President Trump’s new budget plans take particular aim at foreign aid spending, proposing an overall cut of 32% to all civilian foreign affairs spending. Facing extensive criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike for the budget’s draconian vision, Trump’s budget chief Mick Mulvaney defended the proposal by arguing it should be judged not “by how much money we spend, but by how many people we actually help.”
This is an admirably fair standard – because it perfectly illuminates the callousness and cruelty of the 2018 Trump aid budget. I have waded through the numbers and budget narrative released by the White House to see how the budget levels stack up against Mulvaney’s statement. It is not a pretty picture.
The White House justifies cuts of roughly $13.5bn with claims that global aid spending is imbalanced, and the US should roll back its spending to encourage others to do more. Global aid spending is imbalanced – but if anyone is falling short, it’s the US. The United States is the most generous global aid donor in absolute terms, but relative to the size of the American economy it’s less a case of “America First” than “America Twenty-Second”. As my colleagues at the Center for Global Development have pointed out, US aid spending already falls far short of the proportional contributions of most other rich countries in the world.
On the “money spent” side of the ledger, the foreign aid cuts yield negligible budgetary savings while pushing the US deeper into the bottom tier of wealthy aid donors. That’s bad enough, but the “people helped” side is where the real damage sets in. There’s more wreckage than can be covered in a single blogpost, but here is a sampling.
Humanitarian aid is one of the crown jewels of American foreign policy – US funding provides the backbone of global humanitarian response and saves millions of lives each year. The Trump administration proposes to drive it over a cliff – cutting nearly half the funding that Congress appropriated in 2017 and fully eliminating the principal food aid account. The budget documents attempt to wrap these cuts in a veneer of efficiency, claiming the US will purchase food aid more efficiently through a different budget line. Don’t be fooled. The proposal does not shift those resources; it eliminates the money completely. And it simultaneously cuts the budget line that it claims will cover food aid needs. This is not about stretching dollars further – it’s simply about getting rid of them.
The human impact here is extraordinary. Food aid funding would drop from $3.5bn in 2017 – enough to feed 67 million people – to $1.5bn in 2018, enough to feed only 29 million. Beyond the food side, refugee assistance would be cut by nearly 20%. International disaster assistance, which covers the non-food needs of the world’s conflict and disaster victims, takes a massive hit as well – dropping from $2.5bn in the 2017 budget to $1bn in 2018.
