United States foreign aid
[3] Aid is financed from US taxpayers and other revenue sources that Congress appropriates annually through the United States budget process.
[5] Foreign aid typically receives bipartisan support in Congress[6] as it is seen to promote global economic development and in turn, American national security.
On May 6, 1812, despite continued hostilities over independence from British colonial rule, US Senator from Kentucky Henry Clay signed a bill appropriating $50,000 for disaster relief food aid to Venezuela after a massive earthquake devastated the capitol, Caracas, that was enacted on May 8 by the 12th Congress (Chap.
[10] After the war, the American Relief Administration, directed by Herbert Hoover who had also been prominent in the CRB, continued food distribution to war-devastated European countries.
Levels of United States aid increased greatly during World War II, mainly on account of the Lend-lease program.
By 1960, the annual aid amount had receded to about half of what it was in the early post-war years, and, in inflation-adjusted terms, it has remained at that level—with some fluctuations—until the present.
A second wartime aid program, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), was founded in November 1943, by 44 Allied governments, for the purpose of assisting and resettling displaced victims of the war.
[13] Its initial focus was on assisting people in areas the Allies had captured from the Axis powers: distributing food, clothing and other essentials, and helping with medical care and sanitation.
After the war, the United States began giving large amounts of aid to Greece and Turkey under the Truman Doctrine.
In December 1946, Greek Prime Minister Konstantinos Tsaldaris visited Washington and requested additional United States aid.
Truman promulgated his containment doctrine in early 1947, a major component of which was to be aid to the world's poor countries in order to blunt the appeals of radicalism to their hungry peoples and to bolster their anti-communist political elements.
Publicly suggested by Marshall in June 1947, and put into action about a year later, the Plan was essentially an extension of the Greece–Turkey aid strategy to the rest of Europe.
The Communist countries were formally invited to participate in the Plan although Secretary Marshall thought it unlikely that they would accept and they did in fact decline the aid.
Also in 1948, the United States and the recipient countries created the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC – it became the OECD in 1961) to coordinate the use of the aid.
[25] President Barack Obama announced to the UN Millennium Development Goals summit in September 2010 that the United States was changing its policy towards foreign aid.
[26] Some observers criticized the link with national security and foreign policy as unhelpful for the impoverished, and others lamented the attempted streamlining as only adding more bureaucracy.
[27] In fiscal year 2020 (October 1, 2019 - September 30, 2020), the US government allocated $51.05 billion US dollars in economic and military assistance to foreign countries.
[31] Thomas Pogge, Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University, has predicted that public opinion will not change even while the hardships suffered by poor people are rising, partly as a result of the Great Recession.
A poll conducted by World Public Opinion in 2010 found that the average estimate for how much of the government's budget is spent on foreign aid was 25 percent.
[34] A poll conducted in 2013 by the Pew Research Center found that the majority of Americans wanted to either maintain or increase spending on all US government initiatives except foreign aid.
[36] The percentage of people who were provided a positive argument for foreign aid and thought the United States spent too much on it was 28 percent.
[36] The percentage of people who were provided a negative argument against foreign aid and thought that the United States spends too much on it was 88 percent.
