After pulling out of the World Health Organization, the Trump administration is proposing spending $2 billion a year to replicate the global disease surveillance and outbreak functions the United States once helped build and accessed at a fraction of the cost, according to three administration officials briefed on the proposal.

The effort to build a U.S.-run alternative would re-create systems such as laboratories, data-sharing networks and rapid-response systems the U.S. abandoned when it announced its withdrawal from the WHO last year and dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal deliberations.

While President Donald Trump accused the WHO of demanding “unfairly onerous payments,” the alternative his administration is considering carries a price tag about three times what the U.S. contributed annually to the U.N. health agency. The U.S. would build on bilateral agreements with countries and expand the presence of its health agencies to dozens of additional nations, the officials said.

“This $2 billion in funding to HHS is to build the systems and capacities to do what the WHO did for us,” one official said.

The Department of Health and Human Services has been leading the efforts and requested the funding from the Office of Management and Budget in recent weeks as part of a broader push to construct a U.S.-led rival to the WHO, officials said. Before withdrawing from the agency, the U.S. provided roughly $680 million a year in assessed dues and voluntary contributions to the WHO, often exceeding the combined contributions of other member states, according to HHS. Citing figures in the proposal, officials said the U.S. contributions represented about 15 to 18 percent of the WHO’s total annual funding of about $3.7 billion.....

Experts and medical societies have said withdrawing from the preeminent global health alliance is scientifically reckless because global cooperation is key to controlling and preventing infectious diseases. They said exiting the WHO makes the U.S. less prepared to respond to health emergencies such as the coronavirus pandemic or the West African Ebola crisis from 2014 to 2016, which killed more than 11,000 people in the largest outbreak of the deadly disease since the virus was discovered in 1976.