What
you should know about US foreign assistance
By Max Bearak and Lazaro Gamio | The Washington
Post | Published: October 22, 2016
Last month, President Barack Obama's administration
announced an eye-popping $38 billion security assistance deal with the
Israelis, to be disbursed over 10 years starting in 2019. That caught many
off-guard. It seemed like a lot of money. But looking into the deal, and others
like it, we began to realize how little we knew about the U.S. government's
assistance budget, which ranges from programs combating HIV/AIDS to those
directly funding other nations' armed forces.
Using the State Department's request to Congress
for a 2017 budget, we compiled what we thought was a comprehensive look at the
U.S. foreign assistance budget. That budget request is a complex stew of
programmatic acronyms, thickened by confounding numerical overlaps and an
endless roster of government agencies.
In response, numerous representatives of those same
agencies, as well as academics and analysts, got in touch. "You guys are
on the right track," they said, "but there's much more to this than
you've got here."
A tiny fraction of the entire federal budget is
devoted to foreign assistance - just about 1 percent. Most Americans vastly
overestimate this number in surveys. In a Kaiser Family Foundation study
published in early 2015, the average respondent thought that 26 percent of the
federal budget went to foreign aid. Unsurprisingly, more than half the
respondents thought the United States was spending too much on foreign aid.
We have laid out where the $42.4 billion will go in
2017. The money comes from the State and Defense departments and a slew of
other agencies. But it would be wrong to think that "security
assistance" comes entirely from the DoD. Security assistance is a broader
term than so-called military aid because this financial support is often
extended to other types of security forces such as anti-narcotic or trafficking
units.
Actually, only about half the security assistance
budget is provided by the DoD. That mostly derives from programs directly tied
to military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, such as the Afghan Security
Forces Fund and the Iraq Train and Equip Fund. Deals like last month's with
Israel, on the other hand, come from the State Department. In that case, the
U.S. government is essentially financing Israel's military purchases. Under the
current agreement, Israel can spend 26 percent of that money on military
equipment produced in Israel, but the new deal, which starts in 2019, gradually
phases out that stipulation. Then, like every other country, Israel will have
to spend all the assistance money on American defense contractors. In other
words, U.S. foreign military financing is essentially a way of subsidizing its
domestic defense industry while strengthening the military capabilities of its
strategic allies.
Economic and development assistance is almost
entirely provided through the State Department's budget. This includes the
budgets for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Peace
Corps, reserve funds for disaster relief, funds geared toward specific
objectives, such as preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS, and bilateral economic
assistance packages.
Foreign aid assistance from the United States.
Lazaro Gamio/ The Washington Post
Lazaro Gamio/ The Washington Post
This economic and development assistance cartogram,
which is a fancy word for a map specifically geared toward a comparative
display of statistics, shows American aid spread out among more than 100
countriesand therefore vaguely resembles a normal map.
Seven African countries feature among the top-10
recipients of economic assistance. Most of the money given to those countries
is funneled toward health initiatives, particularly HIV/AIDS treatment and
research. The biggest recipient, however, is Afghanistan, where the United
States is hoping to win over hearts and minds with all kinds of development
assistance after 15 years of military quagmire there.
As opposed to the broad dispersal of economic
development funds, the security assistance cartogram demonstrates the targeted
nature of the American national military strategy. A swath of countries from
Egypt to Pakistan - excluding Iran, of course - receive the vast majority of
U.S. security assistance.
The biggest individual, non-bilateral program in
the security assistance budget is the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund (ASFF).
The DoD describes the program thusly: "For DoD to provide assistance to
the security forces of Afghanistan to include the provision of equipment,
supplies, services, training, facility and infrastructure repair, renovation
and construction, and funding."
Security Assistance Monitor, the nonprofit
organization that provided much of the data on which this article is based,
says on its website that the ASFF's ultimate goal "is to produce an
independent, self-sufficient armed forces for Afghanistan."
The security assistance budget also includes
"train and equip funds" for allied forces in Iraq and Syria. Those
funds go toward the Iraqi army, as well as Kurdish peshmerga troops and other
militias the U.S. cooperates with in both countries in its push against the
Islamic State.
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Israel and Egypt are the biggest recipients of U.S.
military financing. Israel receives about $3.1 billion in annual financing
currently, and that number will increase to $3.8 billion after 2017. Egypt has
received major financing ever since it agreed to an American-brokered peace
with Israel in the Camp David Accords of 1978.
But if the U.S. assistance budget demonstrates
where the American government has strategic interest, then where are some of
our biggest allies on the cartograms? Saudi Arabia, NATO members, Japan, South
Korea and India are all conspicuously absent.
The answer is that those countries simply buy arms
from the United States rather than receive large-scale assistance. Many have
their own established defense programs. U.S. arms deliveries worldwide for 2015
amounted to $21.9 billion.
The United States sells arms to nations that
surround its main adversaries, China and Russia, as well as to countries
playing active roles in the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, which
includes most of the Gulf states.
The massive scale of assistance the United States
provides to nations around the world is a reflection of its ubiquitous presence
on the world stage, and the sheer size of its economy. The United States
provides far more assistance than any other country in the world, and in terms
of arms sales, it controls at least half the global market.
However, the United States gives less as a
percentage of its gross national income than other countries. U.N. resolutions
have set 0.7 percent of GNI as an unofficial benchmark that developed countries
should contribute to foreign assistance. According to 2015 OECD statistics, the
United States contributes about 0.17 percent of its GNI, below the 0.3 percent
that is the average for developed nations. Only six countries, all in Europe,
have reached the U.N. benchmark: the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark,
Luxembourg, Norway and Sweden. Sweden stands out, contributing almost 1.4
percent of its GNI to foreign assistance.
On Tuesday, October 18, the U.S. Advisory Council
on Human Trafficking released its 
Representatives from PAHO/WHO, UNEP, and World Vision stand between mountains of rotting garbage at Truitier Municipal Dump (TMD) in Port-au-Prince. The stench alone would drive most people away at the entrance, but Sally Edwards, a PAHO/WHO advisor on environmental health, brings everyone further into the site to see the waste managementprojects. Amid thunderous dump trucks and scrappy 700-pound pigs mingling with goats, Sally explains where pits for medical waste stand in relation to the newly constructed road they are standing on. Truitier has always been a city dumping ground, but over the last six months a consortium of health partners have been working to increase its capacity for a more sustainable waste management system in Haiti.
During the initial response in January, PAHO/WHO provided public health institutions and NGOs with 20,000 colored plastic bags for safe disposal of health care waste and 1,000 sharps containers for needle disposal. This was only the first step in developing a more robust medical waste management system. To ensure timely and safe pickup, PAHO/WHO contracted Haitian Solid Waste Collection Agency (SMCRS) personnel, trained them to safely remove this type of waste and then provided vaccination against diseases. The staff used two specially designated trucks to pick up waste at 24 health facilities in Port-au-Prince.
Sometimes the best laid plans hit unforeseen obstacles, which in this case happen to be more trash. “I remember arriving here in April and discovering the road leading to one of the medical waste pits had become totally impassable because of solid waste and mud,” noted Sally as she reflected on the situation. “Rather than drive a half mile to the correct site once in Truitier, some truck drivers had dumped solid waste in the middle of the road. This action had a cascading effect. The next trucks to arrive were blocked, and had no choice but to dump their trash in the road. It definitely felt like major setback.” To address the issue, PAHO/WHO quickly funded repairs of the blocked 2,000 meter road and turning circle that allowed access to the pits. Two supervisors at Truitier were also hired to oversee disposal of waste in designated sites. This will prevent truck drivers from dumping in the road in the future.