Last week, the executive board of UNESCO, the United Nations education, cultural and science agency, nominated Egypt’s Khaled El-Enany as its candidate to be the next director-general. This decision is expected to be ratified when UNESCO’s member states meet in Uzbekistan for their annual conference from 30 October to 13 November. The baton will then formally pass to El-Enany from France’s former culture minister, Audrey Azoulay, who has served for the past eight years.

As well as being UNESCO’s first leader from an Arabic-speaking country, El-Enany will also be the first from a low- or middle-income country for nearly three decades. The last was Senegal’s former education minister Amadou-Mahtar M’Bowwho served from 1974 to 1987 and who died last year aged 103.

It is unlikely that El-Enany will be able to reflect long on these landmarks, because he takes over at a time when the entire UN system is experiencing what might be its greatest test since its creation in 1945. A lot is riding on the Helwan University Egyptologist and former antiquities minister. El-Enany will need all the support he can get to succeed.

It’s not been reported widely, but the UN is in the middle of one of the most severe budget crises in its history. Member states are behind in their regular contributions to the organization’s US$3.7 billion annual budget. As of April, the United States — which contributes around one-fifth of the UN’s annual income — and China together owed more than $2 billion (the United States around $1.5 billion and China nearly $600 million).

On top of the shortfall, the United States is in the process of withdrawing from UNESCO and from the 2015 Paris climate agreement. It is also reviewing all of its other contributions to UN agencies. The administration of US President Donald Trump has said publicly that it is opposed to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which it sees as an ideological project.

This means that UN secretary-general António Guterres is being prudent to expect further reductions in US funds. To prepare, Guterres is planning to cut the UN’s overall budget by around one-fifth. If implemented, the plan will involve merging several agencies and roles, closing some offices and losing jobs. The initiative also includes creating a cross-UN department for sustainability, both to coordinate better across this vast area of work and to signal to the United States that the other member states are not going to pull back on the SDGs. The goals are not some ideological construct, but are backed by a robust and expanding evidence base and by governments representing a variety of political and ideological backgrounds.

Overall, however, Guterres’s plans have not gone down well with staff at individual UN agencies and many of the body’s users and stakeholders. This means that El-Enany, who was overwhelmingly the choice of low- and middle-income countries, will be expected by his supporters to defend UNESCO’s budget from further cuts. At the same time, as a member of Guterres’s team of UN agency leaders, El-Enany will be expected to implement any proposed changes. It will be a high-wire diplomatic act.

In many respects, El-Enany is being left a solid base by Azoulay on which to build. UNESCO has had time to plan for the agenda that Guterres wants to implement. The agency must also ensure it can continue to do important work across its three big portfolios: education, science and culture. UNESCO is the main UN agency advocating for open science. It has established guidelines for using artificial intelligence in education. And the 2021 UNESCO Science Report remains a comprehensive, authoritative assessment of the state of global research (see go.nature.com/3zlojva).

over, Azoulay and her team have continued to work with the United States. During his campaign, El-Enany suggested that UNESCO should expand its work to include quantum technologies and synthetic biology. These areas present opportunities to engage with the United States. El-Enany must also make the case for the SDGs strongly. Egypt’s government is a long-standing US ally, which suggests that he could also explore a path for the United States to return to UNESCO.

Credit must go to Azoulay for steering UNESCO through these rocky times. Many of the organization’s leaders seem to have faced an existential threat. In 1983, M’Bow’s team confronted a crisis when the administration of then US president Ronald Reagan pulled the country out of UNESCO, citing poor budget management, among other things. The United Kingdom, under then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, followed in 1985. Both countries only rejoined more than a decade after leaving. Our times are different, but many of UNESCO’s problems are the same. El-Enany must gather all of the resources at his disposal — from the research, policy and diplomatic worlds. Considering the situation he inherits, he needs all the support he can get.