Donald Trump promised the Board of Peace would be among the most consequential institutions on earth. Four months on, its official Gaza fund holds nothing, the money that did move went into an account no one can audit, and America’s closest allies have walked away. The question is no longer whether the project failed — it is what that failure reveals about the man at its head.
When President Trump lifted a gavel over the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace in February, the disco beat of “YMCA” filled the gutted hall of what used to be the U.S. Institute of Peace — a building Congress created in 1984 and that now bears Trump’s name above the door. He held up a sheet of pledges and promised to “straighten out” Gaza. Beside him, his son-in-law Jared Kushner displayed glossy renderings of an AI-powered “New Gaza” of gleaming towers. It was, in every visible respect, a triumph of staging. What it has produced, four months later, is a fund with nothing in it.
The numbers Trump announced were enormous. Member states pledged roughly $7 billion for a Gaza “relief package,” and the president personally promised another $10 billion in U.S. backing — about $17 billion in all, channeled, he said, through a dedicated Gaza Reconstruction and Development Fund housed at the World Bank and endorsed by the United Nations. World Bank President Ajay Banga stood at the launch and declared the fund ready to receive the money. Trump called the board one of the “most consequential” organizations ever created.
On May 27, the Financial Times reported what insiders had quietly known for months: the official fund is empty. Citing four people familiar with the matter, the paper found that not a cent of the pledged billions had been deposited. “Zero dollars have been deposited,” one source said. The Agence France-Presse confirmed the same the following day: the World Bank fund had received no money from any donor since the board’s creation.
1. The Fund That Holds Nothing
The administration’s explanation is that the fund was built for a “reconstruction and development phase” Gaza has not reached. There is a thin technical truth in this: Israel still controls more than 60 percent of the Strip, Hamas has not disarmed, and no large-scale rebuilding can begin under those conditions. But the explanation collapses under the weight of what Trump himself promised and what his own negotiators describe on the ground.
Two people involved in postwar planning told the Financial Times that not one U.S. dollar has been deployed for Gaza’s reconstruction. Bishara Bahbah, the Palestinian-American businessman who helped negotiate with Hamas on the administration’s behalf, said the technocratic committee the board created to govern Gaza cannot function for lack of money, and described the situation as dismal. The committee, he said, cannot even enter Gaza, because the moment it does, desperate people will arrive seeking help it has no means to provide.
Roughly $17 billion in pledges; nothing in the World Bank fund four months on. Jerusalem Post
Earmarked to train a Gaza police force; the program has not started and the funds are frozen. Kyiv Post
Roughly $3M from Morocco and $20M from the UAE went into a board-controlled JPMorgan account, not the transparent fund. Middle East Eye
The State Department plans to redirect about $1.2 billion toward board-related projects — none of it spent, none managed by the board. Financial Times
2. Where the Money Actually Went
The more revealing story is not the empty fund but the account that is not empty. Rather than route donations through the World Bank mechanism — which must report its financial position to contributors and is subject to U.N. endorsement — the board has taken money directly into a JPMorgan account it controls. There are, the Financial Times noted, no independent transparency requirements on that account at all. Under the arrangement, the board need not declare its funding to donors or to its own member states.
What has flowed there is modest and telling: roughly $3 million from Morocco and about $20 million from the United Arab Emirates, used to cover the office of the board’s “high representative” for Gaza, Nickolay Mladenov, and salaries for the Palestinian committee. A further $100 million from the UAE, earmarked to train a new Gaza police force, sits frozen because the program has not begun. A board official said only that contributors had “opted to use other options” than the World Bank, and that the board would report its finances to its own executive board — composed of Trump administration officials and advisers — “at a time deemed appropriate.”
“I just don’t know which one it is.” — a UN-style body or Trump’s personal court.
— Sen. Brian Schatz (D–Hawaii), on being unable to determine what the Board of Peace legally is
This is the architecture of accountability turned inside out. The transparent channel built by the World Bank and blessed by the U.N. sits idle, while the money that does move passes through a private bank account answerable only to the president’s own circle. A senior congressional aide was blunt: none of the reallocated U.S. aid is being managed by the board, and the State Department has told Congress it does not intend to let the board manage it. The department wants to hand the board about $50 million directly for operations — but even that is withheld until the board can prove it has the financial controls any recipient of federal money is required to have.
