Memo to Congress: Don’t Cut Foreign Aid

Article published on Politico website on 06/15/2017 by John McCain and Tim Kaine 

The security of the United States and its people is the first priority of government, and imposes numerous responsibilities on Congress and the executive branch. We are responsible for ensuring that our armed services are the best-equipped, best-trained and best-led military in the world. And we are responsible for assigning them missions that have clear, achievable objectives and are worth their service and sacrifice.

We are also responsible for making good use of government’s other resources to help protect America’s vital interests in the world, and share the burden carried by our servicemen and women. Smart intelligence operations are essential to our security. So is adroit diplomacy and U.S. assistance — including humanitarian relief, democracy promotion and economic development — to further our goals.

Defense Secretary James Mattis made that point emphatically when he was in charge of U.S. Central Command. “If you don’t fully fund the State Department,” he told Congress, “then I need to buy more ammunition.” Most general officers share Mattis’ opinion that funding development programs is important to achieving our military objectives.

These are dangerous, challenging times. Instability is spreading around the world. Every day brings new reports of armed conflicts, acts of terrorism, humanitarian crises, and historic numbers of refugees and displaced peoples. Development assistance programs support military and diplomatic efforts to address these many crises, and help prevent conditions that lead to political instability and radicalization.

Just a decade ago, most of our aid was given in response to natural disasters. Today, 80 percent of our assistance provides relief and promotes stability in conflict zones and states on the verge of collapse. There are U.S. Agency for International Development programs in many of the countries most plagued by terrorism, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mali, Yemen and Somalia. We’re saving lives and creating partners to help address the instability that produces the threats our military risks life and limb to fight.

Mindful that 95 percent of the world’s consumers live outside the United States, we also serve our economic interests by helping others. Government support for the efforts of great organizations such as Save the Children, which works to protect the health of impoverished women and children in developing countries, or Catholic Relief Services, which offers critical humanitarian aid to those in need in times of major emergencies, is a decent, moral act on our part. At the same time, by helping reduce poverty in those societies, we’re encouraging economic growth and raising individual earning power, which in turn can open new markets for American goods and services.

Half of the world’s fastest-growing economies are in Africa, where Americans have helped many societies address disease, natural disasters and poverty. By improving their plight, we improved opportunities for our exports and investments.

Of course, with annual spending deficits and a large national debt, Americans must be wise about where we invest our resources. But concerns over our fiscal condition and the taxes required to sustain it have encouraged some people to assume mistakenly that our assistance to other nations is too expensive to continue at present levels.

In reality, we spend less than 1 percent of the federal budget on foreign assistance. During the Reagan administration, we spent twice what we do today. President Ronald Reagan, fiscal and defense hawk that he was, understood that helping other nations overcome their challenges was a much less expensive way to prevent and subdue threats to our interests than risking our soldiers’ lives to defend them.

President Donald Trump faces a world fraught with challenges to our interests, not to mention the demands on our conscience posed by the suffering of so many innocent people around the globe. He will need every tool at his disposal to protect our interests and advance our values.

Unwise budget cuts to effective, desperately needed assistance programs are a penny-wise and pound-foolish error that will shift even more of the burden for stabilizing the world to our overburdened armed services. Such cuts will make it harder to make America safer. They will deprive the world of the full array of American political and moral leadership when it has never been more needed.

We urge the administration and our colleagues in Congress not to make that mistake.