of calling for the US to quit the lender.
But the 87-year-old urged President Trump to “rethink” the global body’s role and how its finances were organized.
“The World Bank should not be an instrument of social policy,” he said in a thinly-veiled dig at so-called ‘woke’ capitalism.
“It should be an instrument for economic development, not taking on ideological things like climate change.”
The comments from Ross come just months after left-wing British charity Oxfam accused the bank of losing track of $24 billion of climate funding due to poor book-keeping practices and a lack of transparency.
The NGO’s report was strongly contested by World Bank officials, but the study echoed testimony to Congress by former Trump Treasury official David Malpass in 2017.
Malpass, who went on to lead the World Bank two years later, told lawmakers the institution was “not very efficient” and “often corrupt in their lending practices.”
Even his Biden-appointed successor as president, ex-Mastercard executive Ajay Banga, admitted last year that the bank faces “declining progress in our fight against poverty, an existential climate crisis, mounting public debt, food insecurity, an unequal pandemic recovery, and the effects of geopolitical conflict.”
The Post reported in November how staffers at the organization in DC were “running around like headless chickens” after Trump’s stunning election comeback win as they braced for possible cuts.
This outlet also exclusively revealed some of the eye-popping perks enjoyed by the public sector organization’s employees.
They include tax-free salaries that allow the bank’s top brass to take home as much as $511,000 a year without handing over a dime to Uncle Sam.
International bureaucrats also enjoy extravagant business-class travel allowances and the use of an exclusive golf and country club in Maryland.
Staffers based in this country also have the bonus of enjoying free US health insurance for life, plus 26 days of annual leave a year and a whopping 15 days of sick leave.