3. A Body Stuck in Legal Limbo
The board cannot say clearly what it even is. Democratic Senator Brian Schatz, pressing for answers, was told by Secretary of State Marco Rubio that the board holds U.N.-style legal standing — a body operating under the United Nations to plan Gaza’s reconstruction. Yet Trump, in the same breath, describes it as something closer to a royal court he personally commands and may chair indefinitely, even past his presidency. As Schatz told the Financial Times, he could not reconcile the two accounts. Lawmakers have questioned whether the body meets the legal threshold to qualify as an international organization eligible to receive U.S. funds, and the State Department has not given them a straight answer.
The home of this confusion is itself a monument to it. The Board of Peace meets in the former U.S. Institute of Peace — an independent organization Congress chartered in 1984, which Trump tried to dismantle by executive order last year. His administration seized the building and fired nearly all its staff. A federal judge ruled the takeover illegal; enforcement was stayed pending the government’s appeal. The building was renamed the “Donald J. Trump U.S. Institute of Peace” by the State Department anyway, and the administration has eyed it as the board’s permanent headquarters. George Foote, counsel for the institute’s former leadership, said a stay is no license for the loser of a case to hijack the property of the winning party. A Carnegie Endowment scholar called it puzzling that a president would carve his name into an institution he had rendered prostrate.
Get Involved Today
Contribute to our mission and turn your concerns into action.
4. No Force, No Allies, No Plan
Security was supposed to be the board’s first deliverable. U.N. Security Council Resolution 2803, adopted in November by a vote of 13 to none with China and Russia abstaining, authorized an International Stabilization Force to demilitarize Gaza and protect civilians under the board’s authority. Months later, the force has stalled. Analysts at the Middle East Institute found U.S. messaging on the force so contradictory that it raised more questions than answers. Potential troop contributors, as one peace-operations scholar noted, will not commit soldiers to a force whose rules on the use of force are set by a board they cannot trust to make impartial decisions — and countries outside the board are unlikely to contribute at all. None of the plan’s three pillars — disarmament, Israeli withdrawal, reconstruction — has moved.
The diplomatic picture is just as stark. Trump assembled a roster heavy with authoritarian governments — among them Hungary, Belarus, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia — and extended invitations as far afield as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. America’s closest democratic allies wanted no part of it. France, Britain and Germany refused to join, sending observers at most. Mary Robinson, the former Irish president and U.N. high commissioner for human rights, was withering, casting the board as the grandiose project of a power-hungry president. An institution conceived to rebuild a shattered territory has instead become a measure of how few of the world’s democracies will follow this president anywhere.
“A delusion of power.”
— Mary Robinson, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, on the Board of Peace
5. A Timeline of a Hollow Promise
Read together, the record describes a presidency that prizes the announcement over the achievement. A building renamed before a single brick is laid in Gaza. A gavel and a theme song before a functioning fund. A roster of strongmen before a coalition of allies. The board was sold as statecraft; it has functioned as spectacle. And spectacle, when it substitutes for the actual duties of the office, is not a harmless vanity. It is a failure of leadership with real human costs in a territory where, by the U.N.’s own estimate, more than $70 billion in reconstruction is needed and nothing is being built.
“Unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”
Section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment allows the vice president, together with a majority of the Cabinet or “such other body as Congress may by law provide,” to declare a president unable to serve and transfer his powers. Crucially, the amendment never defines “unable” or “inability.” That silence was deliberate. As John D. Feerick, the amendment’s principal draftsman, has written, the terms were left undefined not by oversight but by design — a rigid definition was thought undesirable because inability could take forms no one could foresee. Yale’s Rule of Law Clinic, in its authoritative reader’s guide, reached the same conclusion: the framers set out a flexible standard meant to turn on the totality of the circumstances, not a checklist.
But the Board of Peace does not stand alone. It is one entry in a widening record that has already moved lawmakers across the spectrum to act. On April 10, Representative Jamie Raskin, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, demanded the White House physician conduct a full cognitive evaluation of the president; four days later he introduced legislation, backed by some 50 co-sponsors, to establish the Commission on Presidential Capacity — the very body the amendment invites Congress to create. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi called directly on Vice President JD Vance and the Cabinet to invoke Section 4, citing a pattern of erratic, reckless decision-making. More than 70 Democrats, and even some of the president’s longtime allies, have raised the question of his fitness.
