Congress

RECENT POSTS

May 24, 2012 | 11:30 AM | By  | 

News flash: Many Americans want more money spent on foreign aid, global health | 

Hey President Obama and members of Congress, read this report!

I’ve noted this before but it’s worth re-emphasizing the encouraging (and maybe surprising) findings from a public opinion survey on foreign aid and global health done recently by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The news media (sigh) largely ignored this but it deserves more attention. Here’s a good summary by Tom Murphy at the Huffington Post and another story (well, reproduced press release actually) by the Sacramento Bee.

In case you don’t want to read the report (it’s pretty good, trust me) due to your own particular form of attention-deficit disorder, here are three graphic illustrations of the findings

First, most Americans don’t know how little we spend on foreign aid.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, Congress, federal budget, foreign aid, Obama Administration, spending
May 8, 2012 | 11:31 AM | By  | 

The fight over America giving itself foreign aid | 

Flickr, Meredith_Farmer

One of the most inefficient and frequently counterproductive aspects of American foreign aid is our tendency to give aid to ourselves — experts call it “tied aid” — rather than directly giving it to those poor folks and communities overseas we are trying to assist.

Obviously, we don’t say that’s what we’re doing.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, USAID, has long been criticized in development circles for this tendency we have to give foreign aid to ourselves. Lately, under Rajiv Shah, the agency appears to have been making a serious effort to reduce this bad habit — untying aid — by allowing USAID to directly fund local organizations in the countries we are trying to help.

As The Guardian reported in February USAID Now Free to Buy Goods in Developing Countries

The US agency for international development, USAid, will no longer have to “buy American”, thanks to a policy change that will open up the agency’s contracts to firms in developing countries and could herald a significant shift in how the world’s largest aid donor does business.

Well, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, Bill Easterly, Congress, foreign aid, Oxfam
April 12, 2012 | 10:59 AM | By  | 

Oxfam and ONE Campaign call on Congress to stop playing games over hunger | 

United Nations photo

Malnourished child in Somalia

Congress is looking at reforming its agricultural subsidies programs known generally as the Farm Bill — a massive, kitchen-sink piece of legislation that covers all sorts of things like food stamps, soil conservation and about $5 billion in direct payments to American farmers.

Given our nation’s cost crunch, many are predicting some big cuts. Humanitarian groups like Oxfam and the ONE Campaign are trying to raise public awareness to save the US government’s life-saving, overseas food aid program from the budget ax.

ONE’s food aid advocacy initiative is called Thrive. They also have this page explaining their position on these issues.  Oxfam calls its food aid initiative Grow and here’s their argument for sustaining overseas food aid. Both organizations are largely advocating for the same thing — continuing to provide the world’s hungry with immediate food aid and also working toward lasting solutions to end these chronic cycles of hunger and starvation.

Oxfam, always creative and often edgy in their approach, today released this weird, creepy but somehow compelling video calling on Congress to stop playing with food aid (… the soundtrack reminds me of The Shining):

FILED UNDER: Basics, Politics, Congress, food aid, ONE Campaign, Oxfam
October 4, 2011 | 8:56 AM | By  | 

Most Americans favor foreign aid, so Congress looking to cut it? | 

The foreign aid discussion in Washington, D.C., seems like another good example of how disconnected Congress is from the thoughts and opinions of most Americans.

According to this survey published by MarketWatch, 72 percent of Americans think providing foreign aid is in our national interest. Yeah, that’s pretty vague, I agree. But other such surveys have shown pretty much the same thing, that many Americans think we spend loads on foreign aid (it’s actually only about 1 percent) and yet still think it’s a good idea.

Nevertheless, Congress is looking to make cuts in the foreign aid budget. As the New York Times reports, the Foreign Aid Budget is Set to Take a Hit:

The proposals have raised the specter of deep cuts in food and medicine for Africa, in relief for disaster-affected places like Pakistan and Japan, in political and economic assistance for the new democracies of the Middle East, and even for the Peace Corps.

Why the disconnect? Maybe because politicians know that cuts in foreign aid only hurt those overseas, and so have less chance of hurting them politically here at home.

