Who Gets U.S. Foreign Aid: How should we organize aid and cooperation?

Distribution of U.S. Foreign Assistance

Source of Graph: Many Eyes via MemeMapper

Parade magazine has an article on the distribution of foreign aid.

The U.S. will give an estimated $26 billion in foreign aid in 2008—70% more than when President George W. Bush took office (the figure doesn’t include funds related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). More than 150 countries get financial assistance from the U.S.

The ten leading recipients listed by Parade are: Israel ($2.4 billion), Egypt ($1.7 billion), Pakistan ($798 million), Jordan ($688 million), Kenya ($586 million), South Africa ($574 million), Mexico ($551 milllion), Colombia ($541 million), Nigeria ($491 million), Sudan ($479 million).

Think Progress (citing the Congressional Research Service) reports "that the U.S. appropriated $28.9 billion in assistance to Iraq from FY03 to FY06." In August of this year, the Center for American Progress reported that the United States had pledged $10.8 billion for development assistance to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2008, but had actually dispursed $5 billion.)

Comment: The rationale for the aid to Iraq and Afghanistan is obviously politico-military. The aid to Israel and Egypt is a payoff for the peace process. The aid to Pakistan and Jordan relates obviously to their importance to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively. South Africa, Mexico and Colombia are relatively affluent countries, and Nigeria is an oil exporting country with a reputation for corruption and misuse of government funds.

Clearly the allocation of these funds is not based on humanitarian concerns, nor on the need to deal with global environmental problems. There is more concern for global health as a result of earmarks by the Congress and administration.

If you believe that the United States should be doing more to help the world's poor and should be helping poor countries to invest in environmentally sustainable development, then the current allocation of resources is not accomplishing your purposes.

That is the reason that people are calling for a reorganization of U.S. foreign assistance. It should be removed from the State Department where political and economic interests predominate, and from the Department of Defense where military interests predominate, and placed under an independent agency. That agency should have access to the President (probably through the Secretary of State), and should be able to coordinate the bilateral assistance program of the United States (which it would manage directly) with the programs of the International Financial Institutions (now under the Department of the Treasury) and the development programs of the U.N. family of organizations (now under the Department of State's Bureau of International Affairs).

My friend Frank feels, and I agree, that in addition to a broad foreign assistance program, the United States should have a broad international cooperation program. In an increasingly global economy, with increasingly important intergovernmental institutions, the United States has increasing concerns for cooperative efforts not only with poor nations and with the OECD nations, but with middle income and emerging industrial nations.

We need cooperation on the protection of the environment, on health, on education, on science and technology, on agriculture, on fisheries and forest management, and on the global economy. In fact all the agencies of the government have international cooperation programs. They are "stovepiped" however, into sector specific channels, although all fall under the authority of the Ambassador in terms of their footprint in a specific foreign nation. An organization that would coordinate and promote such international cooperation programs, working closely with State, USAID, and Treasury as well as with the White House could be of real service to the United States.