Those calls were prompted by the president’s volatile public conduct, not by the Board of Peace specifically. The board is not the case for Section 4 — it is evidence within it. A president who builds an institution around his own name, channels foreign money into an account no one can audit, alienates every democratic ally, and then cannot tell Congress what the thing he created legally is, is a president whose capacity to “discharge the powers and duties of his office” is precisely the question the framers wanted future generations free to ask. The flexible standard they wrote exists so that the inquiry can begin here.
The practical barriers are real and we will not pretend otherwise. Section 4 has never been invoked. It requires a vice president and a Cabinet hand-picked for loyalty to move against the man who chose them, and Raskin’s commission bill will not pass a Republican Congress. But a barrier to the remedy is not a refutation of the diagnosis. The Constitution gives Congress the power to build the very body that could one day make this judgment on the evidence. That it has not yet done so is a measure of political will, not of constitutional doubt — and the evidence keeps accumulating.
Editorial Conclusion
An empty fund is not merely a policy failure. It is a self-portrait. Donald Trump built a peace institution that bears his name, answers to his court, hides its money, and serves no one in Gaza — and he did it while America’s allies looked away and his own party averted its eyes.
The drafters of the Twenty-fifth Amendment refused to define “inability” because they trusted future Americans to recognize it when the duties of the office went undischarged. The duty here was to rebuild a shattered land with the billions a president promised. Not one dollar has done so. Congress should build the commission the Constitution invites, and look hard at what it finds. The stakes are not partisan. They are whether the powers of the presidency are still being used to govern — or only to perform.
Sources & References
- Financial Times / Irish Times — “‘Zero dollars’: Why does Donald Trump’s Board of Peace fund lie empty?” Read
- AFP / Courthouse News — “Trump Board of Peace’s official Gaza fund is empty.” Read
- AFP / France 24 — “Board of Peace official Gaza fund is empty despite billions pledged.” Read
- Middle East Eye — “Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ fund has no money for Gaza.” Read
- The Jerusalem Post — “Board of Peace’s official fund receives ‘zero dollars’ despite billions pledged.” Read
- Kyiv Post — “Trump’s Board of Peace fund remains empty four months after launch.” Read
- Euronews — “Trump Board of Peace’s official Gaza reconstruction fund is empty, source says.” Read
- The Hill / AOL — “Trump says US committing $10 billion to Board of Peace.” Read
- AFP / Yahoo News — “Trump ‘Board of Peace’ opens with money and troops for Gaza.” Read
- CNN — “Trump launches his ‘Board of Peace’ with billions pledged.” Read
- United Nations — “Security Council authorizes International Stabilization Force in Gaza (Resolution 2803).” Read
- Middle East Institute — “New questions on the International Stabilization Force for Gaza.” Read
- Global Policy Journal — “The future of the International Stabilisation Force in Gaza?” Read
- Associated Press / AOL — “Trump eyes basing his new Board of Peace at a Washington building in legal limbo.” Read
- theGrio / AOL — “‘Puzzling’: The U.S. Institute of Peace is renamed after President Trump.” Read
- Irish Times — “Trump is ‘power-crazy’ and Board of Peace a delusion of power, Mary Robinson says.” Read
- The Hill — “Raskin introduces bill to assess president’s fitness under 25th Amendment.” Read
- House Judiciary Committee Democrats — “Raskin demands White House physician evaluate Trump’s cognitive fitness; calls to invoke 25th Amendment.” Read
- Office of Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi — “Krishnamoorthi calls for President Trump’s removal under 25th Amendment.” Read
- PBS NewsHour — “Could the 25th Amendment be invoked against Trump? Here’s how it works.” Read
- Fordham Law News — “The 25th Amendment makes presidential disability a political question.” Read
- TIME — “What the 25th Amendment means for Donald Trump’s presidency.” Read
- Yale Law School — “Rule of Law Clinic releases ‘Reader’s Guide’ for the 25th Amendment.” Read
Related News
