President Trump was at his most somber in his otherwise optimistic speech to Congress last week when he spoke about the misplaced spending priorities of his predecessors and of Congress.
“We’ve financed and built one global project after another, but ignored the fates of our children in the inner cities… We’ve defended the borders of other nations while leaving our own borders wide open for anyone to cross and for drugs to pour in at a now unprecedented rate… And we’ve spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas, while our infrastructure at home has so badly crumbled.”
Trump has said that he wants to hike military spending by $54 billion and pay for it with economic growth and by cutting non-defense programs, including foreign aid. If the president gets his way, the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development will see their budgets shrink by more than a third.
Trump’s vow to slash foreign aid has met a voluble resistance and an inevitable and fatuous charge from critics that he’s betraying American values. Trump’s campaign pledge to put America first, however, made such an approach both inevitable and sanctioned by voters.
Last week, 120 former generals and admirals signed a letter urging Congress to keep the funding going. But the generals’ desire to use taxpayer dollars to stabilize “weak and fragile states” and alleviate the “lack of opportunity, insecurity, injustice, and hopelessness” that many in the poor world experience is beyond what the American government can or should do.
Ask conservatives who gripe about government spending which appropriations they’d slash, and many will name foreign aid, believing that it is a large portion of the federal budget. In fact, it’s less than 1 percent. But it can be cut.
Washington spends $35 billion annually on foreign aid, nearly twice as much as the next most generous country. Foreign aid includes military aid, debt relief, long-term development and humanitarian or emergency aid.
Military aid, such as the money and weapons sent to Israel, recipient of the largest portion of our generosity, can serve our strategic interests. Humanitarian and emergency aid, such as international relief from natural disasters and health pandemics, helps people for whom receiving such aid is a matter of life or death. But development aid, which makes up the lion’s share of the aid budget, is another matter.
America spends about the same amount annually (nearly $7 billion) to help alleviate the conditions of Ebola victims and refugees fleeing war and famine as it does to promote its population policies abroad, including, under Democratic presidents, abortion.
More broadly, there isn’t good evidence that development aid boosts economic growth in poor countries or even reaches its intended recipients. Indeed, the opposite is true. Most poor countries aren’t poor because they lack resources. In fact, many of the poorest are the most resource-rich. They are poor because they are ruled by corrupt governments and weak institutions. Foreign aid often plays an important role propping up both these evils. Economists have found that countries that are given large sums in foreign aid often suffer economically and politically because free money encourages dependence and discourages governments from prioritizing development.
Unfortunately, many American lawmakers haven’t learned these lessons. The State Department’s budget has nearly doubled since 2005. If conservatives believe that throwing money at failing school districts is a terrible idea, and it is, they should be just as averse to pouring money into countries that could end up being used to prop up corrupt and incompetent governments.
