This brief details how the new Congress could save more than $500 million annually by eliminating unnecessary regulations currently in place that are incredibly wasteful, anticompetitive, and make it harder to carry out effective development programs abroad.

This USAID Monitor Analysis focuses on the effects of the FY2011 budget agreement on the foreign assistance accounts portion of the function 150 budget. While the cuts are not as deep as many expected, they are still significant and will prove challenging for the State Department and USAID.

In this paper, Connie Veillette presents the problems that beset the existing process for budgeting and resource allocation, and argue that the process is backwards. Instead of using baseline budgets and existing resources to dictate objectives, policymakers should clearly define and articulate the ...

Senior fellow Todd Moss considers the future of foreign aid in light of Dambiso Moyo’s book, Dead Aid, which argues that Western aid to Africa has brought more harm than help. The relevant question today, he argues, is not whether aid is good or bad, but rather how aid can be made to work better for...

Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), the new chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has vowed a major overhaul of U.S. foreign assistance. He joins a growing list of members of Congress and the defense, diplomacy and development community who recognize that U.S. foreign assistance programs are badly...

President Bush's FY2008 budget request provides a first glimpse into how the administration's new foreign assistance framework and transformational diplomacy agenda translate into who gets how much for what. In this CGD essay, authors Samuel Bazzi, Sheila Herrling and Stewart Patrick, show that the ...

In U.S. Foreign Aid Reform: Will It Fix What Is Broken? CGD research fellow Stewart Patrick says the U.S. foreign aid regime is broken, and it is not clear that the Bush administration's reform plan will fix it. Patrick proposes a total overhaul of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act and the creation o...