Secretary General Annan — of the $10 billion-a-year, 20,000-person bureaucracy known as the United Nations system of 54 agencies, commissions, panels, and groupings — is scheduled to unveil a report today in which he offers yet more prescriptions for reforming the world body. Details of Mr. Annan’s report were leaked over the weekend by his aides to help counter mounting concern among American policymakers that the organization has been seriously damaged.

One prescription is to expand the Security Council to 24 members from 15, diluting the say of the U.N.’s biggest contributor, America, whose taxpayers are currently required to pay $363 million, or 24.47% of the secretariat’s annual budget. Another prescription is to modify the Human Rights Commission, which has been chaired by Libya and influenced by such as Syria and Sudan.

Well, here are two reforms you won’t find in the secretary-general’s report: One is for Mr. Annan to step down, the other for the U.N. secretariat to be dismantled and its resources allocated to a handful of agencies such as the World Health Organization that perform services and promote research on diseases afflicting the 135 countries of the Third World, which contain 90% of the global population of 6.2 billion.

There’s a tendency among Mr. Annan’s supporters, including those angling for lucrative consultancies at the U.N., to dismiss any criticism of him on the grounds that his probity and integrity are beyond reproach. They point to his Nobel Peace Prize in 2001. But the Nobel Peace Prize is typically a political gift given by a left leaning Norwegian Parliament. Mr. Annan’s aides conducted a campaign to get him that prize, winning him a trophy which also happens to carry a cash award of $1 million.

The secretary-general makes much of his admiration for America’s best run companies; he’s invited their representatives to join his “Global Compact,” whose goals include the halving of the world’s cohort of extreme poverty – which is to say, about 1.5 billion people earning the equivalent of $1 a day — by the year 2015. The result is that, in the time-honored U.N. fashion, a bureaucracy has been established to implement Mr. Annan’s objectives, which are being pushed under the rubric of “Millennium Development Goals.”

The “development” can mostly be seen in the nice compensation of bureaucrats – most earn between $100,000 and $200,000 a year – frequent travel, and, of course, constant talkfesting in the Third World’s favored watering hole, Geneva. Incidentally, the Swiss, who have repeatedly declined to join the U.N., pay barely $17 million to the world body, or 1.1% of the secretariat’s annual budget; but they earn more than $7 billion from the presence and spending of various U.N. agencies in Geneva.

These columns bear Mr. Annan no ill will personally. But we perceive him as a creature of sophisticated public relations, managed by David Finn of Manhattan’s Ruder Finn and by Shashi Tharoor, undersecretary general for information, and Mark Malloch Brown, a Briton who was formerly a Washington lobbyist allied closely with the Democratic Party and is now the secretary-general’s chief of staff. Our quarrel is with the record of the world body on his watch, a record that invites little confidence in him as an engine of reform, particularly a reform that dilutes the American position.

The incoming American ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton, made a famous comment some years ago when he suggested that the world would lose nothing if 10 stories of the U.N.’s headquarters were to be torn down. By our lights the world would actually benefit if all 38 floors of the palace on the East River were vacated and given over to private owners. American taxpayers would save millions that could be allocated to genuine humanitarianism and promotion of economic growth in needy countries. The most honorable course for Mr. Annan would be to make today’s report his swan song.