Foreign aid in the US is in chaos.
The Trump administration frozen most of its aid spending on January 20th. According to billionaire Elon Musk, President Donald Trump’s “special government employee status” adviser, the US International Development Agency, was widely known as USAID, on February 3, 2025.
The Trump administration has no legal authority to do this, but news reports show that hundreds of government staff have been left unpaid leave or fired.
And the agency’s official website was not working. However, partial alternatives were appearing on the State Department website.
I am a public policy scholar studying nonprofits, which is often referred to as non-governmental organizations in the field of foreign aid. These groups are responsible for implementing many programs funded by foreign aid from governments such as the United States.
In light of the Trump administration’s attacks on the government’s major foreign aid agencies and this financial disruption, I think it’s important to expose three general myths.
The United States is spending too much on foreign aid. The US spends more than a fair share of foreign aid compared to other countries. Corrupt governments waste foreign aid on us.
What is foreign aid?
Foreign aid consists of services such as money, goods, and training provided by government agencies to other countries. Foreign aid falls into two broad categories: economic aid and military-sometimes called safety-assistance-assistance.
Economic support includes all programs with development or humanitarian goals. It tends to include projects related to health, disaster relief, promotion of civil society, agriculture and more. Most of the US economic aid comes from the State Department’s budget, including spending allocated by USAID, which has been operating as an independent institution since the Kennedy administration.
On February 3, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared he was acting director of the USAID, indicating that the agency is no longer independent of the State Department.
Although US taxpayers have spent only a few dollars each year on foreign aid, the impact is profound, relieving millions of people from hunger, avoiding the worst natural disasters such as drought and flooding; Malaria, which deals with life-threatening diseases such as tuberculosis, tuberculosis and tuberculosis.
Myth No. 1: The US is too much foreign aid
The United States consistently spends around 1% of its budget on foreign aid, including military and economic support. USAID-controlled aid in 2023 totaled around US$40 billion.
Americans tend to believe that the government spends much more on the majority of its foreign aid budget.
The survey found that, on average, the Kaiser Family Foundation, conducted in 2015, believes that on average foreign aid accounts for almost a third of their budget. Only 3% of those voted correctly said that foreign aid constituted less than 1% of federal spending.
Myth No. 2: The US spends more than its fair share
According to the Economic Co-operation and Development Agency, the United States is the country’s leading source of economic aid dollars. In 2023, it provided $64.7 billion in overseas development support, far surpassing the $37.9 billion spent by Germany, the second largest source of such aid. Part of this support is managed by USAID, partly by the State Department, and a small portion is managed by other government agencies, such as the Treasury Department and the Health and Welfare Department.
But it tells only part of the story. The United States spends little on foreign aid compared to the size of its economy, particularly compared to other rich countries. The US spent about 0.24% of its gross national income on overseas development assistance in 2023. This gave Norway, the top contributor to the indicator, gave 1.09% of its gross national income in overseas development assistance that year. With this measurement, the US is heading towards the bottom of OECD countries near Portugal and Spain.
In 1970, the United Nations General Assembly agreed that “economically advanced countries” aimed to direct at least 0.7% of their national income towards overseas development support. Developed countries have repeatedly mentioned this goal and this goal since then, but few have reached it. In 2023, only five countries achieved their 0.7% target.
The average for the OECD was just 0.37% in 2023. It was much higher than the 0.24% that the US provided that year.
Myth No. 3: Corrupt government wastes US aid
You may think that foreign aid consists of remittances from the government to the government. However, the government supports most of its assistance through nonprofit organizations such as Catholic Relief Services, public-private partnerships, private companies such as Chemonic International and Deloitte, and multilateral organizations such as the UN and the World Bank.
In fact, most US foreign aid has decouped entirely, according to the 2013-2022 Congressional Research Services. NGOs received 24% of money, 21% for-profit enterprises, 34% of multilateral organizations, and other organizations such as universities. , research institutions and faith-based organizations, 7%.
When political scientist Simone Dietrich studied the question, she discovered that the United States outsources a large number of foreign aid to NGOs. This is especially true of the support that the country provides bad governance and ramp-prolonged corruption in Sudan and Sri Lanka.
Certainly, corrupt governments sometimes waste foreign aid on us. However, it is important to understand that most aid never enters the financial resources of those corrupt governments in the first place.
We won’t lead without the cuts that Trump proposed.
Even if Trump fails to make a current bid to cut foreign aid significantly, the UK and Denmark have far more economic support for the world’s poorest people, as a share of the economy than the US. It’s spending.
Reducing foreign aid undermines our credibility with American allies, reduces our influence around the world, and as a group of over 120 retired generals and admirals, Trump has been working to make his case. It was predicted when the first administration tried to cut foreign aid – making Americans safe.
Some of this article was published and updated in the story originally published on April 6, 2017.
