Budget

President Trump sent his fourth budget request to Congress last week—once again including steep cuts to foreign aid spending. We dug in to explore it.

Government decisions affect people’s lives and should be reasonable, not arbitrary. This core liberal principle applies to all major policy decisions, including budget choices. Modern conceptions of democracy, and democratic accountability, also require that government decisions be justified i...

In a flurry of activity, Congress completed its work on Fiscal Year (FY) 2020 spending bills just ahead of the holiday break. For the third year running, lawmakers rejected the steep cuts to foreign assistance proposed by the Trump administration, providing a modest increase in funding for developme...

As the EU considers providing policy-based lending, Mikaela Gavas and Hannah Timmis outline what this support might look like, and discuss what the value-add of the EU Commission would be.

The BUILD Act is a remarkable bipartisan effort to modernize the US development finance toolkit. So why is the White House gutting the most important features of the new agency?

Earlier this week, the European Commission published its proposals on migration and border security for the next EU budget (2021–2027). Financial support for migration, asylum, and border management is to almost triple, from €13 billion to €34.9 billion. What might this mean for the EU and future mi...

Last week, Congress completed work on a spending package that funds the federal government through the remainder of the fiscal year. As far as development and diplomacy are concerned, the bill is an unmistakable rejection of the deep cuts proposed by the Trump administration. Here are a fe...