What Does the Budget Deal Tell Us About the Objectives of U.S. Foreign Aid?
5/12/11
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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).
We might have expected a greater share of foreign assistance dollars going for security purposes given the emphasis on security in Obama’s global development policy and Raj Shah’s congressional testimony. Does this mean we can expect even larger proportions of spending for security purposes in FY2012? Or is the administration succeeding in sending the message that there are underlying security benefits to all kinds of foreign assistance spending?
Moreover, can we say what U.S. objectives are by looking at the budget allocation? There is the question of whether U.S. foreign assistance is meeting its objectives in Pakistan and elsewhere – but this might serve as a reminder that we are not even clear on what those objectives are (as articulated by Veillette and Arkedis).
We wrote in March that looking at how U.S. taxpayer money will be spent in developing countries could help answer the question of what U.S. foreign aid objectives are. We think it’s a start - but the administration and the Congress ought to be more clear line by budget line.
All values in are thousands of U.S. dollars and come from the FY2011 budget deal:
*Notes: The $800M for the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund was allocated to the Department of Defense ($1.2B had been requested by the State Department). Additionally, $115M, which was not in the administration’s requests, was allocated to the international affairs budget for development purposes. The pie charts represent requests and allocations to specific items from the international affairs budget (150 Account) and do not include all U.S. spending on aid or other foreign programs.
Some accounts have multiple purposes. These figures are based on an analysis by Connie Veillette which estimates the development portion of the ESF to be 83.5% of the total, the security portion to be 15%, and the remaining 1.5% to be for humanitarian activities. AEECA also funds activities in all three categories; based on a breakdown of the FY2011 request, security consists of 23% of this fund, development 76%, and humanitarian aid 1%.
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