 

FILED UNDER: Politics, Congress, foreign aid
April 4, 2011 | 9:12 AM | By  | 

New humanitarian standard for warfare? | 

Flickr, Jayel Aheram

Except for euphemistically calling warfare “intervention,” I think this article in The Atlantic about our current military efforts in Libya “The New Standard for Humanitarian Intervention” is a good read. Says the author Robert Pape:

We may be witnessing an historic shift in international norms.

Flickr, Runs with Scissors

Gandhi and Che, two kinds of freedom fighters

Pape’s article answers a question I raised a few weeks ago in my post asking “What determines the humanitarian military response?”

I will refer Pape’s article to my brother who, over the weekend, was challenging me on this — about Obama deciding to wage “intervention” against Libya without congressional approval, about the geopolitical wisdom of using warfare as a means to stop or resolve conflict and so on.

And it’s not just me and my brother. The chattering class (of which I am a card-carrying member) has been all over this issue as well, with some pundits who had been criticizing President Obama for not taking action in the Middle East now criticizing for him taking this action.

I recently looked at the reasons why I believe it is in our national interest to take aggressive “humanitarian military action” in Libya, as did Nick Kristof, who argues it is the better of several bad choices. For more than a month now, I’ve been citing stories about Ivory Coast that raise the question of why there has been so little international response to that crisis so similar in nature to Libya.

Pape goes beyond these specific cases and issues to look at what the rapid military intervention in Libya may mean for the future of foreign policy, and if it signals a more “humanitarian” approach by the international community — a lower threshold of intolerance for brutality. Says Pape:

Crises short of genocide, such as the Libyan conflict, justify a military response when it can save thousands of lives with reasonable prospects of virtually no or only very low casualties to international allies.

FILED UNDER: Justice, Politics, Arab revolt, Barack Obama, Congress, foreign policy, Libya, military, Nick Kristof
March 7, 2011 | 10:00 AM | By  | 

Op-ed: Don’t balance budget on back of the global poor | 

Interaction

Sam Worthington

You know that phrase about being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

As the US and British governments look for places to make budget cuts, many are concerned that the small amount (about 1 percent of the US federal budget) devoted to providing assistance to the needy and fighting disease in poor countries will be cut even further.

Sam Worthington of Interaction writes in the Guardian why this is a bad idea. He notes that the new conservative government in the UK appears to understand why foreign aid is in their national interest. But Worthington is concerned it remains a tough political sell among some in the U.S. He writes:

Many of the budget cuts proposed by the House would have a dramatic effect on development work abroad and could make it hard to respond to crises such as the earthquake that occurred in Haiti in January last year…. The harsh arithmetic here is that when humanitarian accounts are slashed, people die, whether in Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo.

FILED UNDER: Politics, Congress, federal budget, foreign aid, Interaction, Sam Worthington
March 4, 2011 | 10:11 AM | By  | 

Under the lamp post: The push to cut foreign aid | 

Flickr, Gilderic

Okay, so late one evening I see this drunk guy crawling on the ground around a lamp post. I ask him what he’s doing and he says he’s looking for his keys. I ask him where he thinks he dropped them.

“Over there, in that dark alley,” he slurs.

So why are you looking for them here under the street lamp?

“The light’s better,” he says.

That’s how the debate in Congress over cutting foreign aid often looks to me. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, Congress, federal deficit, foreign aid
February 16, 2011 | 9:34 AM | By  | 

Foreign aid cuts popular in budget battle, but not much there to cut | 

USAID

Federal categories of spending, 2010

As President Obama and Congress tussle over how best to cut the federal deficit many are worried about the size of their slice of the federal budget pie.

Cutting foreign aid seems to be a popular idea with many Americans, probably because they believe we spend a lot of money on foreign aid. As the pie chart off to the right there demonstrates, which can be explored in greater depth at USAID’s Foreign Assistance Dashboard, we don’t.

Foreign aid is about one percent of the budget. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, budget, Congress, federal deficit, foreign aid, Obama Administration