By The Economist
From the article:
The foreign-aid budget for 2018, passed by Congress in March, looked very different from the one the White House asked for. Last year the administration proposed slashing it by a third. Funding for global health would be cut by a quarter and food aid by more than half. America is the world’s largest donor by far, so the aid world braced itself for an apocalypse. Then the Republican-controlled Congress maintained foreign aid at $35bn, as in 2017, with funding for health and food largely unchanged. The $600m family-planning budget, which the administration wanted to eliminate, survived unscathed. Some areas even saw a small increase: maternal health and tuberculosis got an extra $15m and $20m respectively.
Democrats often champion overseas aid, but this item in the federal budget is surprisingly popular among Republican politicians too. A non-Trumpian attachment to American global leadership, a feeling of moral duty and a belief that foreign aid is in America’s national interest all help to explain why. Foreign aid more than doubled under George W. Bush. Jeremy Konyndyk, who ran USAID’s disaster-relief programme under Barack Obama, believes that support for aid has solidified even more among Republicans since then. The current crop of politicians, he argues, learned from Iraq and Afghanistan that “military power alone does not work.” America’s AIDS relief programme, PEPFAR, helps 14m people to get life-saving medicines, and its funding for anti-malaria efforts is estimated to have saved 6m lives.
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