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Unsurprisingly, Republicans Still Want To Cut Foreign Aid

Among the cuts in the plan offered by the Republican Study Committee is one measure calling for the virtual de-funding of USAID. As Josh Rogin notes, this is consistent with the statements leading House Republicans have been making about foreign aid spending since shortly after the election: If the RSC plan was ever implemented, which […]

Among the cuts in the plan offered by the Republican Study Committee is one measure calling for the virtual de-funding of USAID. As Josh Rogin notes, this is consistent with the statements leading House Republicans have been making about foreign aid spending since shortly after the election:

If the RSC plan was ever implemented, which is doubtful, the State Department would be in the firing line for huge cuts. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) announced, on her first day as chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, that she wanted to take an axe to the State Department and foreign aid budgets. Her appropriations counterpart, House Appropriations State and Foreign Ops subcommittee chairwoman Kay Granger (R-TX) has made similar statements in the past.

This is not hard to understand. Most Republicans are viscerally opposed to most forms of foreign aid. It is one of the easier parts of the budget to target. Its recipients are not voters, it is actually a very small part of the budget, voters believe it is an enormous part of the budget, they overwhelmingly support cutting this funding because they imagine that getting rid of it would significantly reduce the deficit, and it usually funds projects that can be easily portrayed and dismissed as “nation-building” or worse. There are also good arguments that can be made that foreign aid is often useless, encourages corruption in the governments receiving the aid, and undermines local, private economic development. Then again, wiping out almost all funding for USAID is just the sort of indiscriminate budget-cutting that horrifies Republican hawks when funding the Pentagon’s budget request comes up for discussion.

Notably, the RSC plan designates all of its targeted cuts as “non-security discretionary spending.” If military spending cuts are on the table, no one told the members of the RSC. If Exum persuaded them that USAID funding is properly defined as being related to national security, that might make them more supportive of foreign aid spending, but it isn’t going to encourage them to put military spending under greater scrutiny. So, no, Republicans didn’t vote to cut defense. To claim that they support “defense” cuts because they want to de-fund USAID is to abuse the phrase “defense spending” even more than hawks already do. The RSC supported cutting foreign aid spending because they don’t think of most foreign aid as having any importance for national security policies, and to the extent that they acknowledge that foreign aid funding is directed to Afghanistan and Pakistan they would probably point to this as one of the problems with “Af-Pak” policy.

The overall RSC plan is not likely to go very far. As Rogin reports, “The RSC plan is so drastic and extends its projected cuts so far out into the future that its chances for implementation are slim to none, [Tom] Donnelly said.” AEI’s Tom Donnelly isn’t right about much, but this assessment seems correct. What’s discouraging about this is that the specific cuts the plan identifies actually come to approximately $140 billion, and the rest is supposed to be made up by keeping discretionary spending at ’06 levels. Even a plan that is actually fairly modest and relatively unserious when it comes to long-term deficit reduction isn’t likely to go anywhere.

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