What Does the Budget Deal Tell Us About the Objectives of U.S. Foreign Aid?
This is a joint post with Nancy Birdsall.
Overall U.S. spending on foreign assistance (which we defined roughly as all non-military program spending, taken from the international affairs budget and categorized as best we could as serving development, security or humanitarian purposes – see our pie charts and thanks to Connie Veillette for her help) fell but not as much as feared between the FY2011 request of the administration and the final budget deal.
The proportions of aid allocated for development, security or humanitarian functions stayed roughly the same, with development getting a small decrease. The biggest cuts to development spending were to international financial institutions, especially the administration’s proposals for funding to the Asian Development Fund and international climate initiatives like the Clean Technology Fund (see Sarah Jane Staats’s post).
