UNITED NATIONS – Stating that the United Nations needs “nothing less than a transformation,” the organization’s chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown, told Congress yesterday that reform could be achieved only by increasing funding and reducing American interference at Turtle Bay.

Mr. Malloch Brown told the House International Relations Committee that Secretary-General Annan is intent on making changes, and that he has introduced more U.N. reforms than “any of his predecessors.” He said that in order for Mr. Annan to realize future reform, he must be “given back the power to manage” the world body and member states, including top contributor America, must fund the organization “properly.”

Indicating weariness with promises of reform, Republican committee members such as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, said America would have to take the lead in dictating future change. “We are told we have to give up all our leverage,” Mr. Rohrabacher told The New York Sun. He said that he was not impressed by the reform package developed at the United Nations and introduced to the committee by Mr. Malloch Brown.

The various U.N.-related hearings on Capitol Hill “are building up to a point where a certain reform package is going to be presented in Congress,” Mr. Rohrabacher said, and further funding will depend on its implementation. America is the largest single-nation U.N. donor, providing 22% of the organization’s annual budget.

Mr. Malloch Brown’s visit to Capitol Hill came during the same week that a member of parliament and fellow Briton, George Galloway, testified at an oil-for-food hearing. In London, the Press hailed Mr. Galloway’s performance as a victory of the Iraq War opposition over the Republican-led Congress – specifically over its scrutiny of the United Nations which Mr. Galloway called the “mother of all smokescreens.”

By contrast, Mr. Malloch Brown yesterday said that Mr. Annan welcomed Congress’s attempt to turn the United Nations into “the most effective instrument it can be.” He did not attempt to present the organization as free of problems, and introduced himself to the House committee as someone Mr. Annan recruited to “help advance a serious and ambitious agenda for reform.”

“We in the United Nations secretariat are acutely aware of the reform issues raised by events of recent months,” Mr. Malloch Brown said. Among the “troubling revelations” he counted were the oil-for-food scandal, under investigation by the Volcker committee and Congressional investigations, sexual exploitation by U.N. peacekeepers in Africa and elsewhere, and inaction in Darfur.

Mr. Malloch Brown also spoke to “some real issues of audit oversight, management accountability, financial disclosure, and general performance that we urgently need to get right.” He told committee members, for example, that the organization should increase protection for whistleblowers. “Transparency and accountability are the watchwords for the United Nations in the new century,” he said.

But while saying, “we agree on the symptoms,” he argued against those who believe the United Nations to be “oversized, over-resourced, or under-supervised.” He said the organization is “stretched too thin in both material and human resources.”

The peacekeeping department, for instance, is currently conducting 18 missions around the world with 67,000 uniformed personnel and a half-billion dollar budget, Mr. Malloch Brown said, calling the budget a “fraction” of similar American or British military endeavors. “It’s a bargain, but perhaps too much of one,” he said.

America and other member states must “agree what they want the U.N. to do,” he said, “then fund it properly.” In addition to being “under-funded,” member states need to stop their “micromanagement,” he said. “The secretary-general has less autonomy to move resources from one department to another than the heads of some U.S. government agencies.”

Mr. Malloch Brown ended his speech with a call for better relations between America and Turtle Bay, but some members of the committee were cautious.

“No one is opposed to the U.N.’s role in facilitating diplomacy, mediating disputes, monitoring the peace, feeding the hungry, “the committee’s chairman, Rep. Henry Hyde, a Republican of Illinois, said. “But we are opposed to legendary bureaucratization, to political grandstanding, to billions of dollars spent on multitudes of programs with meager results, to the outright misappropriation of funds represented by the emerging scandal regarding the oil-for-food program.”

Others were more sympathetic to Mr. Malloch Brown’s message. While blasting the United Nations’ “pathological persecution” of Israel, Rep. Tom Lantos, a Democrat of California, said, “If an over-arching international organization did not already exist, we would have to invent it.” He called on Republicans “to resist the powerful temptation to withhold the payment of our dues in an attempt to leverage needed changes at the United Nations.”

Mr. Rohrabacher, one of the most vocal U.N. critics on the committee, said that “before we continue to pump money into the organization,” Congress must “set some standards.” He said that America should reconsider whether to continue to act as a “major player” at the United Nations – and perhaps reconsider its role as host nation.

“I don’t think U.N. bureaucrats should take it for granted that their headquarters will forever be in New York,” he told the Sun. “Maybe they should move to a place where they can feel philosophically comfortable, like a third-world dictatorship.”