The House Republican who chairs a powerful appropriations subcommittee on foreign aid said that he would seek to cut Washington’s funding to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

“What’s the role of the Human Rights Council? To pursue and to promote human rights, yet they have among the world’s worst abusers,” Representative Mario Díaz-Balart told Roll Call in an interview. “It would be funny if for the fact it weren’t so dangerous and again that we’re spending so much money on that.”

Díaz-Balart is the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on foreign operations funding.

For decades, the Human Rights Council has been a constant target of criticism in light of the role that brutal dictatorships play in shaping its decisions and its lopsided focus on alleged Israeli abuses. While members last year booted Russia from the council as part of a U.S.-led push, the body has hosted no meetings on rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese government, even though it has held emergency meetings and passed resolutions on U.S. policing practices. The council is structurally amenable to granting legitimacy to foreign authoritarian regimes and hostile to the concept of Israel’s existence, owing to its lack of human-rights criteria for membership and baked-in anti-Israel meeting agenda.

The Trump administration withdrew the U.S. from the Geneva-based U.N. body in 2018. The Trump administration also stopped funding the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) — related to but distinct from the council — and cut funds allocated to the general U.N. budget, which provides funding to the Council. Early into President Biden’s term, however, the new administration reversed these policies and paid back assessed funds that Trump’s team withheld. Offices such as the special rapporteur for “unilateral coercive measures,” which receives much of its funding from Russia and China and gets a nominal portion of its budget from the OHCHR.

The Council’s 2023 budget is $144.3 million, and the U.S. is the U.N.’s largest contributor, funding 22 percent of the organization’s annual budget.

While Roll Call reported that Díaz-Balart only mentioned the Human Rights Council, Republican representatives might also consider blocking funds to other U.N. offices, such as the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — another agency which saw the U.S. zero out its funding during the Trump era and a subsequent reversal under the Biden administration. UNRWA has funded projects linked to terrorist activities and virulent antisemitism.