Budget

Congress has officially wrapped up the FY2017 appropriations process—a mere seven months behind schedule. Much has changed since last fall, including the rhetoric on US foreign aid spending from the sitting administration. And big questions have been swirling about whether the b...

While we don’t often blog congressional hearings, yesterday’s discussion of “The Budget, Diplomacy, and Development” in the House Foreign Affairs Committee struck us as especially important given the uncertainty facing the foreign assistance budget: the level of consensus in ...

How do you make the case for US foreign aid to an Administration that has proposed slashing it? That was the task for Mark Suzman, Chief Strategy Officer and president of Global Policy and Advocacy for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, when he recently accompanied Bill Gates to meet...

How do you make the case for US foreign aid to an Administration that has proposed slashing it? That was the task for Mark Suzman, Chief Strategy Officer and president of Global Policy and Advocacy for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, when he recently accompanied Bill Gates to meet...

Increases in foreign aid spending—including both military and economic assistance—are not merely a phenomenon of the past eight years. Foreign aid spending increased under the administrations of both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, largely due to increases in funding to Afgha...

It only takes a quick look at the numbers to see that if your chief goal is to bolster defense spending—as President Trump has suggested his is—even deep cuts to foreign aid programs will be of little help. Together, the cuts proposed to the State Department and USAID amount to less than...