by MAX BEARAK & LAZARO GAMIO
President Barack Obama’s budget proposal $4.15 trillion. Each square is $1 billion. 42 squares on the top left is the foreign aid, $42.4 billion, which is about 1% of the total budget
From building wells to building armies
Last month, the Obama administration announced an eye-popping $38 billion security assistance deal with the Israelis, to be disbursed over ten years starting in 2019. That caught us off-guard. It seemed like a ton of money. But as we looked 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. You can see that first attempt here.
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.”
We hope what follows can stand as a more exhaustive explanation.
Washington Post for more