Barely a year after the Obama administration claimed that it was bringing a new era of fiscal discipline to the bloated bureaucracy of the United Nations, the world organization is back to its free-spending ways -- and laying the groundwork for even bigger cash demands in years ahead.

In the process, U.N. records examined by Fox News show, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon helped to sabotage one of the administration’s most high-profile efforts to demonstrate a new era of U.N. austerity and efficiency, a freeze on U.N. salaries that would match the freeze on U.S. civil service paychecks that has been in effect for the past two years.

In a Christmas Eve budget session that matched the “fiscal cliff” wheeling and dealing over taxes and spending in Congress, the U.N. General Assembly approved a series of add-on missions and cost adjustments that hiked a projected U.N. Secretariat budget of $5.15 billion for 2012-2013 -- a period that is already half-over -- to just under $5.4 billion.

The roughly 3 percent spending increase effectively wiped out U.S. claims made a year ago that it had, for only the second time in 50 years, caused a decline in the U.N.’s so-called “regular” budget -- only a fraction of its true spending -- as a prelude to even more fiscal discipline in future.

In fact, it brought the budget figure back to almost exactly what Secretary General Ban himself had proposed in 2011 for the subsequent two years -- before he proclaimed that he had jumped on the bandwagon for austerity and ordered top managers to cut back on their budget wish lists.