New Mission for Foreign Aid

Foreign Aid For Sustainable Development

AFTER 45 YEARS America's foreign bilateral assistance program lies dead in the water. Its principal flagship, the United States Agency for International Development, has become a dispirited bureaucracy lacking leadership, resources and rationale. Rather than burden USAID with yet more policy reversals and program redirections-as happened after each pivotal change in electoral politics during the last thirty years-the best approach the Clinton administration can take is to scuttle America's bilateral aid program and begin anew with a concise, clearly defined initiative to promote environmentally sound forms of economic growth.

The American public's present disenchantment with foreign aid cannot be overstated, and this is not just a matter of aid being juxtaposed with competing domestic priorities. What this sour mood underscores is that the nation's political discourse offers neither rationale nor constituency for traditional aid-giving.

Periodic electoral changes have resulted in ideologically inspired shifts in aid policy, as in the abrupt tilt toward free-market development after 1981 and the beginning of the Reagan years. Couple this with USAID'S long subservience to Cold War calculations, particularly to anti-Soviet strategies that compelled support for authoritarian regimes, and the result is a jumble of activities without coherent purpose.

The Decline of U.S. Aid

OVERALL AMERICAN foreign assistance, which amounted to one percent of GNP late in the 1950s and double to triple that during the plummy (though not fully comparable) post-World War II Marshall Plan era, has declined to a pitiful level of less than 0.3 percent of GNP. Among all aid-donor nations, only Ireland ranks lower in generosity. But during this period both Congress and the executive branch have cheerfully burdened meager programs, particularly those managed by USAID, with ever more numerous criteria and conditions. Political and security concerns no longer appropriate to the post-Cold War era have inspired many of these constraints; others have resulted from reactionary attitudes, particularly the post-1984 clamp on funding for family planning advice in Third World countries. Labor union complaints that USAID provokes domestic job losses also served to crimp the agency.