President Obama Speaks Reform At the U.N. Summit in New York

Not good at all, according to a lengthy study this year by U.N. investigators of a grandiose, five-year effort to streamline and coordinate the performance of a $778 million U.N. bureaucracy that is supposed to do what diplomats like to do best: hold meetings.

According to the report, the bureaucracy’s reform effort so far has been a near-total failure.

Distributed to U.N. members in advance of the September opening of the General Assembly, the 24-page evaluation report was prepared by members of the U.N.’s watchdog Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS).

After four months spent studying a much-touted “Integrated Global Management Initiative,” intended to improve the performance of the sprawling U.N. conference bureaucracy, the OIOS inspectors declared that they had discovered “no progress or change” in how the organization was able to allocate money and staff around the world.

Nor could the investigators discover any cost savings as a result of the global reform effort. In fact, the report says, “no attempt has been made to track any savings or efficiency gains.”