Funding cuts by the United States resulted not only in job losses within Geneva’s UN sector, but they have impacted Geneva airport – Switzerland’s second-largest – as well.
Soon after he took office in January 2025, President Donald Trump announced that the US would be “ending funding to certain United Nations organizations and reviewing United States support to all international organisations.”
As a result of this move, Geneva-based UN agencies and NGOs have had to dismiss hundreds of their employees – with more job cuts still on the horizon.
READ MORE: How many jobs have been lost in Geneva’s international agencies?
This drastic measure has had repercussions on the Geneva airport, Cointrin, as well.
‘Significantly slower growth’
In 2025, the year when the United States began to implement these budget cuts, passenger numbers at Geneva airport had “increased minimally, by only 0.3 percent,” Cointrin’s director, Jean-François de Saussure, said in a press conference on March 24th.
That is much less than the original 8-percent growth projected for that year before the cuts were introduced.
“We are experiencing a significantly slower growth than other Swiss airports” – Zurich and Basel EuroAirport – de Saussure said.
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This is reflected not only in declining passenger numbers, but also in the bottom line – according to de Saussure, the profit for 2025 of 52 million francs was 2 million francs less than in 2024 and well below projections.
“Our airport has suffered from the budgetary issues of International Geneva,” he said.
The reason the cuts have had such an impact on the airport is because “while the number of EU conferences remained at the same level, travel by international civil servants from Geneva fell by 13 percent.”
