'Trump's aid budget is breathtakingly cruel – cuts like these will kill people'

Extract from The Guardian

Humanitarian aid is about to be driven over a cliff, warns Obama’s former head of foreign disaster response, with a resurgence in HIV and other diseases likely

Sudanese workers offload US aid destined for South Sudan from the World Food Programme. The US State Department laid out plans on May 23 to slash Washington’s budget for diplomacy and foreign aid by more than 30%. Photograph: Ashraf Shazly/AFP/Getty Images

Jeremy Konyndyk

Wednesday 31 May 2017 16.31 AEST

President Trump’s new budget plans take particular aim at foreign aid spending, proposing an overall cut of 32% to all civilian foreign affairs spending. Facing extensive criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike for the budget’s draconian vision, Trump’s budget chief Mick Mulvaney defended the proposal by arguing it should be judged not “by how much money we spend, but by how many people we actually help.”
This is an admirably fair standard – because it perfectly illuminates the callousness and cruelty of the 2018 Trump aid budget. I have waded through the numbers and budget narrative released by the White House to see how the budget levels stack up against Mulvaney’s statement. It is not a pretty picture.
The White House justifies cuts of roughly $13.5bn with claims that global aid spending is imbalanced, and the US should roll back its spending to encourage others to do more. Global aid spending is imbalanced – but if anyone is falling short, it’s the US. The United States is the most generous global aid donor in absolute terms, but relative to the size of the American economy it’s less a case of “America First” than “America Twenty-Second”. As my colleagues at the Center for Global Development have pointed out, US aid spending already falls far short of the proportional contributions of most other rich countries in the world.

Food aid funding would drop from $3.5bn in 2017 which feeds 67 million people to $1.5bn in 2018, which feeds 29 million.

On the “money spent” side of the ledger, the foreign aid cuts yield negligible budgetary savings while pushing the US deeper into the bottom tier of wealthy aid donors. That’s bad enough, but the “people helped” side is where the real damage sets in. There’s more wreckage than can be covered in a single blogpost, but here is a sampling.
Humanitarian aid is one of the crown jewels of American foreign policy – US funding provides the backbone of global humanitarian response and saves millions of lives each year. The Trump administration proposes to drive it over a cliff – cutting nearly half the funding that Congress appropriated in 2017 and fully eliminating the principal food aid account. The budget documents attempt to wrap these cuts in a veneer of efficiency, claiming the US will purchase food aid more efficiently through a different budget line. Don’t be fooled. The proposal does not shift those resources; it eliminates the money completely. And it simultaneously cuts the budget line that it claims will cover food aid needs. This is not about stretching dollars further – it’s simply about getting rid of them.
 

Jeremy Konyndyk @JeremyKonyndyk

@ThirdWayTweet @FP @USGLC Gratuitous cruelty: as world faces risk of #4famines (SSudan, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia), budget *eliminates* humanitarian food aid account.

1:53 AM - 20 May 2017

The human impact here is extraordinary. Food aid funding would drop from $3.5bn in 2017 – enough to feed 67 million people – to $1.5bn in 2018, enough to feed only 29 million. Beyond the food side, refugee assistance would be cut by nearly 20%. International disaster assistance, which covers the non-food needs of the world’s conflict and disaster victims, takes a massive hit as well – dropping from $2.5bn in the 2017 budget to $1bn in 2018.

Proposing this amidst the worst slate of humanitarian crises in recent decades is breathtakingly cruel.

