Foreign Aid Is More Popular Than You Think | Opinion

Earlier this month, the Trump administration canceled 83 percent of USAID contracts and continues to dramatically cut back and reorganize U.S. foreign aid programs. Foreign assistance has a bad reputation, but in reality, it is remarkably popular among a broad swath of Americans, even across increasingly polarized partisan divides.

What is foreign aid? Aid, known in the U.S. government as foreign assistance, is formally defined as “any tangible or intangible item provided by the United States Government (including ‘by means of gift, loan, sale, credit, or guaranty’) to a foreign country or international organization.” This includes money, technical advice, as well as equipment and services.

U.S. aid typically breaks down into three main categories—humanitarian assistance, development assistance, and security assistance. Humanitarian assistance consists of food, medical care, and other life-saving disaster relief. Development assistance aims to promote the economic performance of recipient countries and communities, while security assistance seeks to build up the capabilities of partner security forces while also gaining U.S. access and influence abroad.

In fiscal year 2023, the latest available year with complete data, the United States spent $71.9 billion on foreign assistance, amounting to 1.2 percent of the total budget that year ($6.1 trillion). These most recent numbers broadly reflect historical spending levels of U.S. spending on aid, which have hovered around 1 percent of the total budget.

Seventy billion is no trivial number. Yet Americans consistently wildly overestimate the amount that the U.S. government allocates to foreign assistance. Many Americans erroneously think their government spends at least 20 percent of the federal budget on overseas aid.

This is according to a poll conducted last month by the University of Maryland and previewed at the Brookings Institution. The poll was conducted on Feb. 6 and 7 this year and included a representative sample of 1,160 adults across the nation.

Perhaps even more surprising, when Americans were asked how much the United States should spend on foreign aid, “the majority says that it should be at least 10 percent (Republicans 5 percent, Democrats 10 percent, Independents 10 percent.” In other words, Americans think that their government should spend far more on aid than it actually does.

Support for spending at least 1 percent of the federal budget is sky high. Nearly 90 percent of Americans—across political divides—support this historical level of spending on aid. This includes 94 percent of Democrats and 84 percent of Republicans.

Steven Kull of the University of Maryland, who fielded the poll, noted that: “Extreme overestimations of the amount of US foreign aid have led some Americans in some polls to favor reductions from this assumed amount. But large majorities support the actual amount of US aid.”

Does aid work? There is a long running scholarly debate dedicated to answering this question, and there is certainly room for improvement in how aid is allocated and executed.

But there is also compelling evidence showing that foreign assistance can produce real results, including the Marshall Plan in the 1950s and an HIV/AIDS program stood up in the early 2000s that has saved 25 million lives.

Even less grandiose programs can help increase America’s soft power and influence abroad. This is especially so in low-income parts of the world like Africa, which are increasingly being targeted by U.S. adversaries like China and Russia in an effort to expand their global reach.

Soft power gains can then translate into tangible benefits like votes at multilateral bodies, increased exports, or more hard power outputs like access, basing, and overflight rights for the U.S. military.

Ongoing unprecedented cuts to U.S. aid are therefore not only causing real harm to many vulnerable people around the world, but are also doing significant damage to America’s reputation, influence, and interests abroad.

The counterintuitive poll numbers above show that U.S. foreign aid has a major strategic communications problem. This makes it an easy target for political leaders who are laser-focused on reducing spending and making the U.S. government more efficient and effective.

Yet an overwhelming, bipartisan majority of Americans support actual spending levels on aid. In fact, they think the U.S. government should spend significantly more than it currently does. Supporters of U.S. aid therefore need to do a much better job communicating their successes and educating the American public on how much money is actually spent on assistance.

Politicians concerned about the standing of America abroad, and perhaps more importantly, their own political popularity, would then be forced to think twice before gutting U.S. foreign aid.

Alexander Noyes is a fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.