Let’s not sugarcoat this: humanitarian aid is lifesaving assistance, so cuts like these will kill people. As the head of foreign disaster response for the Obama administration, I had to weigh up budget trade-offs every year, knowing that saving lives in one region meant we would save fewer elsewhere. But I never faced trade-offs this extreme. Laying waste to US relief aid would be hard to defend even if the world were in decent shape. But proposing this amidst the worst slate of humanitarian crises in recent decades is breathtakingly cruel. This budget would cut nearly $30m from food aid rolls even as aid groups struggle to hold off four potential famines. It would undermine refugee aid even as global refugee numbers hit peaks not seen since the second world war and new South Sudanese refugees flee their country by the tens of thousands. And it would obliterate funding for the health, clean water, nutrition, and shelter programs that keep victims of conflicts and natural disasters alive.
But that’s not all. Global health funding takes a huge hit as well. The Administration has tried to obscure this by claiming that it is shielding AIDS funding from debilitating cuts. Again, don’t be fooled. AIDS funding would be cut by a fifth, which would allow people currently receiving treatment to stay on their meds, but would dramatically reduce the number of new enrollees. Because the promise of treatment is an important incentive for HIV testing, these cuts would likely disrupt testing too. That means more people transmitting HIV unknowingly and eroding the hard won gains that have limited the spread of HIV over the past decade.
Incredibly, this is not even the worst news on the global health front. The budget proposal seeks to take a much bigger chunk out of non-HIV health programs – cutting their funding by half. These programmes work – they have brought polio to the brink of global eradication, helped reduce malaria deaths by more than half since 2000, vaccinated millions of children each year, and expanded access to basic health care. Cutting these programmes means more children dying of malaria, resurgence of preventable diseases like polio and measles, and many, many other deaths besides. By weakening public health systems, these cuts also increase vulnerability to major epidemic threats like Ebola and Zika.

This budget would debilitate US support to global peace efforts even as it ramps up US military spending

Some proposed cuts are not merely cruel – they are self-defeating even by their own logic. The Administration seeks to completely eliminate funding for reproductive health and family planning. This is motivated by pique at abortion providers; but much of this funding actually supports contraception availability and safe childbirth practices. Eliminating these funds means thousands more mothers needlessly dying in childbirth. It also means a surge in unintended pregnancies, with the net effect likely to be more abortions, not fewer – as many as 3.3 million more per year, according to one estimate.
And the hits keep coming. President Trump tweeted last week that his visit with Pope Francis left him more determined than ever to “pursue PEACE in our world.” His budgeteers seem to have missed the memo: this budget would debilitate US support to global peace efforts even as it ramps up US military spending.
 

Jeremy Konyndyk @JeremyKonyndyk

Trump budget proposal would cut back US aid funding for these disasters by 60%. https://twitter.com/billmckibben/status/869176800089341952 …

11:36 AM - 30 May 2017

UN peacekeepers protect the lives of some of the world’s most vulnerable people – something I have witnessed firsthand during visits to UN Protection of Civilian camps in South Sudan. The POC sites provide protection to hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities who would risk death if they stepped beyond the camps’ gates. While peacekeepers in South Sudan and elsewhere occasionally come in for criticism – some justified – there is ample evidence that peacekeeping deployments shorten conflicts, reduce harm to civilians, and help prevent conflicts from recurring. The Trump administration wants to cut US support for peacekeeping efforts by 40%.
The administration simultaneously seeks to shutter the US Institute for Peace, an independent federal institute created under President Reagan to promote peace and stability around the world. USIP has real impact – it mobilises seminal research and analysis through direct engagement in conflict zones. It has supported major peace negotiations and facilitated the famed Iraq Study Group that helped change the course of the Iraq war. It does all this on an annual budget that’s just bit more than a single replacement engine for an F-35 fighter jet.            

The Trump administration may not see the value in investing in peace, but these budget choices will just mean more people killed by conflict.
I could go on and on. I could talk about the debilitating cuts to global food security programming, which will all but guarantee more famine risks in the years ahead. I could talk about the wholesale elimination of Development Assistance funding, which supports basic education, economic development, clean water, and countless other interventions that improve millions of lives each year. I could talk about the zeroing out of the Food for Education program, which helps kids in extreme poverty stay in school by providing them with a simple daily meal.
But you get the picture. This budget will harm tens of millions of lives to save fractions of pennies. It is gratuitously cruel and unbecoming of the deep American traditions of helping those in need around the world. President Trump and his budget director should think hard about the standard they’ve expressed for themselves – and begin to refocus this budget on “actually helping” people.
Jeremy Konyndyk is a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, and previously served in the Obama Administration as the director for Foreign Disaster Assistance at USAid.